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On a Sunday morning in November, six students studying Arabicare crowded around a television set in the Paul and Edith Cooper International Learning Center (ILC), waiting for a video conference with students in Saudi Arabia to begin. The conference, which was organized by Barbara Sawhill, director of the ILC, and Wafa Hameedi, director of technology at Effat College, is just one example of the way faculty members are using technology to revolutionize the teaching of foreign languages at Oberlin. “This is just one example of how technology can create bridges between schools, cultures, countries,and languages,” Sawhill says. “It is extremely difficult for an American to travel Saudi Arabia, but technology can take us there – and once we are connected, we are able to experience an entirely different world.” Sawhill has also started using Skype, a free, voice-over IP tool that makes computer-to-computer long-distance “telephone calls,” as a way to bring additional native speakers to the students. She recently organized a conference call between Buthaina Al-Othman, a native speaker of Arabic and a professor of English as a Second Language (ESL) at Kuwait University, and the Oberlin students who are studying Arabic with Assistant Professor of French Ali Yedes, also a native speaker of Arabic.

Making the language lab available to the ESL students just seemed a natural extension of the foreign-language program, several school educators said. "It's just such an important tool to get the kids speaking and listening," Preisel said. "You get more in one session here than in an entire year" in just a classroom. For the non-English speakers, the chance to go through exercises slowly, to be able to repeat words and phrases, to hear themselves speak in English and to do so under teacher supervision seemed a perfect match with the lab's purpose, Moshi said. "It wakes the kids up. It's still English, but it gets their interest. I think it's a great motivational tool," he said. "A lot of the ESL kids aren't computer-literate, so there's an added benefit — it's an introduction to computer literacy."

Hello, I am James Torio, I live in New York. I wrote the paper for my master's thesis in advertising design for Syracuse University. I have a passion for design, innovation, creativity, strategy, branding, trend-spotting, problem-solving, all things viral and how they relate to building more dynamic relationships between brands and target audiences. The thesis is saved as a PDF, please feel free to download it and share it. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the survey and every along the way who freely gave advice. To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.