First Voices and the Mac Help Preserve Aboriginal languages (fwd no date)

[Phil Cash Cash]

First Voices and the Mac Help Preserve Aboriginal languages
http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/

“Two tribal school teachers” reach out to the world

English-speaking people can scarcely imagine losing their language, but
many people around the world are facing this disturbing prospect. As
transportation and telecommunication technologies make the world
smaller, they also reinforce the dominance of a few modern language
groups. Regional languages spoken by relatively small population
groups, including Aboriginal peoples, risk extinction within a few
generations as young people leave them behind.

But what if you could use the same communications technology that
threatens aboriginal languages to preserve and teach them? This
possibility was not lost on Peter Brand, a 55 year-old Australian born
teacher and advocate of Aboriginal culture. After a year of teaching
Aboriginal children in his country’s outback and several years visiting
Indigenous cultures in other parts of the world, Peter settled on
Vancouver Island where he taught for the Saanich Indian School Board
for 11 years.

In 1999, Peter was teaching Grade One at LAU-WELNEW Tribal School in
Brentwood Bay. A computer lab upgrade to 25 networked iMacs enabled the
school to experiment with simple indigenous language teaching tools
using iMovie. “We had a Saanich language font created for the Mac,
started shooting video of plants and wildlife, and subtitled the
footage with Saanich words,” says Brand, who worked with John Elliott,
son of David Elliott, developer of the Saanich writing system.

Pretty cool little tool

Brand spent the next spring break working with John Elliott and Ken
Foster, technology coordinator for the local public school district.
The project was an alphabet book for the Saanich language. Working in
HyperStudio, they developed video, sound and text for each of the 40
Saanich alphabet characters. “Then we found a pretty cool little tool,”
recalls Brand, “a piece of Mac shareware called Vocab. At that time
Vocab was a text-only word study application that enabled users to
create word lists and present the words in quizzes and tests.”

Vocab became particularly useful at the tribal school after its
developer, Angus Gratton, added a sound feature. Many of the students
used Vocab to test themselves in the Saanich language. The ensuing
months saw the development of Vocab LanguageLab, a multimedia authoring
suite as a companion to the original Vocab application. “By this time
the kids were using iMovie to create rich media they could import into
Vocab LanguageLab along with sounds, pictures and video. It became a
complete kit for teaching indigenous languages.”

As Brand explains: “Many Aboriginal people are very visual learners. We
found that our Apple equipment enabled students to do things quickly
and easily with digital video. Our students began creating media-rich
learning resources for their fellow students, written in their own
unique orthography, or written language style.” Academically, Vocab
LanguageLab helped to raise the children’s language proficiency by
encouraging them to spend more time working on language related
activities.

The limiting factor, however, was the fact that only a small audience
was being reached. So Brand and John Elliott began to conceive a means
of migrating their work to the web.

In March 2001, Simon Robinson, the head of the First Peoples’ Cultural
Foundation, walked into their computer lab. He said he had heard good
things, and asked for a demonstration. Brand and Elliott gave him the
full show, including their vision to make the multimedia language tools
web-accessible.

Final tweaking of the web applications

Shortly after that, Robinson invited Brand to co-ordinate the official
FirstVoices project. “The project has taken on a life of its own,”
Brand elaborates. “Significant investment has been made to bring it to
its current form. We’re going through a final tweaking of the web
application after beta-testing this year, and we expect it to be in
full operation by early 2003.”

What exactly is FirstVoices? It’s an easy-to-use, secure, cost-effective
web-based tool that enables any language group to develop its own
authentic and authoritative archiving and language reference resource
from within its own community. Text, sound and video can be uploaded to
the FirstVoices online database to establish rich language resources.

“It’s extremely gratifying to witness the fruition of something you
believe in passionately,” says Brand, who lauds Apple for its
enthusiastic support in Canada, the US and Australia. “I never imagined
that two tribal school teachers plugging away at something could
ultimately reach out to the world in this way. Now that FirstVoices is
supported by a team of committed language revitalization advocates, it
can develop into a very important resource for Aboriginal languages.”

Brand encourages people to check out the site, now in late-stage beta,
at www.firstvoices.com.

For more information about Apple technology in the classroom visit the
Apple Canada web site at www.apple.com/ca/education