Broadcasting major Patrick Modrovsky, who happens to be minoring in German, asked if he could create a video news item about German at UT Arlington for utanews, a website showcasing broadcasting students’ work. Of course, I said yes, and he did an excellent job of showing how we are trying to incorporate technology and active learning into upper level German classes here at UTA. We liked the video clip so much that it is now on the German homepage under

UTANews Interview with Dr. Lana Rings.

(The original is located under March 11, 2010 at http://utanews.com/page/2/.)

Thanks, Patrick, for believing German needs to be publicized more at UT Arlington!

I continued down the blog tonight and this was the result …

Well, after reading Ivan Illich off of Jim Groom’s blog, a bit of Stephen Downes, also off of Jim Groom’s blog, and finding Clark Adrich’s blog from somewhere I was reading, I am overwhelmed and back to my original question that I asked in graduate school: why are we here? And I think we cannot ask that question in a blanket way about the curriculum, but rather we have to ask it about each individual course (even about each individual student), because there are some students who will take only that course and not our whole curriculum. What, of value, will the student really take away? I am reminded, daily, of Father Guido Carducci’s Five Minute University, asking myself how I am or am not replicating the professors who people that university. To my mind, these are the questions I want to affirm, to remember, to center myself when I get sidetracked by this or that, these or those, others’ ideas of what it is we are doing, that are not my core values about our enterprise.