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Monday, August 22, 2005 Hello! First of all, thank you very much Buth for listening and aswering all our quetions even though they may not have been for you of an easy issue to talk about. As I couldn't attend the first session, it was my first skype's experience, and I must say that I really enjoyed it. (I have to admit that I was a little bit shy at first). I was really amazed at the many cultural differences between our countries even though I already knew they were really different. It happens that many times we see things about our culture as something so common to us that we can't think of them in a different way or it's difficult for us to imagine people living without them. I believe that the good thing about it, it's trying to get to know another ways of livng and respect them, even they aren't exactly like ours. posted by Laura at 7:28 PM

Great works continue to draw new specialists into the field and serve to bring the history of a language, its people, and their culture to life. Literary works serve as examples of the power and beauty of language at its best. Helping to make such texts more accessible to learners, the Web can make use of hypertext and multimedia to provide context that is so often lacking for those without the general background knowledge that a good reader is assumed to possess.

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.