It has been almost half a year since I started working as the director of the Center for Language Teaching Advancement (CeLTA) at Michigan State University. Moving from Rhodes College, where I had been 9 years, was challenging and thrilling at the same time. My colleagues at MSU are great, Read more…
I’m excited to just have been invited to give a new lecture at Grinnell College. I chose “From Digital Storytelling to Reflective Portfolios: Constructionism, Maker Spaces and the Liberal Arts” as the talk’s topic because it allows me to combine several aspects that I’ve been interested in and passionate about Read more…
In my faculty workshops I often look for solutions that faculty actually want to use. Some of the most successful offerings include workshops on writing, on organizing your classes and research, and on saving time. Today’s post covers all of these; in fact, long-form writing will be one of the Read more…
I’m on sabbatical this fall semester, so I’ve tried to carve out time for thinking, reading, and working on my book project (“Physical, digital, hybrid: New engaging spaces for language learning and teaching”). Today I thought I’d blog about a few updates and things that happened over the last half Read more…
I am very excited to announce the the edited volume “From Language Lab to Language Center and Beyond: The Past, Present, and Future of Language Center Design” is hot off the press and available as of now. More information can be found here. Many thanks to all the contributing authors and Read more…
The Language Center is changing again! We are currently transforming the language center into a student-centered space, an incubator if you will, that brings together those who are interested in other languages and cultures and fosters a diverse environment. We moving into a more restricted resource (and technology-focused) space into Read more…
I finally moved our city of Pfefferhausen web site to a new server and reserved a much nicer URL: http://www.pfefferhausen.org/ There’s still much to do, but the move is complete, the Game On plugin installed, and I am ready to include all our social media, reorder last year’s student projects, and Read more…
Our virtual German city project, #pfefferhausen, will continue to grow in the 2016/17 academic year. I will write more extensively about the growing project in the coming months, and a couple of conference presentations are also in the works. At this point I wanted to give a brief update about Read more…
I often get asked by my colleagues “how this whole consulting thing works.” Many of them are humanities faculty, and they rarely, if ever, do any kind of consulting work. My language learning and technology or language center staff colleagues who are new to this field are also often interested in how to Read more…
Language Centers continue to change rapidly. Since their lab-era days they have always been built around technology. Until recently. The decreasing cost of computing devices, ubiquity of mobile devices (laptops, tables, smartphones, …), and dwindling size have changed the nature of the Language Center in recent years. As fewer computers, especially desktops, Read more…