Lars Egelands blogg

What is going on now is a big change, as big as the change in worldview as Columbus’ exploration of America, Tord said in todays lecture. It made me think that this first of all changed the western view of the world.  Therefore I would like to mention two other explorers:

I am sure you have heard of Marco Polo. Bu have you ever heard about Ibn Battuta? Battuta was a moroccan scholar and traveller who lived from 1304-1368. For more than 30 years he made travels which covered North and West Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central  and Southeast Asia and China. As an explorer he overgoes his near-contemorary Marco Polo.

And have you ever heard of Zheng He? I had not before I visited Dubai and saw a model of his huge ship (se picture) In front of Zheng Hes ship you can see  a model of the small ship Christopher Columbus used to explore America.

Zheng He (traditional Chinese: 鄭和; simplified Chinese: 郑和; pinyin: Zhèng Hé; Wade-Giles: Cheng Ho; Birth name: 馬三寶 / 马三宝; pinyin: Mǎ Sānbǎo; Arabic/Persian name: حجّي محمود شمس Hajji Mahmud Shams) (1371–1433), was a Hui Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who made the voyages collectively referred to as the travels of «Eunuch Sanbao to the Western Ocean» (Chinese: 三保太監下西洋) or «Zheng He to the Western Ocean«, from 1405 to 1433.

Zheng He led seven expeditions to what the Chinese called «the Western Ocean» (Indian Ocean). There are speculations that some of Zheng’s ships may have traveled beyond the Cape of Good Hope.

Zhengs fleet contained ships bigger than any other in the history of wooden ships. His own ship is described like this in Wikipedia:

• Treasure ships, used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies (nine-masted, about 126.73 metres (416 ft) long and 51.84 metres (170 ft) wide), according to later writers. This is more or less the size and shape of a football field. The treasure ships purportedly could carry as much as 1,500 tons. 1^[27][28] By way of comparison, a modern ship of about 1,200 tons is 60 meters (200 ft) long [1], and the ships Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492 were about 70-100 tons and 17 meters (55 ft) long.^[29]

So be aware: In our world view we are the center. We discover the rest of the world, but did they discover us?

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Changes in my daily life the last years:

–        I got a mobile phone. At first I used it very seldom, no I can’t go anywhere without it, and I also expect to be able to reach everyone else. First I always took the phone, now I can let it ring and ring back later. First I asked people to leave a message at my answering machine, now I ask them to send me a SMS.

–        I used to have an ordinary wired telephone and a modem for my computer at home. Now I have an IP-telephone and a wireless LAN in my house. At home I have a laptop that is connected to the net all the time.

–        Instead of writing postcards when I am on holyday, I send SMS or MMS.

–        I use my phone also for checking the weather, reading news etc. When I am waiting for my train to go home, I read the newspaper on my phone.

–        I have got a mobile office-connection to my laptop. That means that I am not dependent on an available wireless LAN, I can get admission to internet via the mobile net. Via a VPN-connection I can log on to the server of OuC and use Last year I attended the IFLA conference in Quebec. After the conference I took 14 days Holyday in Canada, and went into the Canadian outback. There I was sitting attached to the OuCs systems for economy and the internal archive system. I am independent of space for most of my administrative tasks, except one important thing: Communication face to face with my colleagues.

–        I hardly send or receive snail-mail any more – only emails. But the amount of emails has grown some immensely that it is hard to reach over all of them. Therefore people often send an SMS telling me that they have send me an email which I have to respond to.

–        I only take digital photos and I have digitized all my old photo albums. Everything is stored on an external hard disk.  This spring I visited some relatives that I do not see very often. I brought my external hard disk which really stores the whole history of my family.

–        I have not been in a Travel Agency for many years. Instead I use the net for buying tickets and booking hotels.

–        All my music CDs is stored on my computer and on my IPOD. I have bought a new record player that makes it possible for me to digitize all my old vinyl records. I hardly buy CDs any more, only MP3-files. When I have been to a concert or heard a song I like in the radio, very often I go immediately to ITunes-store to buy the song I like. I have a small week-end house in the forest, when I go there I bring my IPOD and connect it to the radio there. At home I have given away my CD-player; I only use my computer for music.

–        I have an account at Facebook and 400 friends – a mix of colleagues, family, friends and people with the same political view as mine. It can be a time-thief, but it is also a great tool to connect with many people. This winter I arranged a solidarity concert for Gaza in my town. Via Facebook we could reach a lot of people. Before the concert we had name and picture of more than 400 people who had said that they would attend the concert.

–        But some things never seem to change: As I was going home today, the train had a delay. When it came, all seats were taken. But still I find it fascinating that I could sit on the floor in the train writing this blog-post and send it to the net.

The photo is taken by a friend of mine with his mobile phone.

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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.

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