School part of Dakotah language project (fwd)

Wed Sep 1 15:33:46 UTC 2004

Posted on Mon, Aug. 23, 2004

School part of Dakotah language project
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/9470240.htm

WAYNE HAMMOND
Associated Press

WATERTOWN, S.D. - Lake Area Technical Institute and Sisseton-Wahpeton
College are teaming up to preserve and teach the Dakotah language.

LATI media programmer Jason Julius and media specialist Bob Day will
work over the next year to take information gathered by SWC and make it
into a multimedia language tutorial.

Day explained that the idea was developed by SWC President William
Lonefight, who was interested in finding a partner with the resources
able to take on such a project. While touring the innovation center on
the campus of LATI, he was struck by the fact that the technology
available might be able to handle the project, Day said.

He said that SWC will do the initial end of capturing the information.
LATI will take it from there.

"They will capture their elders speaking and we will take the content
and make it into a multimedia language tutorial," Day said.

The goal is to provide some level of literacy in the language through
the program being written by Julius and Day. It contains specific
imagery for the detailed language - one which even deviates from when
males and females speak - as well as some of the different characters
not included on a standard keyboard.

Julius is a recent computer information systems graduate from LATI who
expects to see his proficiency in Dakotah increase as he works with it
on a day-to-day basis.

"It sounded interesting to learn a language while I write a program," he
said.

He explained that the program will largely be contained on disc, but
that with the proper computer system, it could be fully contained on
the Web, a trend LATI is becoming more a part of with Web-based classes
available through its nursing programs as well as those offered in
conjunction with the Midwest Dairy Institute.

The program is being funded through SWC. It is scheduled for one year,
at which time a review will take place and a second year is possible.
Day said the school put together an initial demonstration for SWC,
taking a laptop computer to the college, where some of the participants
were able to give an idea of how what they say will be used in the
finished product.

"We looked at some other industry standards of computer-based learning
tools," Day said. "We are going to include some improvements in our
software that aren't a part of the other commonly used packages."

Day said programs like these could prove very valuable in the
preservation of the hundreds of Native American languages.

LATI director Gary Williams added that the school is pleased to be
working on a project of this importance.

"It's a great honor for Lake Area Tech to work with our Native American
friends and partner with the SWC in such a worthwhile project," he
said.