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…
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 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…
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…
It’s been a while… After receiving tenure, I took a small break from blogging. Also, I was elected as President-Elect of the International Association for Language Learning and Technology and have been working on a couple of articles and an (edited) book project entitled “From Language Lab to Language Center Read more…
I recently received a grant to work on electronic portfolios on our campus. Today I offered our first hands-on workshop on the topic: creatingelectronic portfolios for beginners. I introduced 3 relatively accessible tools that are available for free or for a fee with additional options: weebly, wordpress.com and lucidpress. Here’s Read more…
Several years ago there were some wonderful podcasts about language learning and technology. The conversations were recorded and also available live. We have recently revived these podcasts; they are now shorter and include video, but they are weekly and are meant to be conversation loosely guided by a topic that Read more…
IALLT 2013 was a wonderful conference! I learned so much, and was happy to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. It was great to see so much interest in language center design and new learning spaces. The presentation slides and handouts are now available online, you can find them Read more…
Finally there has been a major overhaul of this site. Some of this was on the back end, while other changes are quite visible. Behind the scenes: – WP multisites enabled and installed – better security – back-up workflow established and general maintenance Visible Changes: – complete visual overhaul – Read more…
Phase 1 of my digital storytelling project is done! Four participants granted us the right to post the stories about them. The project turned out as desired: the stories aren’t flashy, but students spent a lot of time speaking and listening to German, and many had an aha-moment when they Read more…