Thursday, February 11, 2016

Focus on SILC Faculty Research ::
Space Sight / Space Sound - The Universe and Our Sonic Imagination

by Daniel Gilfillan, Associate Professor, German Studies (part of the KSEVT Space Sight: Icons of the Non-Visible Exhibition and excerpted from current book project Sound and the Anthropocene: Sustainability and the Art of Sound)


“In space, no one can hear you scream.” The physics of sound production, the anatomical mechanics of human sound reception, and the lack of any medium to carry the sound waves, tell us why this is the case. Yet this tagline from the Alien film franchise still provides pause, because the fictional worlds humans create about outer space tend to be very noisy places. While the majority of these sounds originate from the all-too-human produced pieces of spacecraft technology, the otherworldly sounds created to “auralize” these fictional worlds propel the imagination. When we encounter such sounds produced by planetary and other celestial bodies, then we come face-to-face, or rather, ear-to-sound wave with an extensive realm of possible sounds that exist alongside and beyond human sound perception. Such is the case with a particular comet being tracked by the European Space Agency (ESA) since early 2004, when the mission known as Rosetta was launched.

Focused on efforts to soft land a spacecraft on this comet, the Rosetta mission made an intriguing discovery in August 2014: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G, for short) was emitting a low-frequency range of electromagnetic waves inaudible to the human ear. After increasing the frequencies 10,000 times to allow for human reception, the resultant sound composition picked up by the spacecraft’s instruments could easily be imagined as the vocalization of some new sentient life form wending its way through the oceanic vacuum of outer space. While these sounds are theorized to be the result of oscillations in the magnetic field around the comet as it interacts with the solar wind, the imaginative potential provided by this discovery offers one unique way to rethink knowledge frameworks that originate apart from the human. This celestial body and its song point to the importance of sound for analysis of phenomena external to human-based experience.

In disclosing the possibility of compositional sound originating outside human experience, this sonic discovery points to a whole new set of questions and understandings about how the world and universe work and interrelate. Whether we think of these electromagnetic frequencies as a random set of oscillations dispersing into the vast emptiness of outer space, or whether we interpret them as patterns of communication occurring outside of human spatial and perceptual awareness, they provide a compelling set of possibilities toward understanding both the limitations of human sound perception, and the limitlessness of nonhuman and object-based sound production.

Sound has played a unique role within space exploration through its use in representing both the idea of humankind and life on Earth as mediated via human epistemological lenses for an unknown, but imagined, interstellar audience. Now in its 37th year, NASA’s Voyager mission launched twin spacecraft in August and September 1977 for purposes of detailed flyby studies of Jupiter and Saturn and their two largest moons, Io and Titan. After successfully extending the mission of Voyager 2 to include pioneering studies of Neptune and Uranus, in 1990 both spacecraft officially embarked on their current mission of exploring interstellar space beyond our own solar system. That both Voyager spacecraft carry a golden phonograph containing images, music and sounds showcasing the diversity of life on Earth provides an interesting counterpoint to the low-frequency sonic output of comet 67P/C-G.

Comet 67P on 14 March 2015 – NavCam
Credit: ESA - European Space Agency – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
Accompanying the assortment of genre-based and traditional music from around the globe, this golden record also includes acoustic ecological sounds produced by Earth’s complex interwoven system of spheres—the biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere. Alongside bird and whale song, cricket chirps and frog calls, and the sounds of thunderstorms, earthquakes, wind and rain, we also hear the sounds of the Anthropocene. These sounds range from human biological to human cultural sounds, revealing for an extraterrestrial listener what curator Carl Sagan and his team of collaborators believed to be uniquely human sounds: the beat of the human heart, laughter, the sounds of mother and child, the diversity of the globe’s languages captured in 55 greetings to the universe, and the ingenuity of human invention and human advancement with the sounds of early tools, Morse Code, a horse and cart, automobile, train, and airplane. This sound archive of human life and civilization on Earth is very much an imaginative product of human agency, an idea that denotes the capacity of human beings to act within any given environment or network of relationships, and one that commonly takes humans’ relationships with nonhuman and, at times, non-sentient counterparts for granted. In the arrangement of sounds chosen for inclusion on the Voyager golden record we can clearly see the importance placed on how these sounds contextualize and support human agency as the central player in the development of knowledge. Rather than being understood as providing other models of experience, the sounds of Earth’s interwoven system of spheres serve as background material for humankind’s continued pursuit of that knowledge.

However, the song produced by comet 67P/C-G serves as an additional example for the importance of these other models of experience as responses to the Anthropocene, the critical idea that links the impact of human beings to multiple system-wide changes on a planetary level. The alien materiality of the comet’s composition, the long trajectory it participates in across space and time, and the low frequency waves it produces across that traverse all call attention to the limits of our knowledge, and the limits of our experience. When expanded beyond the specifics of comet 67P/C-G, the sonic realm allows us to rethink the very limits of human resilience alongside the nonhuman. The delicate set of entanglements we share with plants, animals, geologies and atmospheres, and with other humans, necessitates that we also continually open our sonic imaginations to those entanglements within and beyond the human.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Language Learning Online:
Challenging Assumptions, Rethinking the Possible / Part 1

by Andrew F. Ross, Head of Learning Support Services and Rebecca Berber-McNeill, Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish

Language teaching and learning at Arizona State University face a number of challenges; some of these are a natural outgrowth of trends in higher education in the United States (the emphasis on STEM, “global Englishes”, and a creeping utilitarianism in the curriculum). Others are more specific to the state and local environments that ASU inhabits. The School of International Letters & Cultures (SILC) is meeting these challenges in several different ways, including short format courses and hybrid language instruction. Another of these is an effort to fundamentally re-examine online language instruction and to redesign from the ground up a pilot intermediate language course that will serve as a model for other online language courses.

Online instruction, whether within the School or via ASUOnline, is likely to be a major area of enrollment growth in language teaching at ASU. High-credit classes that need to meet more than twice or three times a week are more and more difficult to schedule, as the availability of physical classroom space has had trouble keeping up with burgeoning on-campus enrollments. A look at President Crow’s projections of revenue in the April 2015 Strategic Enterprise Report bears this out: from a current 6% of the University’s revenue, online tuition and fees are targeted to rise to 11% by 2020, or from $84M to $231M. SILC continues to respond to these challenges along a couple of avenues: development of an ASUOnline Spanish BA and increased online courses delivered by the School in a variety of languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, and Romanian.

However, because of the communicative, experiential, and social nature inherent in the courses we offer, SILC has to deliver the most difficult skills to teach online, first. These skills include speaking, listening, reading, and writing in the target language. We are only then able to offer courses with a greater focus on literary and cultural content that are more easily taught in a distance education model. In terms of the curriculum, there is no abundance of low-hanging fruit to be harvested easily, as in other disciplines. The tools and approaches to address online language learning don’t exist in the same settled space as those for content courses do. Lecture capture and PDF readings, asynchronous discussions and final papers aren’t the core of language learning, which is fundamentally communicative and social.

A team of SILC faculty and staff decided to approach the issue of online language instruction from a different perspective, one that extends beyond models currently in use via ASUOnline and other online course providers. Carla Ghanem, Rebecca Berber-McNeill, David Parks and Andrew Ross wanted to develop an online language course without the preconditions that come with translating face-to-face instruction directly into another modality. We selected an intermediate German course as the basis for our pilot project -- using communicative practices and approaches, we want to see how online instruction can deliver the same measured outcomes and meet the same objectives as face-to-face language courses.

Find out how we’re changing the online language course in Part 2 of this post, coming soon to SILC Global Intersections.


Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Focus on Language Proficiency:
Creating the Next Generation of Global Professionals in Arizona

by Juliann Vitullo, Associate Professor, Italian

One of the guiding principles of Arizona State University President Michael Crow's vision for our institution as the New American University is to make ASU a “leading global center for interdisciplinary scholarship, discovery, and development.” Gaining proficiency in a second or multiple language(s) provides a solid foundation for international study and eventually global engagement in any profession. The School of International Letters & Cultures (SILC) has established the goal of becoming an innovative leader in the field of second language acquisition by elevating the goals of its language programs, so that students are required to reach specific benchmarks in a second language in order to fulfill College or program requirements and to engage globally in their future. In the first stage of this move toward proficiency-based language education, SILC is implementing a cutting-edge second language instructional model of intensive courses—one that focuses on adopting proven strategies and techniques, which encourage students to be active learners as they keep track of their own proficiency goals through “can-do statements” as progress indicators.
 
The first stage in the development of the new intensive language tracks is a two-year pilot project in which we create and implement the new curricula in 6 language programs:  Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. A cohort of SILC faculty members are currently working together in Spring 2015 to develop the new intensive curricula, and the courses will be offered for the first time in Fall 2015. The highly motivated students in this track will work to achieve specific levels of proficiency, varying by language, at a faster pace. At the end of the courses they will be tested using internationally recognized proficiency assessments. The results of these assessments will serve as documentation of their proficiency level, which students can share with future employers or graduate/professional schools. Following successful completion of the pilot cycle, SILC will use the data derived from the experience to reshape the entire language curriculum, and expand the model as appropriate to other languages.

The new intensive courses (110, 210) will provide all ASU students a better opportunity to gain professional-level skills in a second (or multiple) language(s) as undergraduates, an important advantage in our increasingly globalized and international economy. These efforts will help move SILC closer to its goal of creating proficiency-based requirements.

If you have any questions about the new intensive courses offered in Fall 2015 (CHI 110,  FRE 110, GER 110,  ITA 110, JPN 110, SPA 110), please contact Sandra Palaich: <Sandra.Palaich@asu.edu>.

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