Government language study released (fwd)

[MiaKalish@LFP]

Hi, Sean,
 Top O' the Beautiful New Mexico moarnin' to yeh! :-)

I agree that we need to have demonstrations that show our success in the
value terms of the listening Group.

My thesis was a standard Psychology thesis, hypotheses, control groups,
Native participants, whole nine.

We "thought" (silly us), that people would respond to our efforts (One
person from the Tribe, good technology, tribal participants asking for
more). NOT.

Also, I have recently noticed something. (Duh!) What I "do", what I am
really, really interested in, is how the principles of cognitive psychology
regarding learning, and other work that people have done, can be harnessed
to make learning easier, more fun, and above all, more powerful in the
actual process. For example, it takes lots of time to develop the cognitive
models of things you read in text. If you don't understand the concept
behind a word, you have a blank space in the model until you find a way to
complete it. What you get is, to coin an appropriate metaphor, is Cognitive
Bowderlization. Of course there is no Bowdler, and there is no intention to
create the blank spot, but if you don't have the concepts, you can't
populate the space.

So to bring it back around, what I was trying to show people is that
different, more cognitively informed ways of Teaching and Learning can in a
reasonable, though certainly not complete, way, make up for the fact that
the environment in which people could learn language by immersion has been
obliterated, the number of fluent speakers who can teach is a) small to
begin with, since not every fluent speaker can teach, and b) decreasing
exponentially. I wasn't "selling" a complete program for them to buy; I was
selling a cooperative way for the community to become involved in saving its
language and culture by working with people who knew how to use technology
to support the process and engender a new emergent structure of culture and
learning.

Nope.

Not having any.

Also, to develop the really comprehensive software like you are talking, to
teach grammar dynamically, takes time, and support for the people who are
building it. We wanted them to support us financially, and we weren't asking
vast sums of money like the quarter of a million dollars people pay for
Macromedia Flash advertising. We were graduate students, and we thought the
graduate student hourly rate was fair, plus we wanted an office on site.
They had the space; one half of us was a Tribal member. Didn't happen. Just!
Didn't! Happen!

So I gave up on the Tribe and went away, reconceived what I wanted to do in
a new format. My main problem was not needing to figure out how to solve the
problem, but developing the materials for building the solution. I have
people here who want to use the software approach I designed for English
language learners, but I don't have the resources to build the materials in
huge enough amounts fast enough.

<BIG WIDE SMILE> So I am working on solving my supply problem. <BIG WIDE
SMILE>

By the way, does anyone know Gilles Fauconnier? He and Mark Turner, who I
also don't know, wrote a wonderful book called The Way We Think. They have a
beautiful structure of networks and spaces. Interestingly enough, the
approach that I used that was so successful is called a Simplex Netowrk in
their format. The nice thing is that they did a lot of the work, so I can
simply use their structure for developing learning materials. I can highly
recommend it. Although, I should add the caveat that the reason I find this
book so clear and infomative is because I have been thinking along these
lines for 20+ years. I would like to hear from people to check the book out
and find it inscrutable. . . and those who don't. I'm thinking of using the
book as a foundation text in a multi-media development course (The answer to
the unasked question: GIGO. . . . if you don't have theory for what
components you are including, you get the same shlock in multiple dimensions
as you do in text. People just assimilate it faster.)

best.
Mia

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean M. Burke" <sburke at CPAN.ORG>
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:10 PM
Subject: Re: Government language study released (fwd)


> At 06:46 PM 2004-12-15, MiaKalish at LFP wrote:
> > > How well did they test on learning grammatical formations, and other
> > > non-lexical things?
> >We didn't get that far. This was for basic lexical acquisition, without
> >using Any English.  We thought the success of our first project would
> >excite others, and we would have the chance to develop the Flash movies
> >for teaching grammar dynamically[...]
>
> Yes, the problem of tribal politics is always a massive obstacle in any
> language revitalization program.  I think the best solution is to have on
> your side not just your ample enthusiasm for technologies that you feel
can
> be promising, but also clear documentation of past experiments showing the
> technologies to be brilliantly useful for the task you're proposing --
> demonstrating this with an experimental group and a control group, and
> going past just lexical retention.  Having experimental results in hand is
> what can put you head and shoulders over the other dog-and-pony shows
> that're out there in the realm of language technology.
>
> I mean, anybody can learn a few dozen nouns in an Apachean language -- but
> it's trying to go from "he runs" to "I ran" or "he ran around" that trips
> up all the learners.  Find a technology that helps with that more than
> /just/ chalk-and-talk does, and show proof of how and when your new tech
is
> effective, and you'll be practically immune to the hassles of tribal
politics.
>
> --
> Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
>