Serendipity35

"When the world starts to move from a primarily vertical value-creation model to an increasing horizontal creation model, it doesn’t affect just how business gets done. It affects everything. - Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat, p.201

As told in the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a built to reach the heavens by a united humanity. God saw this as rather arrogant and so confuses the previously uniform language of humanity with many languages, thereby preventing any such future attempts at tower building.

Serendipity35 doesn't cover the world of religion, but I'll say that I don't see the Tower's destruction as a particularly good move for the welfare of humanity.

So, I'm happy to see a movement like that at Google where many of its products, like Blogger and Google Earth, support more than 170 languages. Being that I was brought up in a much rounder world, I don't even recognize many on the list from Afrikaans to Zulu as even being languages.

Most of these translations are done by volunteers from around the world who are eager to help people view and search the web in their own native language.

Google created a volunteer translation program called Google In Your Language and people can sign up as a volunteer translator by visiting the Language Tools page and then clicking on the link for Google in Your Language.

Translators need to be verified and then are offered the opportunity to translate their main search site, Gmail, iGoogle, Google Maps and others

According to Google's blog, it usually takes weeks for an individual volunteer to finish translating one site. They need a good percentage of pages translated in a given language to put that language into production.

These "volunteer" languages range from Armenian, Estonian, and Slovenian which are 95% complete, to Latin (70%) to some that after several years of translation are still not production-ready. Abhazian, Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof, Zhuang are all have less than 10% of their content translated.

Is that based on the number of speakers? Not really. All of that latter group has more speakers than Faroese, which has 74% of texts translated.

The Google In Your Language program is continually adding languages - most recently Navajo, Filipino, several Russian Federation languages (Avaric, Chechen, Chuvash, Komi), and some African languages (Akan, Bambara, Gikuyu, Kongo, Ndebele, Ndongo, Nyanja, Venda).

I wonder if any language teachers or student groups out there have explored Google's non-English sites, or, even better, have enlisted their students in the process of translation.

Obviously, by crowdsourcing this work with volunteers Google benefits in its business by increased usage. And yet, it still feels like a good thing all around to me. Making Net resources available to more people, and in having users create content rather than just consume, both seem appropriate to the flat web 2.0.

So am I comfortable with knocking down the tower of English online? Hand me the sledgehammer.

If you read Wired magazine, you probably have come across their section called "Jargon Watch." The issue I'm reading now (you can check it out online too) includes the term Social Operating System which they define as "a social network site like Facebook or MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities, including entertainment and shopping, to become a platform for online living.”

Most of know operating systems (OS) as a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer - such as Windows or Mac OS X. So how is something like Facebook an OS?

Before we move on, mash this up with something I heard in the latest This Week in Tech podcast episode where they were looking at Facebook as a kind of little Google innovating and connecting and now buying up other companies. You'll hear talk of Google and Facebook becoming "operating systems" on many sites. Facebook just acquired Parakey which is self-described as "a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web."

You may not think of Facebook as something that can be used educationally or professionally, but others disagree with that opinion - see these ways to use Facebook professionally.

Back in May, Facebook began being talked about as being an operating system with other web apps integrated with it. They released their own Facebook Query Language and started developing their own web servers.

Now, every time you log on to Facebook, you find another widget or application is available. Most of them are for fun (tarot, trivia...) but that will change.

So, people are starting to seriously talk about something like Facebook become a Personal Learning Environment? (BTW, I cannot consider MySpace - despite Wired's definition - as being a contender here since that site is such a design mess).

PLEs are systems that allow learners take control of and manage their own learning by providing support to set learning goals, manage content and and communicate with others in the process of learning.

PLEs may be a desktop application, or composed of web-based services. They would allow the the integration of both formal and informal learning experiences. Social networks, especially ones that can cross institutional boundaries, (Facebook rather than Blackboard) come closer to the ideal.

The Elgg system, which works well with a Learning Management System like Moodle, might be a good example of this.

So, would an a social operating system be a mashup of all these things? Would the ideal SOS be one where a learner would select all the tools & applications she needed and not necessarily just accept the ones selected for her by the teacher? Could the learner select the content he wanted or needed?

Will sites like Facebook move towards becoming learning environments, or will learning environments like Moodle, Elgg, Blackboard move towards social networking? There evidence of movement in both those directions now. The former feels more "open" right now, but with open source learning management systems like Moodle or Sakai adding blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and other tools, perhaps the commercial players will be left behind.

Tumblr (with no final vowel in the Flickr 2.0 way) is a tumblelog. A tumblelog is a variation of a blog. It's for short-form, mixed-media posts rather than longer editorial-style posts that you might generally associate with blogging.

So is this blogging for short attention span readers and writers?

There's some of that, and I'm unsure about my feelings towards the quick-format 2.0 type tools that are appearing now. I use instant messaging infrequently and it can be useful or just fun, though I sometimes find myself IMing a friend and then just picking up the phone in the middle of it to have a "real" conversation. I check into my Facebook a few times a week, but not every day, so the tool that allows me to say my "status update" gets stale quickly. For kids who are online 24/7, these posts that say "out to get dinner" or "in class -text me" serve some purpose, but it's not for me.

There's much buzz about apps like Twitter out there that allow you very quickly add some small comment, link, photo to a web space and then share it with everyone or a group of "friends."

Tumblelogs like Tumblr include links, photos, quotes, more traditional postings, and video. People frequently use them to share their own content from other sites, plus things they have discovered while surfing. The latter use is not unlike bookmarking though using a site like del.icio.us, you would not really embed a photo or video but simply add a bookmark to it somewhere else. One blogger I read made the analogy: if blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

Does a Tumblr account offer any educational value? It probably can be used by a teacher. What it does offer is a way to create an organized web place that is very easy to add content from different sources (both your own and others). You could create one for a project or presentation. It certainly lowers the learning curve for non-techies. Now I said that teachers could create one, but it would be better if your students created them. You can decide/deal with any issues of privacy or access to photos and such from your school.

I created one in about two minutes. You create a URL (choose wisely: short, memorable, meaningful). My sample one is http://ronk.tumblr.com. Right now I have it pulling content from one of my Flickr photo accounts, some YouTube videos that I have collected in an account, posts from my poetry blog, and posts from this blog as text. I could also post content from my phone (but you may know, I'm not a big cell phone fan). There are several design themes to choose from and I'm sure more will be added. Supposedly, these display pretty well on mobile devices.

It's still new and there are some things I'd like to see added: I'd like to be able to shuffle the sequence of the posts, upload audio files, perhaps allow comments, and be able to modify the designs.

You have heard of Creative Commons, right? The alternative copyright (or copyleft) that people are attaching to their work so that others WILL use it.

But how do you find the stuff you can use? Let's say you go to Flickr - some photos are available to use, some not.

Flickr offers a way to search for those Creative Commons photos, but not all sites do.

Did you know that Creative Commons offers its own search? It's not something to replace Google or Yahoo, but it serves a need.

I suggest you watch the short video, entitled "Wanna Work Together?"

They also have some videos uploaded to Revver, so support CC with a viewing.

Sidebar: Revver is the video-sharing platform that uses Creative Commons licenses to help creators possibly make money from their work. They tag a short ad at the end of each video & when someone clicks on the ad, Revver splits the resulting revenue with the video's creator. It's usually a 50/50 split.