{"id":3503,"date":"2006-11-16T09:27:33","date_gmt":"2006-11-16T09:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/11\/money-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-it\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","slug":"money-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/11\/money-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Money – I can’t stop thinking about it"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you had $350 to teach kids one word of an Indigenous language, what would you do with it?
\n• pay a skywriter to write Janapurlalki<\/em> “eagle” over an Eagles grand final footy match in Tennant Creek?
\n• pay a cheersquad of 5 people to chant Ja na pu rlal ki<\/em> at the Eagles footy game?
\n• buy 35 t-shirts printed with wawarta<\/em> “clothes” and give them to the kids?
\n• pay someone to reprogram a Barbie doll to say “Ooooh wawarta!”<\/em>?
\n• provide two big loaves of damper bread with, spelled out in raisins, kantirri<\/em> “bread” or marnukuju jangu <\/em> “with raisins”, once a week for a year?
\nor
\n• pay a language speaker to work with the children once a week for 4 weeks. And record the classes.
\n• pay a PhD student a scholarship for three years plus preparation, evaluation and testing expenses to work with speakers on devising a curriculum, lesson plans and teaching materials<\/strike> ( oops – only a very cheap PhD student in a very poor country – thanks Ilan!<\/em>)
\nNow you’ve got $80,000 to get the kids using 230 words. Would you spend it on 230 reprogrammed Barbie dolls? Or on weekly school language classes for fifteen years? Or on a multi-media CD?<\/p>\n


\nWould you go for the CD if.. the CD is a black box – done in proprietary software. So that teachers can’t add to it, create new modules, put other words in, and can’t download the pictures to create flash-cards or use them in other resources (they can print out .pdfs of some of the pictures).
\nWould you do it if.. the CD lacks movement – no cars to chase, no monsters to kill? (You can put eyebrows on faces).
\nIf you would, then check out: Multilocus’ Eight Indigenous Language Multimedia CD-ROMs<\/a>, a finalist for “Best Indigenous resource” in the 2006 ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) multimedia awards<\/a>. The first five of these CDs cost $400,000. That’s yours and my $400,000, if you’re an Australian tax-payer, thanks to the Government’s Telecommunications Action Plan for Remote Indigenous Communities<\/a>. At $80,000 each, plus a lot of time, unpaid or seconded, from linguists working with communities and language centres, they had better be pretty damn good right? ( Conflict of interest!! I was barracking for an unsuccessful competing tender to produce open source multimedia dictionaries of several thousand words based on the Kirrkirr<\/a> model<\/em>)
\nI haven’t seen the CDs in action in classes yet, and I haven’t heard of any evaluation of their usefulness as a teaching tool. Rumour has it that one is not being used because one of the speakers recorded on the CD died and people are worried about accidentally listening to the voice. And because the CD is a black box there’s no way for anyone to get in and change the sound files.
\nSo, blithely ignoring my conflict of interest, I took a look at the Learn Adnyamathanha<\/em> CD-ROM. Adnyamathanha<\/a> is a language which is not spoken fluently by anyone except some old people, and the CD is aimed at language revival. Adnyamathanha people are lucky because the South Australian Education Department has done brilliant work in curriculum design for teaching Indigenous languages, and this CD fits into that framework. Its usefulness owes a lot, not to Multilocus, but to the people they worked with.
\nThe CD contains pretty pics of the Flinders Ranges and drawings by the kids at Augusta Park Primary School. It has 10 activities, things like clicking on syllables and listening to sounds, matching words to pictures, some cloze sentences, and a little story text with a handsome goanna going shopping that you can listen to. The audience is DEFINITELY primary school children. My attention drops sharply after the tongue has floated onto the face – forget clicking on the right word to get the nose and eyes there….
\nThere are some sentences, mostly useful for grammatical points rather than conversation. Yellow-footed rock wallabies live in the hills<\/em> is charming but not a conversation starter – The CD lacks the helpful structures of Alexander Lipson’s Russian conversation<\/a> “Tigers live in Asia… We don’t live in Asia” “How come?” “Because we’re not tigers.”<\/em>).
\nOne good feature which I haven’t tried is a utility allowing students to record themselves and listen to themselves. Another good thing is the .pdf handbook for teachers, written by Guy Tunstill and Christine McKenzie. This gives teachers ideas about how to use the CD in class, as well as word-lists, translations, and a couple of songs (the latter don’t appear on the CD – maybe for copyright reasons?). Use the CD with a printout of this guide handy – one sentence cloze activity is too hard without it.
\nKids can play with the CD on the computers at school; they can’t take it home and read it with their families, unless their families own computers. In that respect, picture dictionaries, such as the Institute for Aboriginal Development series, are more useful (and a hell of a lot cheaper to produce). Of course the CD-ROM has sound, and that beats most of the picture dictionaries. But even here the multi-media possibility isn’t exploited enough – it’s just syllables and listening to sounds. Nothing as good as Wendy Baarda’s phonics CD for Warlpiri – which draws the child’s attention to the face and the shape of the mouth as words are pronounced.
\nStill – it’s only 230 or so words and some simple sentences. It was probably brought in on time and on budget. Is this value for tax-payers’ money? Wait and see if any proper evaluations are done about how effective these CDs are in helping people learn Indigenous languages over a couple of years.
\nShould the CD be a finalist in a “Best Indigenous Resource” competition before these evaluations are done? I say ‘No’. Just as (another hobbyhorse<\/em>) buildings shouldn’t win architectural awards until people have lived in them long enough to see if the buildings work and how much the repairs and running costs are.
\n Postscript: watch this space in a year’s time. See Jane bow her head. Hear Jane confess. Read Jane on what’s wrong with her CD. Well. maybe… maybe we can learn from this and do a better job on our Kaurna CD. Certainly it won’t cost as much…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you had $350 to teach kids one word of an Indigenous language, what would you do with it? • pay a skywriter to write Janapurlalki “eagle” over an Eagles grand final footy match in Tennant Creek? • pay a cheersquad of 5 people to chant Ja na pu rlal ki at the Eagles footy … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian-linguistics","category-indigenous-language-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4396,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3503\/revisions\/4396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}