Rosetta Stone

[Ackerman, Ilse]

Hi All,

It's me - sorry it's taken so long to chime in.  I've appreciated the
discussion sparked by the Navajo project, and you all have touched on a
lot of the issues in language revitalization and technology that we
confront at Rosetta Stone.  I thought it might be interesting for you to
hear how our approach has been shaped by these concerns....  The
colleagues and discussions on this list have been really helpful in
guiding our philosophy over the years, and I expect I'll continue to
learn from this exchange as well....

Jess and Phil made good points about the cookie-cutter approach.  In our
case, we've chosen to do something of a hybrid between cookie cutter and
starting from scratch.  -We provide a template that's flexible, and each
language team can take advantage of already-developed elements of the
curriculum where they do apply, subtract the elements that don't apply,
and add the elements that are missing.  ...Recognizing that not starting
from scratch means it won't be as perfectly suited to the language as it
could be, while starting completely from scratch may render a project
unviable economically or otherwise.

Re: Phil and Jess's musings as to whether the method supports the
intricacies and idiosyncrasies of certain languages... The method works
for any vocabulary, syntax, or grammar that you can learn inductively by
the juxtaposition of a visual context and context of known language....
We were all pretty successful at learning our first language by that
method alone, if you think about it, and that was with a lot of chaotic
input, while this is arranged in building block order....  Where this
method is least suited is where there are very intricate rule exceptions
that don't lend themselves to contrasting examples.  However, so far we
haven't run into a language that hasn't been able to use it to teach
coursefuls of worthwhile content....

Rosalyn LaPier and others made an important point about training.
Training our partners in developing the curriculum, using our
development tools, recording the audio, doing voiceovers, etc. is one of
the no-brainers. : ) The development of content belongs to the
indigenous language team, and we don't have either the language
expertise or the resources to do that work ourselves.

Rosalyn and Keola's points about technology's place in the overall
strategy of a revitalization program are really important, too-the last
thing we want to happen is to devote the huge effort it takes to develop
a new software product and have it end up on a shelf - or to displace
other valuable efforts!  So that's been an important part of the project
application process-being assured that a community is set up to adopt
and benefit from a software 'solution', should it be created.

Intellectual property, per James.  We haven't run into any fuzzy areas
yet on this one.  The custom language content (text, photos, audio)
belong to the indigenous group, the software shell to Rosetta Stone. Our
partners have consistently made considered decisions about to whom
they'll make the software available.

Economic profit.  As follows from the intellectual property arrangement,
Rosetta Stone doesn't sell or profit from the sale of any endangered
language products.  Whether to sell the product is up to the indigenous
community.

Rosetta Stone charges for the development of an endangered language
product.  This covers the direct costs but not much of the considerable
opportunity cost of not putting those resources into making mainstream
commercial products that can sell.

The development cost means that some potential partners can't afford to
do a project.  We launched the subsidized program with that in mind, to
make it more affordable.

Where funds come from for language revitalization....  While I think
governments probably should shoulder an enormous part of the
responsibility to compensate for and reverse language loss (including by
funding teaching methods training/teaching materials creation/teaching),
I'm also afraid that won't happen in time.  So we think meanwhile
there's some logic behind a language-learning business putting some of
its profit from sales of mainstream language products toward language
diversity.

Re: using technology you haven't developed yourself, per Mia. - This is
interesting to me.  I doubt anyone would argue that if a community
wanted to print textbooks they might want to start with developing their
own word processing and layout software to do so.  I wonder what makes
other uses of software feel different that way....  I guess our thinking
on this is that we want to be an accessible choice to people who want to
take advantage of the enormous R&D effort we were able to invest in
developing a method, platform, development tool, and template that
works.  Or for people who want software, but want to prioritize their
resources toward the development of content rather than technology.

To Don's post, I think we're aspiring to be critical practitioners?
That's somewhere between not being ignorant but also not being paralyzed
by the imperfectness of all of this.... : )

ilse

Ilse Ackerman
Editor-in-chief

Rosetta Stone

T  540 | 236 5318

    800 | 788 0822

F  540 | 432-0953 
RosettaStone.com

 

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