Lars Egelands blogg

The first week of Latina summer school is over. It is a fine team of students with different background and experience, which is a resource for Latina.

The students have learned to use some different digital tools. We could have chosen other tools also, but Youtube, Flickr and Picasa is chosen as examples of tools that can be used to get and store pictures and films. The most important thing is not the technology, but to implement the technology in the way we work and in our daily life. New technology in its self is not so interesting, it is only interesting when it changes the way we work or live. In that way the change from vinyl records to cd’s is not as important as the change from cd’s to mp3-files that can be purchased on the net, transported over the net, and makes it possible for me to bring over 4000 songs with me as I am going jogging.

How can we implement the tools we have learned in our daily life? Google chat can be a good tool, but it has to be used to something meaningful, not only to interrupt us every five minutes. The advantage of email is disappearing when we get so mange emails that we have no chance to read them. That is something we have to bring with us the two next week’s: How can we implement the digital tools in our teaching and learning in a way that improves the learning.

Yesterday we had a session about multilingualism. I think it was very interesting and everybody had an important contribution. Agnes told us that there are more than 60 different languages in Uganda. The children start to learn English in kindergarten, which is compensatory from 3 years age. But everyone has to pay a fee, in kindergarten and in school, as in the universities. What about them who are too poor to be able to pay?  In her work as a music librarian Agnes is working also with ethnographic music recordings, but she has no possibility to understand what they say or what they are singing in the native languages.

George is a real multilingualist. He grew up speaking Swahili, but started learning English in school – first as a subject, later as the language which is used for teaching in the universities. Then he went to Ukraine and had to learn Russian.