Last semester, I taught Norwegian 253, a fifth-semester Norwegian language and culture class that focuses on contemporary Norway. At the end of the semester, the students did two projects instead of a final exam.
For the first project, the students divided into pairs and interviewed six native Norwegian students who attend St. Olaf. Each interview was videotaped and lasted approximately 15 minutes. The students were required to have an introduction, questions about each of the four main topics we examined during the semester (politics & democracy, family & the local community, education & economy, and language & culture), follow-up questions, transitions between the sections, and a conclusion. We were all happy about how the interviews turned out. There were, of course, many similarities in the way the Norwegians answered the questions, but there were also significant differences in perspectives on politics, education, and dialects. Three of the Norwegians were from the Oslo area, but the other three spoke dialects from Bergen, Sauda, and Snåsa. The American students had improved their listening skills significantly during the course of the semester and had learned about many new aspects of Norwegian society, so they were excited to discover that they could understand the Norwegians so well and could follow the discussions of abstract issues as well as the everyday topics.
The second project was to create a digital story by writing a text, creating a slideshow of photos in iMovie (or a similar program), and then adding audio narration. The students watched several examples of digital stories on the web, including the three posted below.
Fortellingen om Hadia Tajik
Helens stemme
Lasse Gjertsen: Jeg går en tur
Student Examples
Some of the students uploaded their digital stories to YouTube, so here are some examples of the student work. The students chose their own topics, wrote their own texts, and created the digital stories by combining photos and audio narration. The texts were relatively brief -- approximately one page -- and most of the videos were about 3 minutes in length.
Anna: Historien om en boknerd
Emma: Familien min
Caroline: Jeg liker å gå på tur
Evert: Kjenner du denne byen?
Maren: Min opplevelse i Norge
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