Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 27, 1995 TAG: 9511270082
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The college's new high-tech foreign language lab makes those daily jaunts possible.
The lab is housed in the college's former religion classroom and offices. It takes students from one continent to the next in the time it takes to dial a phone number.
The travel is courtesy of the Internet, and the television programs are beamed in via satellite.
``With the college's push for internationalizing the campus, this really connects us with the world,'' said Associate Professor of German Jim Ogier, who hand-picked much of the lab's equipment. ``Every area has its own links. Pick a city.''
Students can swap jokes, check the weather or scan the headlines of almost anywhere in the world. It sounds like frivolous fun, but there is some learning going on, too, Ogier said.
Take, for example, one of his assignments for his German class.
He asks students to price a large pizza with anchovies in Germany. An easy enough task, right? Wrong.
``They have to know what the currency is and what country they're in to figure out how much it is,'' said Ogier, who has had students come up with pizzas for $100 (the answer is closer to $17). ``They can really order a pizza through [the Internet]. I don't think they'd deliver it, though.''
The possibilities for the lab are endless, he said. The challenge is developing a curriculum that taps all of the lab's potential.
``We're rethinking our classes, adapting the technology to our courses,'' Ogier said.
It's an especially harrowing task considering where the professors and students are coming from. Last year's lab, stocked with Apple IIE computers, was a technological dinosaur.
``The one last year was worse than my high school. It was bad,'' said Julie Carson, a junior and a German minor. ``There was one TV and one VCR in the lab. I'd never do the listening assignments because I hated going in there.''
Now each work station is equipped with a monitor that doubles as a television screen and a computer. Students who watched, on Canadian news shows, Quebec's voters decide not to secede from Canada could then flip a switch and write about it. There's a program on the computers that checks French grammar and spelling, too.
Gone are the days when professors had to show slides or transparencies to classes. Now they can bring their students into the lab, pull things from CD-ROM data files, transparencies, videos or satellite and pipe the information out to the students' work stations.
The days of goofing off in language lab are over. Professors can monitor what students are working on from the front of the lab.
That ``big brother-is-watching system'' also helps if a student gets stumped by an assignment. The professor can see exactly what's throwing the student and walk the student through it or take control of the student's screen.
Carson said the lab's new ``toys'' make learning easier and more enjoyable - so much so that she now does her listening assignments.
``We've had a lot of green-faced people coming through here. We have the best facility for miles around,'' Ogier said. ``It's a good tool for breaking them out of the Roanoke Valley. Students here are cruising around the world.''
by CNB