UACALI News
10/6/08
A beta release of the upcoming Critical Languages Series: Beginning Kurdish DVD-ROM is being used at the University of Arizona for Kurdish language instruction. See the full press release for more details!
8/6-8/08
Scott Brill gave a presentation titled "MaxAuthor: A Freely Available Authoring System for Windows and Moodle" at the 2008 WorldCALL conference in Fukuoka, Japan.
7/2/08
We have been working on a new MaxAuthor export format for Moodle. Check it out at Critical Languages Series Online!
8/14/07
Version 3.21 of MaxBrowser is now available free for non-commercial use download.
The Critical Languages Series has a totally revamped website with demonstration videos.
We will demonstrate MaxAuthor at the ACTFL conference in San Antonio, Nov 17, 2007.
See our article about MaxAuthor in the National Capital Language Resource Center Newsletter.
See our new MaxAuthor video tutorials.
1/31/07
The University of Arizona has a new National Foreign Language Resource Center CERCLL: The Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy. As a part of this center, we will be creating MaxAuthor training materials.
María Palacios de Erickson, Santa Monica College , has produced a new Spanish MAX lesson available online at: http://cali.arizona.edu/maxnet/spn/
We will demonstrate our new software at the NCOLCTL conference in Madison Wisconsin, April 26-29.
4/11/06
We will demonstrate our new software and courseware for Cantonese, Kazakh, Turkish, and Ukrainian at the CALICO 2006 conference in Honolulu , Hawaii , May 16-20.
We now have a series of Macromedia Flash-based videos demonstrating our student formats for Kazakh (other languages similar), see http://clp.arizona.edu/cls/videogrid.htm.
MaxAuthor was included on the 2004 and 2005 "Resources for English Language Teachers" CD-ROM by the US Dept of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, English Language Fellow Program, see http://exchanges.state.gov/education/engteaching/fellows.htm
10/19/05
Our new paradigm for delivering MAX lessons over the Internet has now
progressed. MaxAuthor has been able to
export lessons in HTML format for many years and thousands of students have
used these lessons over the Internet (see http://cali.arizona.edu/maxnet for
samples in 20 languages). The student
experience was not quite as rich as our CD-ROM delivery mechanism for
several reasons: limited support for display and keyboard input of less
commonly taught languages such as Cantonese and Native American languages,
and limited audio support for our pronunciation exercise and other audio
activities. We experimented with doing these things in Java and Flash, but
there were compatibility or vendor issues that were not easily resolved.
Instead, we have chosen to improve MaxBrowser so that a student can use it
to directly open MAX files over the Internet. It is very similar to Internet
Explorer, and is built using components of it. The new, free for
non-commercial use, MaxBrowser3 has all the same interactive features as our
latest DVD-ROMs (see http://clp.arizona.edu/cls).
Once you download and install MaxBrowser3, we have several sample lessons
with audio and streaming video you can try (more coming soon). Your own
lessons created with MaxAuthor can also be used over the Internet with
MaxBrowser3 if you have a web server. You can download MaxBrowser3 from
http://clp.arizona.edu/docs/beta/maxbrowse/BetaTestingMaxBrowser3.htm.
We are using MaxBrowser3 as the delivery mechanism for our soon to be
available "Critical Languages Series Online" subscription service
where
students will be able to sign up and access the same materials available on
our CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs for a period of several months at a time.
We will be demonstrating this and our new DVD-ROMs at the annual conference
of the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP)
conference in
Arlington
,
Virginia
(near DC) October 28-29. If you
have been
considering offering an LCTL at your institution for credit, NASILP can
show you how. Please see www.nasilp.org for
registration information.
Other News: Dena Thomas and Members of the Tohono O'odham Nation Education
Department have produced a 2 CD-ROM set "Acim ac O'odhamkaj neneok"
(Beginning O'odham Levels 1+2) containing over 180 lessons created with
MaxAuthor. Tohono O'odham is a native language of
Arizona
.
How are you using MaxAuthor? We are applying for new funding and your
comments and suggestions can help shape the direction of our future materials.
7/26/05
The University of Arizona Critical Languages Program and the UA Computer Assisted Language Instruction Group are pleased to announce the availability of 5 new titles in the Critical Languages Series:
-Beginning Ukrainian
-Intermediate Cantonese
-Intermediate Turkish
-Intermediate Kazakh
-Advanced Kazakh
These 5 new titles are in DVD-ROM format and require a computer running Windows 2000 or XP (not intended for standard home DVD players) and were developed using our MaxAuthor authoring system with funding from: the US Department of Education International Research and Studies Program, the Office of the Dean of the University of Arizona College of Humanities, and the National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs.
These extensively tested materials contain many video clips, thousands of native speaker audio recordings, several types of interactive exercises, and are equivalent to a one-year college course. The suggested retail price is $79.95 and are distributed by the University of Arizona Press 1-800-426-3797.
Scott Brill and Alex Dunkel will present these new materials July 29th at the Interagency Language Roundtable Showcase (www.govtilr.org) at Howard Community College , Columbia , Maryland .
Many thanks to our authors (and their assistants), 10 reviewers, 11 native speakers, 10 production assistants, 43 beta testers, and many others who have made this project happen, we really appreciate your help! For more information about the Critical Languages Series, see http://clp.arizona.edu/cls.
10/8/04
For speakers of Chinese, there is a nice Flash-based tutorial on how to use MaxAuthor produced by the Far East Book Company at http://www.hsenglish.com.tw/teach/t_supply/tool.asp
3/15/04
Poster session at the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages, Madison , WI , May 1st.
MaxAuthor Workshop at CALICO 2004, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, June 9th.
MaxAuthor Workshop at American Indian Language Development Institute.
8/12/03
New online lessons created with MaxAuthor: German lessons from the University of Pittsburgh , and a new Chemehuevi lesson by Johnny Hill, funded by our Gates Foundation grant.
See our latest publication: "The Impact of Self-Instructional Technology on Language Learning: A View of NASILP", A. Dunkel, S. Brill, B. Kohl, In C.A. Spreen (Ed.), New Technologies and Language Learning: Cases in the Less Commonly Taught Languages (Technical Report #25; pp. 97-120). Honolulu , HI : University of Hawai'i , Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center , 2002. ISBN 0-8248-2634-5
1/4/03
We have a new generic MAX CDROM delivery system so you can easily put your own MAX lessons on a CDROM, check it out at http://cali.arizona.edu/docs/genmaxcd/genmaxcd.htm
We have been awarded a grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with the Colorado River Indian Tribes to help develop materials for the Mohave and Chemehuevi languages.
6/12/02
Department of Education Grant
MaxAuthor 2.5 (released 12/11/2001) and the Critical Languages Series CD-ROMS created with MaxAuthor have been verified to operate correctly on Windows XP as well as Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME. The new audio dictionary feature introduced in MaxAuthor 2.5 has been well appreciated and has saved content creators many hours of re-recording the same words in different lessons.
We now have over 300 registered MaxAuthor users in 42 countries. Many of them are creating lessons and putting them online for students. Recent examples:
Grindsted Gymnasium Og Hf: (Russian
for Danish speakers)
Latin lessons from Cornell
College
Chechen
from Zura Batsiyeva
If you know of other MAX lessons created with MaxAuthor that have been put online, we'd love to hear about them!
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Mail your comments to: brill@u.arizona.edu