Posted on 11th August 2011 by Judy Breck in Biology, Language, Literature, Mobile Learning, Schools We Have Now and Testing
mobile, untethered
Yesterday I watched and listened to a recording of Lynda Weinman interviewing Will Richardson. The title of this free Webinar: Personal Learning Networks Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education — which is the title of a new book by Richardson.
The webinar is an hour long. Richardson describes his work aimed at making schools better. The discussion between these two at the end of the hour is frank. They agree and agonized over this reality: The system for conveying knowledge to students in the schools we now have is not working and it is changing very little if at all.
I know, from having been her student in several contexts, that Lynda is a great teacher. I feel sure Richardson is as well. Lynda is a major leader of digital education — essentially the supra-teacher of digital arts. Richardson has been immersed in the school mess for 20+ years — and is a father of young teenagers, and proposes ways for teachers to improve their classes against the system. These two hands-on experts do not have answers for how really to change the schools methodologies so that the kids can get a decent education at school.
From their discussion in the webinar I picked up this new word for how education could change: untethered. It implies for me the concept of handschooling: an individual student engaging knowledge by using a mobile that she owns and controls, providing her with a 24/7 web browser.
I suggest that untethering a student’s access to what is known — cutting access loose from standardized curricula, grades, and tests — is a specific, simple step. Connect a kid: let him engage is mind on his own with algebra, history, ecology and the rest of the subjects that are now for him tethered to the academic (school) brick and mortar world.
With individual wireless access on a tablet or smartphone, a student can while away boring times in school:
Posted on 25th February 2009 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning, Language and Networks
chulym, endangered, kallawaya, language, linguistics, tofa
You can listen below to living speakers of four languages that are dying. The material is an excerpt from a SeedMagazine article about The Amazing Race to record dying languages, and a PBS program to be aired on February 26 on the subject.
“The following sound clips are provided by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. They are used with the consent of the speakers and communities who are the owners of these languages.”
Audio: Endangered Languages
Tofa; Central Siberia, 35 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Tofa song, untranslated
Below is an excerpt from a SeedMagazine article about a PBS program on rescuing dying languages that will air on February 26.
Ho; eastern India, 1 million speakers
Listen to mp3 | Translation: “new moon”
Kallawaya; Bolivia, 100 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Untranslated
Chulym; Siberia, less than 10 speakers
Listen to mp3 | Translation: “Where are you going; where are you from; I’ve never seen such stupid people.”
The internet is rescuing languages from oblivion.
GoldenSwamp.com is about the global emergence of what is known by humankind from the working of network laws within the chaos of the internet. A clear example of this golden mechanism of emergence is the preservation of languages. In the days, just a couple of decades ago, when language media were limited to print and tape, languages were dying off with at best fragile ways to remember them.
That has changed. Right now, with one click, you can listen to Chulym, a language now only spoken by ten living people. The mp3 file you will hear is not from a magnetic tape that must be preserved in a physical vault. It is sequences of zeroes and ones in the digital cloud, where it can network with Siberians, their children, scholars, historians, and others.
