Ein Storify von Daniel Kastner. Studentenwerke in Baden-Württemberg sind ab sofort out, sie heißen jetzt Studierendenwerke. Der Beschluss der Landesregierung kostet ein paar Hunderttausend Euro. Das Netz schäumt - über Gender, Geld und Grün-Rot. Mehr...
By Lucy Ferriss. I didn’t know I was named for the devil until I studied on an exchange program in Belgium. There, I would be introduced as “Mademoiselle Luci Férriss,” and the people who had begun stretching out their hands would recoil. “Lucifer!” they exclaimed more than once. “Why would your parents have saddled you with such a name?”
The answer, of course, is that my parents hadn’t thought they were naming me after the Prince of Darkness. The origin of my first name is the Latin word for light. The origin of my last name is probably the Latin ferrum, referring to ironmakers somewhere back in the family tree; but it could also be the Latin ferre, “to carry,” which made Lucifer the bringer of light, or the dawn. In any case, I’ve rather enjoyed being named after a fallen angel, especially when I’ve found people from other cultures also studying the name in puzzlement. More...
By Ben Yagoda. Idea for a sitcom: The Big Lang. Theory. Premise is that a bunch of language nerds sit around and talk about their observations, obsessions, and pet peeves. Let’s say their names are Geoffrey, Lucy, Allan, and Ben, and that they’ve got some wacky neighbors, Bill, Anne, Ilan, and Rose. For the pilot episode, one of the gang, scouring the databases and corpora, thinks she has found a use of a word published prior to the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. But it turns out to come from a book that Google Books gave an incorrect date to. Hilarity ensues. More...
By William Germano. So I walk into the little dry cleaners near my office and these are the first words I hear:
“Where were you? In bed with your—Polack!”
For a split second I’m stopped in my tracks. More...
How can we benefit from OEP and an increasingly multilingual and culturally diverse society? What does this imply for policymaking? And what are the issues that need our further attention?
Open Educational Resources (OER) in less used languages: a state of the art report . OER for less used languages. More...
The webinar will address the challenges of the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) for less used languages.
The webinar, organised by the LangOER project in cooperation with the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, will take place on 19 September from 14:00h-15:00h (CET). OER for less used languages. More...
Linguistic and cultural diversity are at risk. It is estimated that nearly half of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages could die out by the end of the century, with 96 percent of these languages spoken by a mere four percent of the world’s population.
A vernacular language is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, region or country that is more the language of ordinary speech than formal writing. Every day, a dozen of these vernacular languages disappear. This is alarming, because language plays a vital role in development, in ensuring cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, and is also critical in strengthening cooperation, building inclusive knowledge societies, preserving cultural heritage and providing quality education for all.
Unfortunately, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), especially Internet, have so far contributed to the trend towards reduced linguistic diversity, although international organizations such as UNESCO and the Broadband Commission for Digital Development regularly advocate the need for a greater presence of content in local languages. More...
This is just a piece of reflexion that started to emerge in our project team. Alannah’s Fitzerald blog post on “Open Linguistic Support in the Context of Open CourseWare and MOOCs“ has been very helpful. She writes:
When it comes to the development of open linguistic support for the world of Open CourseWare and MOOCs, we are still very much educating in beta with language learning and translation technologies. OER14 and the OCWC 2014 Open CourseWare Consortium Global Conference): Open Education for a Multicultural World are fast approaching and this year at the OCWC in Slovenia the focus is very much on multiculturalism with the following presentations addressing multilingualism in OpenCourseWare. More...
Open Educational Resources (OER) in less used languages: a state of the art report - July 2014
This report presents the results of an in-depth investigation and analysis of Open Educational Resources (OER) in 23 languages, including the target languages of the LangOER consortium: Dutch, Frisian, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish. Target languages have also been extended to more European languages, regional and minority languages (RML) such as: Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latgalian, Norwegian, Romanian and Welsh. The investigation also included a more global overview by using languages such as English, French, and German for reference.
The scope of this report is to present the state of the art of OER in less used languages, and to frame some current features of relevance for further development.
The study will be translated in several languages (Dutch, Frisian, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish) by early September.
The Work Packages consist of the following activities:
WP3: International challenges that less used languages face
WP5: Regional and Minority languages
WP6: Challenges for language learning
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