Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Ideas for Multilingual Center in Brooklyn Public Library

For some months now I've been interning at the Central branch of the Brooklyn Library System. Most of the time I've been working along side the director of a program similar to MOUSE. Some of our work includes setting up a wiki to past along to the children to introduce them to creating content with Web 2.0 items instead of just simply using them. I will continue to work with them on advancing that little wikispace, but now I would like to branch out into another area, namely the Multilingual Center that the library has to offer (If you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm sure you can figure out why I would have an interest in putting my hands on that department...)

After expressing this to the head of the department that I'm interning for, she told me that they'll be happy to get any help I would like to give and that it would be a good idea to come up with a list of ideas that I would like to bring to the table - which leads me to the point of this post: I would like you guys to give me feedback on these ideas and to share your own. Basicaly answer the question of what would you like to see your local library offer if you were aiming to learn a new language.

  1. Have reading groups. Everyone in the group reads the same book and then hold discussions about that book in the target language.
  2. Hold trips and events geared towards learning more about the culture and people of the target language.
  3. Find groups outside of the library that deal with the languages we are aiming to focus on and see if we can set some sort of collaboration in motion.
  4. Start a web project of some kind that aims to help with learning and keeps people up to date with whats going on within the groups - more than likely a blog or anything else that will achieve the same goal.
Those are my first four ideas. I'm heading back to the library Friday to try and discuss all of these things with people and then edit them to reflect how the conversation went.

Now that you all have a taste of what kinds of ideas I'm after, start posting your own thoughts about it.

4 comments:

  1. I'd suggest something around DVD's of foreign movies.

    And maybe you could propose a system for recommending certain bilingual blogs... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. lol. Yes, of course I will advocate your blog. It is one of my favorites after all.

    And you have a great idea about the foreign movies thing. I'll be sure to bring that up as well - I don't want every meeting to be just people talking about books. Movies would add a nice touch the the meetings.

    ReplyDelete
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