Personal Mention

Sue-mei Wu, teaching professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Masters in Applied Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Modern Languages, was invited by the East Asian Studies Center at The Ohio State University (OSU) to give lectures at Columbus State Community College (CSCC) and at Ohio State. Her talk at CSCC was titled “Amazing Hands: Teaching Taiwanese Hand Puppet Theater in U.S. Universities” and her talk at OSU was called “When CBI Meets TEL: Robust Content Knowledge and Language Skill Learning.” These two talks highlighted her innovative digital humanities project that integrates ethnographic research with content-based instruction on Taiwanese Puppet Theater and Taiwanese Opera, and her technology-enhanced learning efforts, including her OLI Chinese Online and digital storytelling projects, and her Chinese language and culture learning modules. Learn more about Wu’s projects.

Casey Roark, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CBNC), recently participated in the Listening Into 2030 workshop in Berkeley, Calif. Roark was one of only eight early career researchers invited to participate in the event, where she helped create a “roadmap” for developing new technologies in speech communication and the hearing sciences. “It feels amazing to have been given this opportunity and to have my voice counted among these senior researchers,” she said. CMU’s Lori Holt, a well-known expert in auditory cognitive neuroscience and Roark’s Ph.D. adviser, added, “Intensive, forward-thinking workshops like Listening Into 2030 … require bold, out-of-the-box thinking and a willingness to cross traditional disciplines. CMU fosters excellent students like Casey by creating an environment that values just this kind of approach.” Learn more about Roark’s research and the Listening Into 2030 workshop.