Telecollaborative Webcasting: Strengthening acquisition of humanities content knowledge through foreign language education

FAIN: HD-51008-10

University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. (Athens, GA 30602-1589)
Victoria Hasko (Project Director: October 2009 to March 2012)

Development of innovative online applications employing high definition video to enhance collaborative foreign language instruction among U.S. and Russian foreign language students.

This Level II Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant intends to support design, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative curriculum-development project aimed at strengthening humanities content learning through a telecollaborative foreign language project which will include video/audio/textual bilingual exchanges between university students in the U.S. and Russia. The project addresses the expressed national needs to improve (1) the efficacy of foreign language instruction as well as (2) the depth of content area learning in humanities relevant to the interdisciplinary study of languages, cultures, and global communities. The project will produce learner-authored multimodal bilingual artifacts, compilations of references to digital humanities sources, and curriculum development materials via a open-access online resource which will serve scholars, learners, and general audiences interested in enriching their knowledge of humanities and foreign languages.