iChat AV Powers Transatlantic Language Studies
Profiles in Success: Franklin and Marshall College
Lancaster, PA — When Europeans refer to a “tandem,” they’re not necessarily talking about a bicycle. In that corner of the world, the word describes the practice of partnering with a native of another country to learn a new language. Now, with the help of iChat AV, students at Franklin and Marshall College (F&M) have added another word to their vocabulary. They participated in what just might be the first-ever “eTandem” — a transatlantic videoconference supporting their language studies.
The eTandem was the brainchild of F&M professor (and Apple Distinguished Educator) Dr. Jay Martin Anderson, who has studied seven different tongues. In addition to English, Anderson can converse in Italian and German. But he is not actually a language teacher. Instead, he teaches computer science (with a specialty in computer graphics), and studies computational linguistics. Thanks to a chance experiment, Anderson’s continent-spanning video hookup was born.
“I had a very positive experience using iChat AV, in which we talked to a teacher in Germany who was able to see my whole class, and they saw him,” Anderson recalls. “It was ‘one-to-many,’ not ‘many-to-many.’ But it was still great for my class here to see someone who obviously had a German accent, who wasn’t from Pennsylvania, and who could enhance what we happened to be learning that week. I thought the use of iChat would carry over into language studies very easily, which got me started thinking about class-to-class conversations.”
Mobile Apple Tools Make Videoconferencing Possible
In the spring of 2006, Anderson was looking forward to enjoying his sabbatical in Bolzano, Italy, located in the trilingual province of Alto Adige, or Süditrol. Though Anderson was officially on leave, he couldn’t resist the chance to visit the Free University of Bolzano (FUB), where German, English, and Italian are spoken. Toting his PowerBook, two iSight cameras, and a consumer-grade Canon video camera, he realized he could give his students at F&M a taste of life in Italy.
Says Anderson, “I thought I might be able to offer a course in computer graphics while I was on leave. Also, I had a good friend in the language department here at Franklin and Marshall; we talked and thought, ‘Let’s give this videoconferencing thing try.’ Apple’s iChat AV absolutely made that possible.”
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