Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Using Intermediaries to Facilitate Communication
Regarding intermediaries, and the use of written English amongst Yoruba speaking people, Pat Hall asked me to explain more about the situation in Oke-Ogun: Pam, is there something else going on here - perhaps the language policies of Nigeria have led to the education system favouring English? The answer is Yes. I will give some examples of how things are. - In Oke-Ogun English is the main written language, and the main language of education (and, I believe, administration) whilst Yoruba is the main spoken language. - The late founder of CAWD/OOCD, Peter Adetunji Oyawale, told me that he did not learn to read and write Yoruba until the last few years of his secondary education - and it was against all the odds that he managed to continue his education beyond primary level. It was a source of disappointment to him that he could write English better than he could write Yoruba, but he was not able to express himself in English as well as he could express himself in Yoruba. The reason he wanted to include community radio alongside his proposed CDICs (Community Digital Information Centres) was so that the OOCD 2000+ project could Speak, speak to people in the language they understand. He was particularly concerned for people like his parents and his friends from primary school. (OOCD community radio is on hold, as our partner organisation for community radio has been waiting over a year for a license to be granted) - Peter's widow Agnita and I do not speak Yoruba. The letters we get from Ago-Are are written in English for our benefit. - Before the memorial service for Peter, which was held in London in 2001, Peter's younger brother sent an email with a Yoruba message which he suggested could be read at the service. A well educated friend from Ogun state tried to translate it for Agnita and me. (He is another person with Yoruba as his first spoken language but English as his written language) He struggled with it almost as if it was in code. He kept going back over the individual sections. He seemed to be trying out different possibilities of how the words might flow together, before he could get the meaning, in order to express it in English. Don Osborn of Bisharat, who is a contributor to this list, could explain better than I can the importance of tonal marks in written Yoruba, the related problems regarding email, and work being done to address the problems. - At Peter's school there was a sign - No vernacular beyond this point. - At the secondary school in Ago-Are there is a sign To achieve total success always speak English - My first awareness of Yoruba speakers not writing Yoruba came when I was teaching in Peckham, in South London. One of my colleagues, whom I admired as a teacher, was a Nigerian. I was interested in some aspects fo her culture, and asked her to write down some Yoruba words she had used in her descriptions. I was intrigued when she hesitated and was obviously creating the written form of the words from knowledge of how written Yoruba is constructed (i.e. I think probably). Her writing was not based on knowing how to write the words through familiarity with their written form. - I have the impression that this is gradually changing and the use of written Yoruba is becoming more prevalent. - I have seen a Yoruba reading book in a primary school in Oke-Ogun. It was in June 2002 when I was in a school just outside Ago-Are. The children were jostling to get their photos taken and were waving various classroom objects in front of the camera to atract my attention. One pupil had a tattered commercially published book. It was in Yoruba. - Last Christmas I was discussing the use of Yoruba with an English VSO volunteer who had been working at a school in Nigeria. He told me that Yoruba literacy is now on the primary curriculum, but other lessons are still taught in English. - Two of my Nigerian contacts have mentioned a professor at Ibadan who is encouraging the use of Yoruba in higher education. As I recall he has accepted (or is going to accept) a dissertation writen in Yoruba, which I understand is a very unusual thing to happen. Pat also says: The nice thing about speech communication as in telephones and the voice-letters suggested by Vickram is that the technology does not favour any one language and literacy is not a prerequisite to the use of the technology. I agree, that is a great potential benefit. We need the right tools for the job and there are many different jobs to be done. I will point to a kitchen analogy. It is now a little outdated as kitchen fashions have moved on and what were once known as white goods on account of their white metal cabinets (i.e. cookers, washing machines, tumbledriers, dishwashers, fridges and freezers) have changed their appearance. However the analogy still stands. The white goods had to be chosen after deciding what purpose the electrically powered labour saving device should serve. Even now, the greatest high-tech
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Using Intermediaries to Facilitate Communication
Pat Hall's questions for Pam McLean open up a whole range of issues regarding the intersection of sociolinguistics, and language and education policies with ICT policy that are pertinent to the discussion but probably need to be explored in depth elsewhere. I'll let Pam reply on the particular case of Yoruba with which she is more familar than I, but the general situation in African educational systems has been to favor the official languages inherited from colonization even though these are no one's maternal languages. Many countries where English is used have policies for some African language instruction at lower grades shifting to English later, though I've heard that application is uneven at best, while the general rule where French is the official language has long been a French-only (from day one) approach. Although a few people manage to excel under (or despite?) these type of systems, many others end up with limited skills in their maternal language (e.g., can't write it, don't have as wide a range of expression as they might) and limited skills in the official language (in which, at least in the typical Francophone model, learning is by rote). One wonders if this isn't an underappreciated dimension to the development struggles of the continent: the means haven't been there or allocated to developing and applying effective bilingual education, hence the majority of school leavers don't end up with an optimal set of language skills and all that would go with that. On the ICT side, one of the reasons for pushing for multilingual capacities on computer systems and African language content on Internet for the continent, is to open up the possibility for use of and expression in - and indeed learning of/in - the mother tongues and vehicular languages, whatever does or doesn't happen in the educational systems (regarding the latter, there are some hopeful developments in some places like in Mali). But because even literate people may not be multiliterate, and also because of the importance of oral tradition, innovation - regarding audio especially, as many of us are saying - would seem to be an essential part of the strategy ... As well as a way to avoid having someone translate Yoruba to English to write in a letter/e-mail and perhaps someone else translate English to Yoruba on the receiving end. Don Osborn Bisharat.net This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities
After lurking on the list for more than a week, allow me to introduce myself. I am director for the Uconnect Schools Project. Our NGO is providing computers to mostly rural primary and secondary schools in Uganda. Schools pay something less than $200 for each computer, which is enough for us to continue to purchase and ship additional recycled equipment needed for the expansion of the project. The overriding aim is that the project should be sustainable, scalable and reproducible: schools provide their own transport for taking delivery of equipment; students and teachers are trained at Uconnect workshops at education ministry headquarters for installing their own LANs; and computer labs are opened to the parents and community after school hours on a fee-paying basis as schools-based telecentres. Our NGO's train-the-trainer programme has demonstrated that training the indigenous youth is a key component in the successful expansion of any such project, and that their supervision and training can be done remotely through Internet technologies. Bob Miller has already made interventions to the list about Advanced Interactive's SchoolWeb solution. I would only add that we have been quite impressed with their solution, so much so that we have begun a pilot project involving the installation of SchoolWeb servers at forty mostly rural schools. WorldSpace seemed to offer the low cost connectivity solution we were looking for. Certainly the one-time equipment costs were low, at around $200 per radio, with satellite data receiver and antenna (for bulk purchase of forty or more units). But I was not happy with the recurrent fees proposed by WorldSpace for our schools project: $180 monthly (for between 40 and 100 schools) per school for 500 Mb of download. Added to other recurring costs, monthly server maintenance, monthly dialup subscription at $30, and airtime fees averaging $1.05 per minute (for GSM data - for most rural schools the only means for Internet uplink), the WorldSpace recurring fees I was quoted were not even competitive with two-way satellite services offered locally, such as the Hughes Network Solutions DirectWay (Afsat's I-Way) which provides 1 Gb monthly for around $250. We are again in the hunt for a more cost-effective connectivity solution for the rural schools. Kind regards, Daniel Stern This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
