While transporting my high school son to debate tournaments at various Bay-area high schools, I have found myself parked in high school libraries for hours at end, waiting my turn to judge one of the many events. It is striking the difference one finds between libraries in top-ranked high schools (e.g. Lowell [...]
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From the FIT afternoon gathering last Friday, April 1. Several people seated around a table outside started passing a piece of paper around as we talked and this is what happened. What does it all mean?
more→There’s an important word that katiebernie starts off with (albeit somewhat facetiously) in the post right before/above this one, and one that I’ve written facetiously myself to spam on one occasion, and in Japanese to my former instructor on another…but one that somehow escaped my mind and mouth when [...]
more→So I noticed today that Google had Morse Code on its front page. “How interesting,” I thought to myself. It’s Samuel Morse’s birthday — he was the inventor of Morse Code and one of the inventors/developers of the electric telegraph.
I actually learned Morse Code many years ago, when I was a Boy Scout. [...]
more→Who here learned the English alphabet to the “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” melody? Of course since we have many international readers I’m half expecting a few people to say “I didn’t!” (or maybe you did? I’m curious). Well, from my own experiences growing up, the link between music and language was strong. From more→
Bobbie Johnson, writer for the UK Guardian’s Technology Blog, recently wrote an article entitled “Why aren’t ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates” in which he examines the role of piracy in the conversion from analog to digital music, video, and books:
Everyone’s looking at the pattern they’ve seen in music and video – an [...]
more→While I was wading through the myriad book exhibits at the carnivalesque MLA conference in San Francisco (7000+ people here, they say), I happened across the very cool-looking Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations published in 2000 by the New York University Press, edited by Marc [...]
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Taiwan is planning to apply to UNESCO to have complex Chinese characters (also known as traditional Chinese characters, 正體字, or 繁體字) gain cultural heritage status.
I view the simplification of Chinese characters in the 50s/60s under the communist regime of Chairman Mao as being one of the greatest cultural losses in history. As a Taiwanese American, [...]
more→In an earlier post, Usree linked a youtube video comparing Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” to Joe Satriani’s “If I Could Fly.” A background in music theory/composition will tell you that the majority of modern, mainstream music is based off a few pretty common chord progressions (copying the melody and tempo, however, is a completely [...]
more→Ajit Balakrishnan, the CEO of Indian’s fifth largest web portal, Rediff.com, argued recently that data collected over the last decade suggests no evidence that Indian Internet users “want Indian languages.” He went on to state that “practically all of the 300 million young people who aspire to something in this country aspire [...]
more→The pressure to be amusing, insightful, personal, and relevant, all while doing compositional backflips is a lot of pressure. Too much pressure. My name is Amy, and this is my first blog post (anywhere, ever). I feel the need to admit that up front.
I am friends with Dave M. and Usree, who are regular posters [...]
more→Crazy Indian Video….Buffalaxed:
Youki: Usree, I came across this video and I was extremely reluctant to share it with you, because of how extremely offensive it was.
Usree: Extremely?
Youki: [Nervous laughter]
Usree: Okay…I love offensive…er “stuff.”
Youki: [Looking away, still nervous]: I actually saw it a couple of days ago. And uh wasn’t [laughter][ gonna send it to [...]
We’ve just added Papyrus News to the blogroll–it’s a blog by faculty and students at UC Irvine’s Digital Learning Lab, headed by Mark Warschauer. The blog’s “About” page says that it “focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies and language and literacy development, education, culture, equity, and diversity.”
Any other blogroll [...]
more→This coming Monday the 24th, the Berkeley Language Center will be hosting a panel discussion on digital storytelling, with Joe Lambert from the Center for Digital Storytelling, Heather Pleasants from the University of Alabama, and Mark Evan Nelson from the National Institute of Education in Singapore (and recent graduate [...]
more→A cursory look at the literacy rate in Zimbabwe gives a very impressive picture about the Southern African country. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Zimbabwe has the highest literacy rate on the entire continent. 91% of the population is literate (94%males and 88% females). The results even get better [...]
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