Technology and Indigenous Language Revitalization - 0 views
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My research on the use of Internet for Hawaiian language revitalization is congruent with these perspectives. When Hawaiian language educators first began thinking about using the Internet, they confronted an unfriendly terrain. There was virtually no information in the Hawaiian language on the Internet, and web sites devoted to Hawaiian culture had mostly been developed by tourist agencies. Few Native Hawaiians had Internet access in the home nor in their schools. The Internet and the computers it was developed on did not readily support the use of Hawaiian language diacritical marks. In response to this situation, the Hawaiian educational community developed their own Bulletin Board System in Hawaiian, they worked to get their schools online, and they developed software solutions to modify computer operating systems to allow full Hawaiian-language operation, including Hawaiian language menus. Most importantly, they designed and implemented educational uses of the Internet which built off of the social and cultural strengths of the Hawaiian community, emphasizing Hawaiian cultural traditions such as 'talking story' and encouraging student development of multimedia online content which critically interpreted the Hawaiian experience. Though they have much more work to do, they have taken important steps towards creating a Hawaiian presence on the Internet which is congruent with their culture and which furthers their aims of language and culture revitalization.
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Applying a similar outlook to electronic literacy practices, Kaplan (1995, p. 28) argues that The proclivities of electronic texts?at least to the extent that we can determine what they are?manifest themselves only as fully as human beings and their institutions allow, that they are in fact sites of struggle among competing interests and ideological forces. Or, to put the matter another way, social, political, and economic elites try to shape the technologies we have so as to preserve, insofar as possible, their own social, political, and economic status. They try to suppress or seek to control those elements of electronic technologies uncongenial to that purpose. The degree to which they are successful in controlling the development and use of electronic texts will define the nature and the problems of literacy in the future (p. 28). My research on the use of Internet for Hawaiian language revitalization is congruent with these perspectives. When Hawaiian language educators first began thinking about using the Internet, they confronted an unfriendly terrain. There was virtually no information in the Hawaiian language on the Internet, and web sites devoted to Hawaiian culture had mostly been developed by tourist agencies. Few Native Hawaiians had Internet access in the home nor in their schools. The Internet and the computers it was developed on did not readily support the use of Hawaiian language diacritical marks. In response to this situation, the Hawaiian educational community developed their own Bulletin Board System in Hawaiian, they worked to get their schools online, and they developed software solutions to modify computer operating systems to allow full Hawaiian-language operation, including Hawaiian language menus. Most importantly, they designed and implemented educational uses of the Internet which built off of the social and cultural strengths of the Hawaiian community, emphasizing Hawaiian cultural traditions such as 'talking story' and encourag
