Languages and information technologies

Today, information technologies make a wide range of tools and resources available to all those who work in languages. In the course of your studies, you will find yourself using computers and online tools more and more extensively throughout your writing and research. Here, you can explore further how you can use these tools in many areas of your work, and in the writing that you yourself will produce.

This site aims to document some of the ways in which you can use these resources productively. This documentation is divided into eight main sections. You can read through all of these in sequence, or concentrate on individual parts as the need arises. You will also find template files that you can use in your own written work.

Encountering information technology

In your studies, you will have access to a wide range of resources and facilities, and you will make use of digital tools in availing of them. You will be able to do so using open-access computers on campus, as well as equipment that is at your own personal disposal and which you may choose to bring on campus with you or use to work remotely.

Beyond these resources, the internet will allow you to explore a vast range of collections and applications that will have a bearing on all aspects of your work — spanning research, collection of data and materials, reading, writing.

Your work in languages

You are already likely to be an experienced and adept user of information technologies. The guidance on this site is designed to illustrate how tools that you may already be familiar with can be used to new ends and in new ways. Over the course of your studies, you will also discover new applications and online resources, many of them specific to languages.

Here, you can begin to find out more about all of these many kinds of information technology. You will discover that a given kind of work can be made possible or supported by more than one tool. One of the ways in which you will progress as an independent and autonomous learner is by working out which of these many options support you best in your work. This site aims to help to guide you in this work and it it seeks to anticipate some of the issues that you are likely to want to think about in using information technologies, whether you are using the facilities on campus or you have the opportunity to work with a device of your own.

The documentation has been developed to support students in the BA in World Languages in University College Cork. This programme is taught by staff in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the School of Irish Learning, the Department of Classics and the Language Centre.