Keith August 15th, 2008
So, I delivered the workshop today - to three great participants! The workshop was: Using social media to harness knowledge within an organisation: Addressing the challenges. We all had a great time, and a good conversation!
I have now also registered with SlideShare for the first time, and uploaded a (very slightly modified) version of the slide pack. Not totally happy with the way it has been rendered, but it seems to be fairly readable. It is also available for download. Help yourself! And thanks to those who contributed…
Also had a great conversation with Ian Farmer of Bullseye. Ian pointed me at a few interesting sites:
- Free web meetings at Dimdim.
- Social language learning at Livemocha. This apparently provides two-way language learning - with real people.
- How to draw maps using your GPS - and lots of other apps - at Fire Eagle.
Also got a good reference from elsua via Twitter for “Twelve Ways to Sell Social Media to Your Boss - Don’t Forget about Yourself!” This may be of particular interest to this morning’s participants!
Keith August 14th, 2008
A good day today. Met some good people, and all of the presentations were good.
Great live Second Life demo from Decka Mah (aka Lindy McKeown) to end the day. She also introduced us to PicLens - a cool Google plug-in for image viewing. Second Life is definitely a usable environment for learning, but the interface probably has a way to go yet to be really seamless. One thing to remember - it really works best as a synchronous learning environment - you have to be there at the right time. One neat application - a virtual city for immersive language learning.
You’ve heard of blended learning? Well, with Second Life, you can have “mixed reality”.
Some of us got a Twitter commentary going. See the tweets here - and a couple of rogue ones here.
Chieftech mentioned this site as a good source for info on RSS for the enterprise - he has also blogged about the day.
Lots of other good stuff, but I really need to make sure I am all ready to present my workshop tomorrow. A few parting thoughts that caught my attention, (somewhat paraphrased) from various presenters today:
- “So there are photos of me drunk on Facebook. So what if a prospective employer sees them? If they don’t like it, then I don’t want to work there, anyway!” Continue Reading »
Keith August 1st, 2008
An earlier post here referred to “Indlish” - a blend of Indian and English. An alternative name that I picked up since is “Hinglish”.
So which is it? The score on Google, with links to the top site in each:
- Hinglish - 104,000 (a Wikipedia reference)
- Indlish - 2,900 (a link to a book)
Maybe that tells the story.
The British government’s call for migrants to be able to speak standard English was the topic of a Telegraph article a while ago. The article defined the following variants of English:
- Hinglish (Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu-English)
- Chinglish (Chinese-English)
- Spanglish (Spanish-English) - also known as Tex-Mex
As stated earlier, this is in addition to Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish - Malaysian English.
The article quotes a report that makes the wise statement that English “… is no longer the preserve of the English, who are ‘just one of many shareholders’ in a global asset”.
Continue Reading »
Keith July 6th, 2008
Actually just back in Australia now from a few days’ holiday. Had fun in Nouméa, Ile des Pins, and Phare Amédée, but couldn’t actually log into WordPress from the hotel, as the connection there was via some sort of rather badly behaved VPN.
Enjoyed the time, but some aspects were disappointing. Mining is treated as more important than tourism in New Caledonia.
It was fun to practice my French again, but ran into an interesting language barrier. On our second day there, Marilyn was experiencing some pains. Fortunately turned out to not require any critical attention, but we did spend a few hours at the main hospital in Noumea - Gaston Bourret.
It was easy enough to communicate that there was some pain, using a mixture of my French and their Anglais. But the problem arose in communicating the type of pain. How do you distinguish between a dull ache and a sharp pain across the language barrier? A “niggly” pain doesn’t really translate.
Looking up “pain” in my English-French dictionary was potentially dangerous. One of the French alternatives offered was a word that I suspect actually means “labour pains”. An attempt to use this could well have got us onto the wrong track entirely!
Language barriers become fairly obvious in this context, but how often do we have equally misleading communication when we are all speaking the same language?
Keith June 19th, 2008
Just heard an interesting interview on the radio. The subject was Joe Bennett, who has recently published a book called: Where Underpants Come From. You can read more about the book in an article in New Zealand’s Dominion Post.
Apparently, Bennett looked at the “Made in China” tag in his new undergarments one day, and decided to find out more. This led him on a rather strange journey to China, and into Chinese history.
The thing that caught my attention was a story he told of one incident during the journey.
As I remember the story, he was eating in a small restaurant in a lane-way in a Chinese city. He was the only tourist in the restaurant, among 30 or 40 Chinese customers. The others in the restaurant fairly quickly noticed his entire lack of ability to eat with chopsticks. He was “spreading food all over the restaurant, and not eating anything”. Everyone was very good-natured about it, and some began to laugh at his predicament. He laughed with them. One came over and gave him instructions on eating with chopsticks.
By the end of the meal, even though he spoke almost no Chinese, and the other diners little English, they were all laughing and joking together. When he left the restaurant, everyone said goodbye to him. The waitress even followed him out onto the street to return his tip.
Continue Reading »
Keith April 16th, 2008
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
There has been some discussion on actKM about language translation. It has been suggested that it is possible to decide that a particular translation can be said to be “correct”, or that one translation can be actually measured and rated as “better” than another.
The argument has variously referred to single words or whole texts; poetry has also been referred to.
Is it possible to say that even a precise, simple, factual statement is accurately translated? Maybe, but I am not convinced. However, when it comes to translating “knowledge” - any piece of text that is in any way context-dependent, then I must side with David Snowden’s view that “knowledge is closer to poetry than a factual statement.”
Poetry tends to be strongly context-dependent. There is no way that a translation of a poem can be judged to be “correct” in any completely objective or absolute way (or thus, by the above argument, knowledge).
Continue Reading »
Keith March 11th, 2008
The baker man was kneading dough
And whistling softly, sweet and lough.
Yet ever and anon he’d cough
As though his head were coming ough!
“My word!” sad he, “but this is rough;
This flour is simply awful stough!”
He punched and thumped it through and through,
As all good bakers always dough!
“I’d sooner drive,” said he, “a plough
Than be a baker, anyhough!”
Thus spake the baker kneading dough;
But don’t let on I told you sough!
W. T. Goodge (1862-1909)
(Copied from a book of Australian poetry of uncertain vintage. All spelling as per original.)
Keith March 10th, 2008
My wife Marilyn and I have got away for the long weekend to Lorne (on the Victorian south-west coast, on the Great Ocean Road). Found a delightful place to stay – Shepherd’s Rest. This is a modern two-bedroom apartment, on the top level of a new house in North Lorne. It is owned by a couple of artists, who have moved down from further north in Victoria, where they ran a farm.
The place is totally delightful, decorated with a wide range of pieces of art. It is only two blocks back from the beach, and only a short walk from where my uncle once had a holiday house, where I spent many happy holidays as a child. It was interesting walking on the beach here again for the first time for many years. The beach has changed a lot – a large amount of sand has been washed away.
There is a good supply of holiday reading in the bookshelves here. One book is of a type I have never seen before. It is a taste of absolutely brash commercialism from the 1890s (precise date not specified). It is Dougal’s Index Register to Next of Kin, Heirs at Law, and cases of Unclaimed Money Advertisements. At least, that is the short form of the title. The title page expands this out to a grand total of 85 words, including several et ceteras (then spelt as “&c.” - the ampersand sign comes from the letters “et” - the Latin for “and”).
Continue Reading »
Keith November 20th, 2007
“A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.”
- Caskie Stinnett
Keith October 22nd, 2007
“I’m sorry sir, that will have to be cloaked”.
That’s what the doorman told me as I entered the Hamer Hall for my final visit to a school Presentation night. I was encumbered with my daughter Lauren’s schoolbag. This year she is completing Year 12, so this year is our last as parents of school children.
“Cloaked”? It conjures an image of stealth bombers. Or maybe, given the school context, Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. That would have been handy - it would have saved me going back downstairs to find the cloak room, lodging the bag and traipsing back up to Door 9.
Obviously, in the doorman’s world, the meaning of the term was quite clear. And while it wasn’t all that hard for me to figure out, it was just one more example of the importance of context in communication.
“Cloaked” indeed!