News Releases: Iowa State University

QUICK LINKS
Today's News
News releases
ISU homepage

NEWS RELEASE

09-13-02

Contacts:
Dawn Bratsch-Prince, Foreign Languages & Literatures,
(515) 294-4046
Dave Gieseke, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, (515) 294-7742
Kevin Brown, News Service, (515) 294-8986

OPEN HOUSE, DEDICATION TO BE SEPT. 20 FOR NEW FOREIGN LANGUAGES CLASSROOM AT IOWA STATE

AMES, Iowa -- An open house and dedication will be held by the department of foreign languages and literatures at Iowa State University for the new Cargill Foreign Language Digitally-Enhanced Classroom. The open house will be from 1 to 3 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, third floor of Pearson Hall. A brief dedication ceremony is at 2 p.m.

The $73,000 classroom was funded in part through donations from Cargill, Incorporated, Minneapolis, through its Higher Education Initiative.

The classroom contains 23 student computer workstations and one instructor workstation connected to the Internet, a SMART board, and an Internet-based video conferencing system. A "SMART" board allows a professor to write notes beforehand and call them up on a big screen during class.

The classroom is now being utilized for language courses in Spanish, French, Chinese and German.

Courses offered through the new Iowa Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES) Distance Learning Consortium also will be taught in the Cargill classroom. REEES is jointly operated by Iowa State, the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls. It will offer language courses in Czech, Polish and Serbo-Croatian.

The video conferencing system will allow Iowa State students to interact through two-way audio with professors in Iowa City and Cedar Falls. Other features of the classroom include virtual tours of countries associated with the languages being taught, software components of language textbooks for real time classroom use.

Cargill's Higher Education Initiative, established in 1996, seeks to build mutually beneficial partnerships with select universities and academic programs relevant to the future of Cargill's businesses. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the department of foreign languages and literatures provided additional funding.

-30-