UCLA’s Language Material’s Project

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4December2009

UCLA announced the publishing of the “Language Material’s Project”.  It’s a very well organized database of resources for language teachers of less commonly taught languages.

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Lessons.aspx?menu=003

These searchable repositories aren’t as necessary as they once were with the rise of very large, public and international web 2.0 sites of links, pictures, news, video, etc.  These crowdsourced sites tend to be much larger than academic repositories and are easily searchable by language via tags.  For example, one can search Flickr or YouTube by keyword in a given language and find thousands of videos.

That being said, I think this project has some strengths that will appeal to language teachers.  The organization by material type and language makes it easy to find quality resources on the topics common to beginning and intermediate texts.  For Arabic they’ve also categorized the items by country of as standard Arabic.

If you’re looking for something specific, you’re probably still better off going to a more general site for authentic materials.  On the other hand, if you’re starting your syllabus for next semester, it’s well worth the time to peruse the materials they’ve collected in the language.  Odds are quite good you’ll find something (menu, brochure, simple online game) that can add to a class activity.

Univision comes to YouTube

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17November2009

YouTube is looking to compete with other rising sites such as Hulu for the internet TV market.   They took a big step today by signing a deal with Univision.

Wired on Univision and YouTube

There’s certainly no shortage of video on the web, and it may not be long before we begin questioning the need for satellite progamming altogether.  In addition to having the videos available on any computer, they also become archived and searchable.

Twinity, 3D Berlin

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16November2009

Twinity is pushing their 3D version of Berlin, and they’re taking advantage of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  They’re holding lectures, classes, and have recreated the wall in it’s original location.  It is interesting to see the location of the wall in modern day Berlin.  The world is still primarily populated by German speakers, so it shouldn’t be hard to start a conversation.

Kindle Goes International

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7October2009

The Kindle is now being sold in other countries.  Unfortunately, only English books are available.  Too bad, once books are available in other languages along with the corresponding built-in dictionary, it could be a real aid to the students in their first year of literature classes.  If their readings are old enough to be in the public domain, it would save them some money in the long run as well.

Amazon announcment

Twitter Trends in other Languages

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24September2009

This is fun and found via Mundaysa’s Twitter account. For those not familiar with Twitter, it’s a microblogging service.  Still doesn’t make the sense?  Imagine text chatting the world.  As it’s gained in popularity, it’s appeared in the regular news media quite frequently.  One of the many uses people have found for Twitter is to search the “tweets” for keywords to find trends.  As an example, one of the most famous trend/keyword so far has been #IranElections

Twirus now provides a service that lets you search these trends based on language.  So far, they only have the major western European langauges, but it’s a start.  Do a search for Uni Bremen in German.  It’s a nice snippet of daily life for our students.

New Study Abroad Bloggers

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21September2009

So far we have Sarah in China and Matthew in Spain.  Looking forward to some post from Germany soon and hope to find some students in France and Japan!

Language Exchange Survey Results

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10September2009

Results from language exchange surveys.

JapaneseSkypeSurveysSpring2007

LanguageExchangeSurveryFall2008 (German, Spanish, and Italian)

Kafka and Spore

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9September2009

It’s still quite rare to find video games based on literature, which makes another game based on a Kafka story so remarkable.  I’ve previously shown Kafkamesto to our German department.  It’s a very well done point and click game that incorporates elements from several of Kafka’s most famous stories.

Today, I read about an expansion pack for Spore based on The Metamorphosis.   The Metamorphosis scenario is a download for an expansion pack of Spore.  Unfortunately, the game itself doesn’t involve much language usage, but perhaps the scenario will be different.  Here’s to hoping we can find a language rich German version.

New Flickr Image Search

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4August2009

Flickr has updated their search function as well (Thank you Mashable).  They’ve also add the ability to search for Creative Commons under the Advanced Search link.  For most of the searches in languages, you’re probably best off searching by Tag.  You’ll see this option under the Advanced Search as well.  Use the target language for your class instead of English to find more culturally appropriate photos.

Keep in mind as well that many images in Flick are geo-tagged, which means you narrow your search by location as well.  Do this from the main page and under the Search dropdown, choose Location.

.FlickrScreen

Google Image Search, Creative Commons

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10July2009

Google has updated their image search to include license type.  This means you can click the advanced tab on Google Image Search and narrow your selection of images to those that permit reuse.  If you’re just showing an image on the web to your class, this doesn’t really matter.  This is for instances when you need an image to publish with a paper, show at a conference, or produce any other work that will be publicly available.   You can check it out here:

http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en

Keep in Flickr in mind as well.  The photo sharing site also allows you to search by license type.  The number of images are smaller than what you’ll find in Google Images, but the images themselves are usually of higher quality.