On the surface, Allison Francis, an English professor at Chaminade University, might not quite fit the profile of “digital nomad,” but don’t let her humanities bona fides fool you.
The Hawaii Kai-based playwright has had a number of successful local productions and is busy plying her trade in Italy half of the year. She was recently commissioned by a village on Lake Como to write and direct a short play, “Tre Ragazze,” celebrating village legends.
After visiting her on a recent trip, I came away impressed how she used information technology apps and hacks for her creative pursuits. Francis explained that without the right technology, she could not have produced her Italian play in any sort of expedient manner.
So where does tech come into play?
First off, she said, “I had to prepare. You don’t just write a play with an Italian theme without some homework. The first step before I even got on a plane to Italy was to have a better working knowledge of Italian.” She said she had a “rudimentary” background in Italian, but it needed work. She noted there are Italian classes available in Hawaii, but as a full-time professor (with a family), she had little time to take them.
Her solution? Duolingo.
According to a review in PC Magazine, Duolingo was “the first free language-learning app to rival expensive paid programs.” It offers self-paced exercises to help you learn the basics or review a language you already know. (I had a chance to try it out, and plan to explore it more thoroughly in a future article.)
Francis began using Duolingo about a year ago to communicate with her Italian boyfriend. She is impressed with Duolingo’s quiz formats that encourage you to practice writing, speaking and reading in the languages of your choice. There are also incentives like extra points to trade in for things like a “strike freeze,” which allows you to miss a day without ruining your learning streak.
As a playwright, Francis finds herself in front of her Mac laptop’s screen quite a bit, but she assured me her Italian play was a collaborative effort. There were people she worked with on the production in Hawaii, on the mainland and in Italy.
Dropbox, she said, “was a convenient means of allowing the translators and actors to access the play and, if necessary, share different drafts of the play for editing.”
Then there’s that old-fashioned mode of communication, voice.
“If I wasn’t face to face with my colleagues,” said the professor, “I was often on the phone with them, either individually or on a group chat.” Her app of preference was WhatsApp, which you can use to message or phone someone, on Oahu, on the mainland or on another continent. It’s encrypted, free of charge and the voice quality is terrific. (I used it extensively while in Europe to call friends on the mainland. I also noted that most of my European colleagues were on it even when they communicated with people within their own countries.)
WhatsApp also allows users to create group chats and even communities where announcements can be posted. Francis used this feature to share videos and images in real time with her collaborators around the world.
What else came in handy?
The professor said, “I used my iPad during rehearsals to read the script while directing the actors. I also used both my tablet and my iPhone to access Google Translate when I didn’t know a word or phrase I needed to block the actors.”
Without these digital modalities, creating, writing and directing a play in northern Italy would have been almost impossible to achieve in less than a year for this Chaminade professor.
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Rob Kay, a Honolulu-based writer, covers technology and sustainability for Tech View and is the creator of fijiguide.com. He can be reached at Robertfredkay@gmail.com.
