Dave’s Whiteboard

Christy Tucker has a sidebar link on her blog to this post by George Siemens at elearnspace. Some corporations in the U.K. can now grant the equivalent of high-school qualifications.

Siemens likes the idea — “real world training and practical hands-on activities” — but wonders, as I do, about what could be lost.

Here’s the Globe and Mail article that Siemens is talking about.

I’m really intrigued by this. As the article says, McDonald’s is “introducing a ‘basic shift manager’ course, designed to train staff in skills needed to run a McDonald’s outlet, from marketing to human resources and customer service skills.”

So Shannon can work at McDonald’s, cope with the challenges of a shift manager, and presumably learn on the job ways to improve her abilities.

Read the comments that follow the Globe and Mail article. An astonishing range (and intensity) of reaction. (I agree with one comment: McDonald’s as a participant, rather than, say, Target, makes the idea a richer target for mockery.)

Stephen Downes highlights a stimulating article by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler:

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (also available as a PDF)

Read in detail; here are just a few highlights that struck me:

• During the next decade [1996 - 2006] , this 30 million [people qualified to go to university but with no place to go] will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week. [Sir John Daniel]
• The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students…
• …Social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning…

Brown and Adler argue that a widely held model is the one in which students spend years learning about a subject. “Only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge…of how to be an active practitioner/profession in a field.”

Social learning tools enable anyone with an interest to join in a community of practice and participate in that community. (On the internet, no one knows you’re a grad assistant.) Here’s one of the illustrations from the article:

Most of this I’ve read about in one way or another, but the authors have done a great job of bringing concepts together. I’m seeing some of the implications of “new learning” more clearly than I had.

The Office of Management and Budget (which as part of the executive branch oversees the U.S. budget) has created a wiki for federal agencies to use as part of their budgeting process.

Details in this morning’s Washington Post. Launched a year ago, the wiki has more than 5,500 members (though it’s not open to everyone). It’s helped do things like compile a database of nearly 13,500 earmarks (special congressional funding projects) in less than 10 weeks.

Among useful features:

• Users can add attachments of up to 100 megabytes.
• Information includes a user directory with phone numbers and email, “an inportant feature…[when] people transfer among agencies or take different jobs every few years.”
• Users can restrict pages to “invitation only,” or open them only to certain groups.

That last point would be heresy at Wikipedia, but in government, corporate, and organizational circles, it often makes sense.

Of course, the closed nature means I couldn’t find a link, though I did stumble across the Government IT Wiki as well as a reference to Intellipedia, used by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Languages fascinate me, especially living languages. In high school, as someone in the college track, I had to work to get out of taking Latin so I could take French instead.

I didn’t have anything against Latin (et non modo sibilo “Terram Dixonis”); I just wanted to learn a language that people spoke (and not just at the Vatican).

In grad school, I learned that the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777, a fact that astonished me with its specificity. But of course someone’s bound to be the last speaker of any language, as Dolly Pentreath apparently was with Cornish.

Ned Maddrell was likely the last native speaker of Manx; he died in 1974.

Both cause echoes in my memory; the Scottish Gaelic spoken by my grandparents is not in the best of health.

In yesterday’s paper, I learned of the death of Marie Smith Jones on January 21. Jones, who was 89, was the last full-blooded Eyak, and the last native speaker of her language.

Seven of Jones’s children survive her, though none of them learned Eyak.

Languages inevitably die out, though some like Latin and Greek have a richer afterlife than most others. A couple, like Hebrew, have been resurrected. Down home in Cape Breton, people working to preserve Gaelic get advice from Kohanga Reo (”the nest of the language”), a movement promoting the retention and use of the Maori language.

Kohanga Reo seeks to encourage whole families to speak the language, and especially to have children use it freely. Without that, any effort to preserve a language is a form of artificial life support.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum said at Language Log:

Let me remind you what is necessary for a language to be living: there must be little kids who speak the language with each other because it is their only language or else their favorite. Little kids who would speak it even if they were told not to. It is not enough that a community of grownups (squabbling or not) has learned it from books and reads to each other each Tuesday night in someone’s living room…

…Always remember this, as we head into the sad time of massive language extinctions that is coming. Ask around the village and find the age of the youngest people using a language every day for all their normal conversational interaction. If the answer is a number larger than 5, the language is probably dying. If the answer is a number larger than 10, it is very probably doomed. If the answer is a number larger than 20, you can kiss it goodbye right now: no amount of nostalgic appreciation of it will make it last even one more generation as a going concern. That’s the way languages are.

Ave atque vale to Eyak and to Marie Smith Jones.

In this time of hyperlinks and digital content, I sometimes think of past efforts to preserve and pass along what people have accomplished.

Like this song heard and transformed by Robert Burns (born this day in 1759), eventually joined to an old tune, Low Down in the Broom (broom being a plant, not a cleaning implement).

I’m not crazy about the video, but you’d have to go far to hear a better singer than Andy M. Stewart.