Emerging Technologies Consulting

As you can probably tell from the links in the last post, I’m coming down from a trip to Paris.  Today is Bastille Day and because I was just in Paris a few days ago, I thought it appropriate to celebrate by cooking a few things.  I am, at this very moment, waiting for croissants to rise.

What I wanted to talk about, though, is language.  I took 4 years of French in high school and another couple of years in college, thinking I might even major in it.  That was 20 years ago.  I failed to seriously brush up on my French before we went, so although I tried to speak it a little, I got a lot of funny looks as people tried to decipher what I was saying.  Usually, they then switched to English, for which I was actually grateful and not in the least offended.  I had a slightly better experience 20 years ago when I took a trip to Paris in that my French was more current and I think I sounded a bit better, but still, I didn’t have to use it that much.  I gave someone the time.  I ordered bread (pain) and coffee (du cafe).  For more complex transactions, my friend, a fluent French speaker, did all the talking.  I find my lack of real knowledge about French, despite so many years of studying it, rather disappointing.  It would be nice to truly be able to speak the language.  I think two things kept me from really learning the language.  One, we did not speak French that much in class and two, when we did, it was not to ask directions or order food, it was about, as Eddie Izzard demonstrates so nicely–cats on chairs and monkeys on branches (La chat est sur la chaise et le singe est sur la branche.)  Mostly we learned to read French and to write it.  I actually read a Zola in French, but I don’t think I’m going to have a conversation with a waiter about that.  Now, I passed up a couple of opportunities that might have helped.  Every week, there was French table in the cafeteria where only French could be spoken.  Presumably, the conversations were about real things–what we were eating, what we were going to do on the weekend, etc.  By the time this came into my consciousness, I’d decided to drop French as a major.  I also could have gone abroad to France and studied.  Again, I’d dropped French before really exploring this option.

When I was in college, the Internet barely existed.  The web didn’t yet exist.  We barely even had computers, much less networked computers.  Now, though, there are many ways I could immerse myself in a language, thanks to the web.  I can read or watch French news or tv.  Better yet, you can actually have conversations over the net with real people.  The Mixxer is a site where one can find people to converse with in different languages.  I’ve signed myself up despite no forthcoming trips to Paris, alas.  But I’d like to not let my French die and next time I go to France, I’d like to avoid such funny looks.

So, remember back a week or so ago, when I was reviewing in alphabetical order all the social software on the eHub site?  Well, I got a little bored with it, so I decided to switch strategies and just look at things that would be useful for education, but even that got boring.  It is overwhelming how many tools there are out there, many of which will be gone before the proverbial ink has dried on the review.  But I’m still going to try to sort through a few of them, interspersed with more interesting, I hope, content.

Today’s installment is more cute than useful, but I thought most people would appreciate the cuteness. Addictionary is a site for creating and adding new words to the English language.  People vote on whether the word is a good one or not.  For example, there is the word “autoquette” to describe the unspoken rules of the road, or Feng “Schwii” to describe the careful arranging of furniture for safe and optimal Wii playing.  They also issue challenges to come up with words for things we don’t yet have words for.  The current challenge is to come up with a word to describe the act of warming your feet on someone else.  So maybe the site isn’t full of intellectual heft, but it’s creative and might even be used to launch a discussion about how language develops (hint: it’s not usually by issuing challenges to come up with new words).

Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting together a video to be presented at a conference on language learning.  My experience with language learning goes back to my first days of reading.  My mother taught high school French and eventually Spanish and Latin.  When I was around 6 or 7, I remember finding her books and started trying to read them.  The conversations presented in them were stilted and old-fashioned even for the 70s.  It would go (in English) something like this:

Girl: Hello.

Boy: Hello.

Girl: My name is Maria.

Boy: My name is John.

Girl: I live in a blue house.

Boy: I live in a red house.

As Eddie Izzard points out, most of the phrases one learns in language class can never be used in a real conversation.  You never seem to learn how to ask where the bathroom is or how to order a meal properly.  Despite the stilted conversations, I continued studying French through college, almost majoring in it.  Of course, majoring in French meant reading Proust in his native tongue, not actually speaking to French people.  I tried that in the summer of 1989, when an opportunity arose to spend time with a friend in France prior to a summer program in England.  I found out that the average French person hasn’t actually read Proust or Zola.  Further, the people I was staying with were all American and tired of speaking French all the time.  I managed to be able to ask the time (and tell someone the time), order food and ask when the next train was, but beyond that, could not carry on a decent conversation.  As far as I can tell, languages are still taught with a focus on literature rather than on having actual conversations.

In making the video, I was trying to make the point that language learning offers an opportunity to open students up to a larger global community, but only if language teachers allow that to happen.  Sitting in booths and memorizing vocabulary and phrases like “The mouse is under the table” isn’t going to help much.  Yes, students need to learn vocabulary, but they also need to talk to real people in that language.  They can do so quite easily now via the Internet.  They can have blogs, participate in Skype calls or IM chats, record podcasts, or participate in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.  Unfortunately, many teachers aren’t taking advantage of what’s out there instead using the same old rote memorization and stilted conversation methods.  My experience with language teachers has been similar to my experience with other teachers.  There is a small minority experimenting with having their students keep blogs or even have conversations with students who speak the language natively, but most teachers are relying on 20 year old textbooks and recorded material.

My French is rusty now, and most people think of French as an elite language that lets you travel to France and order fancy meals and wine.  However, when I was in high school, some immigrants from Laos showed up in our town and besides the Laotian language, they spoke French.  My mother ended up being the only one who could talk to them.  French is spoken in many countries in Africa as well.  So, even though we think of many European languages as being limited to Europe, thanks to a long history of colonization, these languages are spoken in many countries around the world, opening up an opportunity for students to connect with developing countries and to understand the history of colonization and its impact–on the language, yes–and also on the people and the economy.

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In addition to thinking about the possibilities of language learning beyond where my own classes took me, in looking for video and images to include in my video, I learned quite a bit.  I wanted to find factory photos to represent the idea of industrial education and narrowed it down to child labor photos.  That led me to a set of photos related to a textile plant in Birmingham.  Later, I ended up at a set of postcards about mining in Pennsylvania.  I was fascinated by both sets of images and it really brought the whole child labor issue into sharp relief.  (Despite reading Zola, it’s hard to imagine what child labor was really like).  I also found my way to these Lewis Hines photos, many of which are on Flickr.  As I kept exploring, I watched two different talks, one on kids teaching kids and one on Global Citizen Year.  The first showed up in my feed reader.  The second one I found via photos from Flickr.  My collaborators introduced me to the Life photos hosted by Google, which was a treasure trove of images of classrooms past.

It never ceases to amaze me how much information is available on the Internet.  And the more amazing thing is that it’s only a drop in the bucket.  It’s easy to get lost in the pathways, but it’s also just as easy to make really amazing discoveries.  I wonder if I could brush up on my French using similar pathways, by forcing myself to read French blogs, for example.  Seems like a definite possibility.