SEELANGS Facebook page

[Susan LaVelle]

I also am a graduate student like Stephanie and I think that I would discourage her from pursuing a facebook page for this listserve. The additional traffic--especially from undergraduates--that facebook might attract, would likely decrease the candor of the listserve. As it stands now, a professor can recommend any student to be a listserve member (that is why I am here), but opening the list up in the way that facebook  might, would likely stifle the academic and collegial atmosphere. Certainly professors should be recommending this listserve to any graduate students that would benefit from it and perhaps they need a reminder on occasion to keep doing it.

What graduate students like about the listserve, or at least what I like best about it, is to be able to be "a mouse in the corner" and watch the professors and experts press forward their take on an issue, along with its natural, and sometimes frisky, debate. I don't want to make the academics less apt to contribute their free opinions. When they argue out the current parameters of a subject, I learn a lot about the topic's past and present direction and the nuances of the discussion.

For most students, I think that the crucial thing is for their professors and instructors to bring to their attention the useful websites and resources that will help them make progress and develop their interests where they are at. I have seen on this listserve, for example, information by Prof R Robin (sorry if I got the name wrong), with that kind of great information useful to undergraduates. 

I think that perhaps a useful service for someone like Stephanie would be to start a facebook page or a blog for students of Russian that incorporates and keeps current lots of these resources for the use of undergraduates. Many times SEELANGS brings to light things that undergraduates would find useful, like the MOSFILMS available free on the internet or the dictionaries just added to the Russian Archive on the SRAS webpage (http://www.sras.org/russian_archive_access). Of course, there is already some of this, but usually from the perspective of various institutional sources, not from a student's perspective. You, Stephanie, may be poised to do something like that.

Susan LaVelle

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