Summer Institute 2000 Participants
Daria Kirjanov
Slavic Languages, University of Pennsylvania
I came to this Institute in the land of fantastic myrtle crepe trees hoping to return to the land of pretzels (Philadelphia) with some concrete and usable html skills. And this is exactly what I got! I could could also write about the abundance of other marvelous acquisitions, colleagues, pedagogical materials, non-pedagogical materials, enjoyable extra-curricular experiences, and ideas for course development - all in the context of a great deal of fun. (Our pedagogical philosophy is, after all, contextually based). But I will leave these parts of our most rewarding Russian institute to be described by my colleagues. We came up with the idea of constructing this Website to show our appreciation to all the organizers and presenters, especially to Edna Andrews, Laura Janda, and Meredith Clason, and to spread the word about this program in hopes that more will follow in the summers to come.
This section features George Mitrevsky, and I would like to say some glowing words about his superbly organized two-day workshop 'Developing Interactive Web-Based Exercises.' This was hardly a take-notes-and-forget-everything-when-you-get-back-to-school class. Since George equipped each of us with a notebook of instructions on how to use html code, and a CD Rom with templates for all the exercises, we actually took very few notes. The majority of the workshop was spent learning experientially, in front of state-of-the-art UNC computers, writing html code, following every single instruction George so patiently repeated over and over, and designing our own modest, not flashy, Web pages. The atmosphere of the class ranged from moments when childish self-absorbtion would combine with extreme frustration - "George, George, what do I do, what do I do??!!? It's just NOT WORKING!!" - to more frequent moments when the beauty and effectiveness of correctly tagged html commands would just amaze us all - "Ahhhhh - this is good, this is so good!" I quote here from one especially memorable moment when Pushkin appeared on Julia Titus screen. We were all moved, we were all a touch envious, until George showed us the secret again, and again, and again, and again.
Such comprehensive workshops for teachers in the field of Slavic are not so easy to come by, but they are absolutely necessary. We need to learn how to develop exercises in Cyrillic, which has its own idiosyncracies when working with html. And because much of the writing of html can be time-consuming, we need well-tested templates that will make our lives easier. George provided us with all these tools and demonstrated how truly creative one can be with a very limited number of commands and exercise formats. Some of the most useful skills we learned include: writing a variety of exercise formats in cyrillic; writing verification codes; inserting buttons that enable the user to reset answers, to mail to the instructor, and to view the correct answer; inserting images; and recording and inserting audio files.
I now have on my office shelf and saved in my PC much of what I need to know in order to make Web-based materials for my Russian classes. A week after the workshop and with George far away in Alabama, I could actually sit at my desk and write up a Webpage, which I will use for the second semester for my Intermediate Russian course. I have included it below, though it is still in progress and, for the moment, missing the accompanying video clip for the script. I have also included the html code for the page, which my colleagues may find useful to use as a template. Thanks to the technical guidance of Dan, this page survived the swamp of font/browser incompatabilities.