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Volume 14

No. 1  September/October 1998

Berliner sehen Lets Students Explore Two Neighborhoods

Lee Ridgway

When it comes to harnessing technology for innovative approaches to foreign language learning, MIT's faculty continue to pioneer the way. Their development of learning environments for foreign languages and cultures began about ten years ago with A la recontre de Philippe (Meeting Philippe) for French, and No recuerdo (I don't remember) in Spanish. These were followed by the Star Festival in Japanese and further projects in French and German.

The common thread through these language projects is interactivity: students can follow or create various paths through videos and other material. The idea behind these tools is to give a more natural experience of the language and a more realistic cultural and social experience of that country.

Making its debut in the German classroom last spring was Berliner sehen (Seeing Berliners seeing themselves), a hypermedia documentary coauthored by Ellen Crocker, lecturer, and Kurt Fendt, research associate in MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures section.

Inside Berliner sehen
The basis of Berliner sehen is thirteen hours worth of short (45 seconds to three minutes) video clips of conversations. The conversations, captured in the summer of 1995 by Berlin filmmaker Hanno Baethe, are combined with an extensive archive of texts, images, and historical audio and video documents. Students explore the material through contextual links and from differing perspectives with no set pathways, with each student discovering her or his own themes or threads to pursue. Since Berliner sehen is not organized as a linear narrative or along any predetermined plot lines, the possibilities are limited only by the student's interests and inquisitiveness.

While Berliner sehen takes advantage of recent technologies like DVD-ROM (high-density digital storage) and the Java programming language, it's the content that counts. Crocker and Fendt, aided by Baethe, came up with the concept of going into two neighborhoods, one in former East Berlin and one in former West Berlin, and filming the residents within the neighborhoods in conversation with each other.

These conversations take place during daily activities, as residents talk about their lives, work, and relationships - of how things are changing and how things were in the past. Given the locales of the neighborhoods and the backgrounds of some of the people involved, it's not surprising that the conversations often include a considerable amount of politics and history.

The Berliners converse as people do everywhere: in colloquialisms and dialect; with unfinished sentences, implicit understanding, hand gestures. The student hears and has to make sense of everyday German, not academic classroom German.

As Crocker and Fendt began editing the initial 28 hours of film that covers about 50 people, they settled on eight main figures, four from the east and four from the west, as the focal points for the student's explorations. These main "characters" relate within and sometimes across the two neighborhoods, either through knowing each other or sharing mutual acquaintances or pasts. Thus, the raw material is in place for the student's encounter with Berliner sehen.

The Student Experience
Berliner sehen can currently be launched from networked workstations in the Language Learning and Resource Center (in its new home in 16-644). The main interface is comprised of a viewing space, a navigation panel, and a workspace. A student can start by selecting among the main figures and aspects of the content, which then leads to a selection of materials involving that person. The clips are represented as a collection of thumbnail images displayed in the periphery of the viewing space. The eight main figures represent a real cross-section of their communities, including Herr Tapp, a former Communist party official in the eastern neighborhood; Frau Sipp, a single mother in the western section who runs a well-known bakery; and Jana, a young stage set designer whose personal ties and family history extend into both neighborhoods.

In addition to the main figures, students can select among nine content categories, that express what Crocker and Fendt call "notions." Among the notions are Ich (self) and Andere (others), Öffentliches (public sphere) and Privates (private sphere), and Tun und Machen (activities; what people do in everyday life). One of the key notions is that of Kiez, literally meaning community, but in Berliner sehen encompassing how the residents see or think of their neighborhood.

To view a video clip or related material, the student drags a thumbnail from the periphery to the center of the viewing space. When a video clip is in the center, additional notions are highlighted in the navigation panel to indicate other ways of relating people and content. When the student clicks on a highlighted notion, the materials in the periphery change accordingly, providing a new context for the video clip. No order of viewing is presented or presupposed. It is up to the student to decide what videos to watch (repeatedly, if need be, to better understand the conversations). The workspace lets the student collect clips and other materials for future reference.

Through this back-and-forth viewing, the student begins to discover connections between the stories told in the conversations and between the people themselves. Depending on his or her interest, the student may wander about, getting acquainted with the neighborhoods and the people, or delve deeply into ideas or topics. The uniqueness of Berliner sehen is that the student can repeatedly reconfigure the relationships between clips and other related documents. This encourages the student to explore cultural and social issues from different points of view through the eyes of people who live in that culture.

A Look at Language Projects
For overviews of Berliner sehen and related projects from MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures section, see http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/.

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