About The History of this Website
This website is the culmination of a year’s worth of planning and effort, and several year’s worth of consideration and anticipation. To say the least, it takes a lot of coordination to produce an online product that is useful, effective, and that staves the tide against becoming obsolete overnight.
The idea that language learning can be done online is a realistic goal, but actually achieving it can prove to be somewhat elusive. This website is our latest attmept. If you are a student or faculty involved in languages, regardless of where you are in the world, you are the expert. Please let us know where we have failed so that we can continually improve our product.
In developing this resource, one of the things we learned was that if language departments are going to really get online, it is necessary to realize that additional personel are needed. Language departments are not currently equipped with the know-how to achieve an online presence, and Academic Computing Services cannot be taxed with teaching the departmens the necessary skills to create the type of product we think we have created here. Likewise, the individual task of creating specific resources for each class is also not a realistic expectation to place upon ACS.
There needs to be a group that can interface between the language departments and Academic Computing. A department needs to find and hire its own highly skilled person or people to design and build the resources. These people must have familiarity with both the material being taught, AND the technology necessary to put it online.
Luckily, the best place to find such people is often going to be the students who are taking language classes. Students are getting ever more accomplished when it comes to the Web, and in fact the newest developments are driven by young people anyway. Additionally, students of foreign languages are also likely to be the most dedicated to creating newer and better resources.
Along these lines then, a supportive administration is essential. Yale University East Asian Lang. & Lit was very supportive of this project, and gave us complete autonomy in creating a custom resource tailored to Yale’s Intermediate Japanese course. Professor Edward Kamens, Chairman of the Department of Languages and Literatures is the foremost responsible for creating this working environment for us. Chioko Takahashi, Coordinator of Language Instructions, also supported our project and ideas from the beginning. Immense thank you’s to both of these people.
In working with networks, servers, software packages, and complex projects, difficulties inevitably arise. There are numerous groups whose support and help are also needed for a project of this size to succeed because without it no online effort can survive.
Thanks go to Gloria Hardman, Director of Special Instructional Computing, Nina Garrett, Director of Language Study at The Center for Language Study, and both of their staffs. Special thanks to Bradley Gano, in The Center for Language Study for his close attention and consistent help throughout. David Davies, Coordinator of Information Technologies Student Computing, answered many questions when his time was being demanded by other immediate and nearby concerns– thank you for taking the time.
We were fortunate to have received help from outside Yale University as well. Apple Computer Support staff came through for us repeatedly when our problems seemed unresolveable and lived up to their name and reputation in Educational Computing. Also, of course a special thanks is due to Saeko Komori of Chubu University for allowing us to have a compelete mirror-copy of the more than 1000 Kanji Quicktime videos she created.
There are many others who answered questions and took care of the backroom so that our materials could be viewed by the world. We are grateful to everyone named and unnamed who contributed.
It is difficult to explain in this small amount of space what it took to specifically create the overall plan of action and the necessary steps that led to this website. Nonetheless, here are some of the details:
Photoshop 5 was used to create the graphics that are found throughout the site. Given the scarcity of Japanese Language capability on computers among students, a successful website had to overcome that problem if all of the students were to benefit. Photoshop allowed us to create the graphics using Japanese.
We created more than 1200 unique graphic images for this site.
Photoshop is the most sophisitacted design tool available outside of specialty labs like Disney. It takes time to learn and training is necessary, but the leverage gained in using this tool is unmatched when it comes to producing web-enabled graphics, among others.
BBEdit 5 was used to create all of the HTML pages in the site. We created more than 30 pages. This number is deceiving becuse it says nothing of the sophistication of those pages. BBEdit facilitates the custom creation of web pages more than any other HTML Editor available. Without BBedit, this web-project would not exist. It saved so much time and enhanced procductivity so much that it can only be put in the “essential” category alongside Photoshop.
Javascript is used heavily in making the graphics switch and change, and in most cases this must be coded and de-bugged by the designers themselves. The same is true for the graphic layout of the many individual graphics that comprise the site. No software package can do this independently.
As listed in the credits on the home page, Zac Pessin’s KSDesignworks (which includes Sebastian Rossi), managed and created the site in conjunction with Yoshiko Maruyama.
Maruyama Sensei, Senior Lector of Japanese and in charge of the Intermediate Japanese program, naturally assumed the lead role in tuning the development to fit the curriculum. Furthermore, she contributed directly to the creation of the site and was willing and motivated to learn to use both Photoshop 5 and BBedit 5 having no prior experience, which is no small accomplishment. It is the real beginning of the department working to acquire the know-how to create online resources.
Now that we have finished, and certain that we could do it both faster and better the second time around, anyone interested in learning more about how we created our site is welcome to contact us before, during or after creating their own– there are bound to be lessons we can share which have not been mentioned here.