The 2004 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Liberal Arts

Title:
Ancillary Web site for the Film Jenseits der Stille ("Beyond Silence")

Faculty Client:
Dr. Zsuzsanna Abrams, zsabrams@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Shantanu Mishra

Project Description:
As part of the GER 506 curriculum, students view a German film for three class periods. Traditionally, only 10 minutes per day could be devoted to discussion of the material, allowing little time for students to interact with or reflect on the content of the film. This project designed a website to provide flexible access for students to film materials, increase out-of-class attention to film content via homework assignments, make film clips available for student reference, and provide a self-contained unit including lesson plans from which instructors of the course could draw.

Title:
Film Course Development

Faculty Client:
Dr. Katherine Arens, k.arens@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Harikrishna Katragadda

Project Description:
This project developed materials for two film and culture courses in which about 28 films comprise the majority of the course content. This project digitized and edited fair-use clips from these films for in-class demonstrations of how film sets up points of view and thus interpretive frameworks. For example, in the film "Stalingrad”, the first few minutes of the film and a later battle scene can be used to discuss how the film condemns the high command: the visuals equate the sufferings of the enlisted Nazi soldiers with those of the “enemy” Russian refugees and can be compared to official reports of the battle from history books.

Title:
Texas German Language and Identity

Faculty Client:
Dr. Hans Boas, hcb@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Laila Nawaz

Project Description:
Four guest speakers from the Texas German community delivered class lectures in GRC 327E in the spring semester of 2003 and this project digitized videotapes of those lectures to make them available on the web. Topics include: History of Fredericksburg, Germans in the Civil War, History of Sattler, and Finding your Grandparents' Identity when you don't speak their language. The presentations gave students a different view of issues they had only read about in a book. By hearing real Texas Germans tell their stories, students become much more excited about these topics.

Title:
Virtual Oxford: Writing Place and Space in a MOO

Faculty Client:
Dr. Jerome Bump, bump@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Chad Wood

Project Description:
This project developed a MOO (an online interaction environment) to help convey to Texas-bound students the experience of Europe, especially the architecture. It lets the Texas student explore Oxford University (which is very different from UT) and helps the student to develop their ability to write about space and place, which is quite a challenge. The goal of the project is to encourage the Texas student to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a European culture.

Title:
Virgil: An Interactive Tutorial for Writers

Faculty Client:
Dr. Lester Faigley, faigley@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Peter Siegesmund

Project Description:
This project developed a writing assistance web site to help students and teachers who cannot access the Undergraduate Writing Center, or who need help late at night or on the weekends when the UWC is closed. The site is named “Virgil” and is designed to be extremely friendly and easy to use. The UWC is often at or above capacity and—while it can never replace a live consultation—Virgil helps students identify the help they need at different points in their writing process, thereby both offering an alternative and helping students get more out of their UWC consultations when they do come in for face-to-face sessions.

Title:
Shakespeare Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Faculty Client:
Dr. Alan Friedman, friedman@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Evan Johnson

Project Description:
Continuing work on the Shakespeare Studies website, this project added an entirely new section on the play “A Midsummer-Night's Dream.” Resources include digitized audio and videos clips, a concordance, links to other resources on the Web like primary analysis and scholarship, historical information and a glossary of dramatic and Shakespearean terms.

Title:
Child Rearing Simulations: Learning About Life as a Parent

Faculty Client:
Dr. George Holden, holden@psy.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Chad Wood

Project Description:
The goal of this project is to give students taking developmental psychology classes a flavor of what child rearing is about by presenting three interactive simulations on the web. The interactive, web-based simulations are designed to be fun and engaging learning tools, an example of which is “The Cry Problem.” In this simulation, the student must determine why an infant is crying by selecting the most important pieces of information from 25 available. The information is about the baby, context, nature of the cry itself, timing, and baby’s parents. Through an interactive process, students gather information then decide whether they are ready to select one of nine possible causes of the crying.

Title:
Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: Images and Texts in Translation

Faculty Client:
Dr. Thomas Hubbard, tkh@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Shantanu Mishra

Project Description:
The goal of this project was to expand and enhance the current course Web site by adding about 50 images and creating interactive features such as search functions and bulletin boards for each page. In addition to the images—mostly taken from Attic vase painting—this web site features the first two chapters of the instructors anthology “Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Texts.” The site is intended not only for use in class, but as a supplement to the book, since it provides a far more complete repertory of relevant artistic images than was possible in the print version.

Title:
Parlons Français: Enhanced Language Learning Through the Use of Technology

Faculty Client:
Dr. Jane Lippmann, j.lippmann@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Chongxiang Wang

Project Description:
This project continued work on a web site for students learning French. Specifically, the site was designed to help students sharpen their French comprehension and speaking skills, while learning a practical French vocabulary that would make a trip to a French-speaking country more meaningful. Students listen to digitized audio clips of spoken French and then type responses, which are then spoken back to them via a voice synthesizer. Two new modules were added this year.

Title:
The Sister Arts: Painting, Poetry and Gardening in Britain, 1700-1832

Faculty Client:
Dr. Lisa Moore, llmoore@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer(s):
Richard Meth, Scott Herrick

Project Description:
“The Sister Arts: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening in England, 1700-1832” is a “virtual museum” focusing on eighteenth-century and Romantic representations of the British landscape. The site is organized to allow students to visit exhibits focusing on five well-known British landscape gardens. Four of these gardens — Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham and West Wyckham — are still extant and students learn about them through recent photographs of the sites as well as period drawings and literary descriptions. The fifth garden, Mary Delany’s Delville, no longer exists in the real world, so students encounter it via a three-dimensional animated flythrough as well as through eighteenth-century drawings, paintings, and literary descriptions of the garden.

Title:
Teaching Indigenous Culture

Faculty Client:
Dr. John Weinstock, weinstock@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Harikrishna Katragadda

Project Description:
The Sámi are a relatively small, heterogeneous group numbering some 70,000 spread over northern Scandinavia and Russia and have lived in this area for thousands of years. This project continued work on an existing web site about the Sámi, by adding digitized videos of interviews with living Sámi writers, biographical sketches of the authors, and excerpts from their works. Sámi writers have managed to modernize without losing their connections to their oral and visual indigenous culture — a process which makes their case particularly interesting for students of modernization among indigenous cultures.