"On November 13 the Digital October Center hosted a web meeting with Eli Bildner, one of the Coursera team members.
Bildner is responsible for looking for educational partners and translating selected videos into the native languages of the projects's multicultural audience, and shared the results of the first few months of work he has put into localizing the content of the most popular platform for free online education.
He discussed:
which translation approaches have been tried and how well they have worked from country to country
why Coursera settled on working with local partners
the statistics on what has already brought about growth in the number of users who do now know English well enough or even at all.
Lecture guests also were the first to see how the crowdsourcing platform ABBYY Language Services and the Knowledge Stream team built to translate Coursera content works.
This solution at some point in the future may become a universal tool for localizing courses around the entire world. At this point, however, the development is in beta testing."
While millions of U.S. citizens voted for national and local elections last week, some of the nation's deaf and hard of hearing citizens were casting important votes on the future of captioned radio
Welcome to AllYouCanRead, a massive media directory of 22,800 local and international magazines and newspapers from all over the world. Over 200 countries are represented at AllYouCanRead.com.
"Introduction
In recent years, the world has witnessed a growing wave of local initiatives in support of public schools.
Teachers, cultural associations and civil society have been playing an active part in grassroots experiments aimed at helping schools in the creative elaboration of new educational methods, also exploiting information technologies.
Here answers are coming from those directly faced with educational issues, in contrast with the more common top-down reforms, where experts' committees draw up didactic experimentation plans to be put forward to willing teachers.
Experiments like that are often very effective but, unfortunately, they rarely get known beyond the immediate sphere of their promoters. Moreover, they tend to be short-lived because promoters don't have the strength to sustain them and a suitable supporting network is lacking. They are like drops in the ocean: they apparently cannot change the entire educational system. But the ocean of whole human community could be flooded by many such contained experiments that would transform it, if the most meaningful of them could be fostered, spread and developed. ..."
Imagen ISO del DVD Malted 2010 para su descarga. Incluye la última versión de la herramienta, ya en formato plug-in, con sus dos editores y el navegador malted también, así como todas las nuevas unidades didácticas que hemos ido produciendo a lo largo de 2010 para inglés de primaria y francés de secundaria, además de los materiales de siempre.
Todas las unidades didácticas son ejecutables directamente desde el DVD y también ofrece la posibilidad de instalar malted en local en Windows, así como las instrucciones y programas necesarios para su instalación en Linux.
Advice for language learners
General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you.
Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox?
At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure.
* Read books in the target language.
* Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.)
* Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things.
* Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it.
* Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself.
* Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it.
* Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends.
* Seek out opportunities to work using the language.
* Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language.
* Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language.
* Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.)
Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas