Modern Russian Culture: Multimedia Courseware Development
Karen Ryan, Slavic Languages and Literatures
1997 TTI Fellow
Email: klr8p@virginia.edu
The study of culture integrates information across a variety of subjects including literature, music, art, film, geography, and architecture. In the traditional classroom, literary texts and slides are the primary tools used to access this cultural information. Professor Ryan plans to develop an electronic sourcebook that integrates text, visual images, music, video clips, and geography over the course of her TTI fellowship. This sourcebook will enhance the experience of the students in her Modern Russian Culture course (RUTR 236/336) by providing a broad range of access to richer types of media, both in and out of the classroom. The project will provide a template for similar multimedia sourcebooks that could be adapted to many types of culture-oriented courses. It will be delivered as a hybrid of CD-ROM and web site that provides the opportunity to explore methods to combine static and dynamic media information. And since the Cyrillic alphabet uses non-Western characters, it will provide an opportunity to examine the process of integrating other languages into the primarily Anglo-European computer world.