Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] report on consultation re: Indian Languages in Higher Education
Thank you very much for this article. Information about the usage of the languages of India in different social contexts, and especially in education, is very useful for my work. The impression that I had about the state of local languages in India is that English is used a lot even though not everybody knows it sufficiently. This articles more or less confirms this impression and substantiates it with data. It was also very interesting to read about the concept of homolinguality. I can't say this strongly enough: I'd love to see more research of this kind coming from Wikimedia India, CIS, and other organizations in the field. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2013/3/16 Tejaswini Niranjana t...@cscs.res.in: Hope this will be of interest. Just published in the Economic and Political Weekly. -- Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (CCS-IISc) t: 91-80-26730476, 26730967, 26730268 f: 91-80-26730722 http://heira.in www.cscs.res.in ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] report on consultation re: Indian Languages in Higher Education
Thanks for the affirmative mail, Amir. Although most Indians speak at least three to four languages, and some are quite bilingual in English and an Indian language, the bilingualism doesn't translate into bi-literacy (if I may coin a term). Because tertiary education is mandated to be in English, people end up not knowing - or having forgotten - how to write in an Indian language, which is a key problem for growing Wikimedia content in these languages. Here is a newspaper article commenting on the data gathered by the 2001 national Census: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-03-14/india/28117934_1_second-language-speakers-urdu On 16 March 2013 18:02, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.ilwrote: Thank you very much for this article. Information about the usage of the languages of India in different social contexts, and especially in education, is very useful for my work. The impression that I had about the state of local languages in India is that English is used a lot even though not everybody knows it sufficiently. This articles more or less confirms this impression and substantiates it with data. It was also very interesting to read about the concept of homolinguality. I can't say this strongly enough: I'd love to see more research of this kind coming from Wikimedia India, CIS, and other organizations in the field. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore 2013/3/16 Tejaswini Niranjana t...@cscs.res.in: Hope this will be of interest. Just published in the Economic and Political Weekly. -- Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (CCS-IISc) t: 91-80-26730476, 26730967, 26730268 f: 91-80-26730722 http://heira.in www.cscs.res.in ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (CCS-IISc) t: 91-80-26730476, 26730967, 26730268 f: 91-80-26730722 http://heira.in www.cscs.res.in ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] report on consultation re: Indian Languages in Higher Education
This is a difficult question! But let me share a few preliminary thoughts. I have helped to host a couple of digital literacy workshops (including Wikipedia editing) and will be planning more in at least five languages. Some learnings from work already done: --Student interest/motivation relates to the relevance of the material they are producing (relevance: to a better grasp of their curriculum, to topics that connect to their daily lives - as students, as young people) --They do get excited by the idea that they can contribute to assembling knowledge on a platform that makes it so widely available --Motivation is high when entries come out of research projects they have undertaken either as part of college work or as part of co-curricular activities --Using wikipedia editing as part of a more general research training programme is also helpful My colleagues and I have worked with students in remote colleges whose primary language is not English. These students are more interested in contributing material in Indian languages than those who have been educated mainly in English medium. Since they hear so much about how they cannot be socially mobile because they don't know English well, they do feel encouraged and validated when they are able to communicate the work they have done in a language they are comfortable with. On 16 March 2013 18:56, sankarshan foss.mailingli...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Tejaswini Niranjana t...@cscs.res.inwrote: Hope this will be of interest. Just published in the Economic and Political Weekly. And, also at http://www.epw.in/commentary/indian-languages-indian-higher-education.html You mention Creation of Indian language materials by students could also be an invaluable resource; this could include Wikipedia entries, audiovisual resources, and compilations of material on peer-to-peer learning platforms. - I would like to know your thoughts about what around the motivations/incentives that would facilitate the creation of new content in Indian languages by students. -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l -- Tejaswini Niranjana, PhD Lead Researcher - Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Senior Fellow - Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) Visiting Professor - Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Visiting Faculty - Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science (CCS-IISc) t: 91-80-26730476, 26730967, 26730268 f: 91-80-26730722 http://heira.in www.cscs.res.in ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] report on consultation re: Indian Languages in Higher Education
2013/3/16 Tejaswini Niranjana t...@cscs.res.in Hope this will be of interest. Just published in the Economic and Political Weekly. Thanks Tejaswini for the paper. All the best for the inititaive. One key step that was missed out in the past digitization initiatives was making the meta data about the book (title, author) available in the language of the book. Accomplishing that step alone could help the lndian language users in accessing the already digitized content. The next step is transcripting the Indian language content from the digitized scans. In Telugu, I initiated these steps using WIkisource project. A 1910 book on History of Andhras (Telugu Title: Andhurla-Charitramu Part 1) by Chilukuri Veerabhadra rao was transcribedhttp://te.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%B0%86%E0%B0%82%E0%B0%A7%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%B2_%E0%B0%9A%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%AE%E0%B1%81_-_%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%A5%E0%B0%AE_%E0%B0%AD%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%97%E0%B0%AE%E0%B1%81. The transcription of meta datahttp://te.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8B%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D:%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B0%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%9C%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%9F%E0%B1%8D/%E0%B0%86%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%B5%E0%B1%8D.%E0%B0%86%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%97%E0%B1%8D_%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%8B%E0%B0%A8%E0%B0%BF_%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%97%E0%B1%81_%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A4%E0%B0%95%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%81of the Telugu titles available in archive.org is initiated. Cheers Arjuna ___ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
