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Extraordinary edublogger Barbara Sawhill at Oberlin University's language lab in Ohio brings students of Arabic to talk with native speakers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia using Skype. This triumph over distance only works because Skype's sound quality keeps the high and low tones of sound; telephones and other VoIP software/hardware clip out those parts of speech.

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.