Briefly: Turkish University to Offer Armenian Language Course

Turkish university to offer Armenian language course

Using a $23,500 grant from the German Marshall Fund’s Black Sea Trust, Kadir Has University in Istanbul plans to begin offering Armenian language lessons this month.

Serdar Dinler, director of the university’s Center for Lifelong Learning, said by telephone that the course would be taught by a doctoral candidate from Armenia as part of a cultural exchange between countries whose ties have been fraught for a century.

“Turkey is becoming an energy-transit corridor and a center for diplomacy in the region,” Mr. Dinler said. “Also the Turkish government has a new ‘zero problems’ policy with its neighbors, so we believe that the new generation in Turkey needs to have more dialogue with neighboring countries, including Armenia, Russia, Iran, Greece, etc. Knowing the language can only help.”

Kadir Has is a private university established along the Golden Horn in 1997 and named after its founder, a Turkish automotive magnate.

— SUSANNE FOWLER

Students not ready to adopt Kindle for notes and reading

Just seven months after adopting an e-reading device, the Kindle DX, for university-level reading and note-taking, some 60 percent of students had put it aside in favor of traditional learning material, according to a new study presented at a conference on human-computer interaction by the Association for Computing Machinery in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week.

The study’s authors are investigating the impact of electronic reading devices on higher learning. “We are still trying to understand what we lose or gain by the adoption of e-reading technology,” said Alex Thayer, the primary co-author of the study and a doctoral student in human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.

Students found it difficult to adapt traditional reading, scanning and note-taking methods to the platform. The study’s authors found that the e-reader disrupted students’ ability to remember the physical location of passages and notes in book.

However, the study also found that the e-reader, owing to its size and portability, was more likely to replace paper-based learning than computer-based learning. Students are more likely to use a Kindle than a computer on public transit, for example, Mr. Thayer explained.

The study is based on the learning habits of 39 first-year graduate students at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering. Despite a relatively small sample size, the study represents one of the first to look at long term academic learning habits of students using electronic readers, according to the study’s authors.

“E-readers are not where they need to be in order to support academic reading,” Professor Charlotte Lee, who led the study, said in a statement.

— CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

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