On the mechanics of self-censorship

I stumbled upon this piece by Frank Dai, and find the description of the mechanics of self-censorship to be equally entertaining and explicable:

All the staff at the Chinese bureaucratical institutions tend to think one thing first before they did anything else: how their bosses will consider? They were always trying to figure out the bottom line of their boss because they worried about exceeding the limit of tolerance. Moreover, the bottom line is often underestimated by these staff. To put more bluntly, they scared themselves. Let's look at an example how the people at CCTV works: If we set the tolerance rate at 10 for President Hu, the rate for the Ministry of Propaganda would be degraded to 9; 8 for the Ministry of Broadcasting and 7 or 6 for the officials at CCTV. When comes to the program producers it would be a miracle if the rate stays at 2 or 3. How can a TV program be excellent with such bottom line principles?
It's as simple as it's genious, and it's a way of things we should all watch out for. Not least in these Wikileakin' days...

M.I.A - Born Free

Det er grafisk og nokså blodig. Samtidig virker det nesten for absurd. Jeg har tenkt på denne siden jeg så den midt på dagen i går, og tenker fortsatt på den. Derfor syns jeg det er en god ytring. Kommer med andre ord tilbake. Hva syns dere? Pedagoger og andre? Den åpenbare samplinga/homagen til Suicide er uansett ikke å forrakte, originalen finnes her.

Shouting across the divide

When he addressed the Muslim world from Cairo this spring, his State Department translated the text into 13 languages and hired bike-messengers to hand-deliver recordings to African radio stations.
Sasha Issenberg on Barack Obama's ability to make America's international reputation an issue ((in Monocle, issue 28, vol. 03, p.044))

Bilingualism

Why bother blogging? A question worth asking once in a while, if you ask me. And, as it turns out, if you ask others to. Different people will come up with different answers. I have several, some related to a bloated superego, others more constructive. One that falls in the latter category is that as an aspiring teacher, I feel an obligation to write, to use language in as many ways as possible. I need to stay in shape (in this case metaphorically speaking).

From this acknowledgement (and inspired by Torger Åges migration to bilingual blogging) emerges a need to find an efficient way to be able to blog in both english and norwegian. I’m not a teacher of english alone. My blogging in english may be directed towards norwegian colleagues. They will be able to read posts in both languages, but what if someone drops in from the englishspeaking (or other -speaking) part of the world? I feel they should be given the option to display only englishspeaking posts.

So far, so good. Even though the toll this post have taken on me only underlines the need to write english more frequently.

So I went looking for a bilingual/multilingual plugin, and found several. At the Wordpress plugin directory i was pointed towards xLanguage and Gengo. As always, the algorithm to download the plugin(s) and uploading it (them) to the right folder utilizing Cyberduck was a laugh. Now, the neccessary tweaking was all I had to do.

I decided to go with xLanguage first, as the manual outlined a scenario similar to the one I found myself in: The need for a bilingual blog, where one language A (in my case English) could be understood by users of language B (Norwegian), but not vice versa. The default setting would be to display both languages, and then there would be an option to hide the minoritylanguage (mind you, speaking globally now) for user customization. To make a long story short; the process of customizing the plugin blew me off. And I say this not to criticize the developers behind xLanguage, ‘cause they are quite frank: simplicity is sacrificed to allow a wide range different uses. And I totally agree. It just wasn’t what I needed. Moving to Gengo, now slightly out of breath from the session with xLang, I realized halfway through that what I needed wasn’t a fully fledged bilingual site. I wanted a way to allow visitors to sort out all the norwegian jibberish (taking the visitors perspective here), and be left with english postings alone. As Wordpress generates a stable link to both categories and tags, all I needed was to create the category in question (english) or tag (as Torger Åge did), and then create a link to that url in the sidebar. So I did. And now, the english-speaking lot of you can go directly there to get what you want. What you are able to read.

And I just got a nice session of english writing.

…if you should feel the urge to give me feedback, either linguistically or technically, please go with that urge. I will, in the spirit of processwriting, modify this post according to your guidance. Thank you.

Prof. Jim Cummins @ HiO

Empty seats where hard to come by as Jim Cummins paid Oslo University College a visit today, for an inspiring session on Identity in multicultural classrooms. The canadian Prof. focused especially on the importance of approaching multiculturalism, multilingualism and diversity with an open mind, with an eye for the opportunities that lie on such a complex situation, rather than focusing on the obstacles it can provide for the educator.

This approach includes acknowledging any lingual competence any student may carry, in their first language and second/target language alike, as competence, as a resource to be used within the context of the classroom. Thus, communicating to students that knowledge of more than one language is a great academic skill, even though recipients of communication within that language may be limited, is of the essence, and even something that may aid the communication between the educational institution and the home.

Mr. Cummins made several interesting points, of which there are two I would like to bring to the forefront: the first is the devision of language proficiency into three levels:

  1. Conversational fluency ->conversation in everyday context
  2. Discrete language skills ->discuss the rule-governed aspects of language
  3. Academic language proficiency ->knowledge of the language required to achieve academic success, whichever the level of the system you're at.
To my understanding, this division has a profound impact in the way educators percieve their students, and especially students with a different mothertongue than the language used by the educational system. The idea that an educator will be able to determine the level of languageskill in a student by interacting in the classroom is severly undermined. A fully 'functional' student, able to interact in the everyday conversation, and even meta-lingual debate, may still have huge holes in their vocabulary, compromising any classroomactivity. Among many things, this may well lead to students that fall out of progress, becoming rabble-rousers. Have you ever heard a teacher say of his/her pupils; "It isn't the language, their struggle is more of a social character", implying "they're perfectly adequate speakers of Norwegian (majority language), they just can't behave!"

The other point, slightly off the honourable professor’s field of research, but all the more interesting for educators concerned with implementing ICT in the classroom,  was something that came up while he was presenting bilingual books, ‘identity affirmers’, made by secondary school students. These books, obviously acting as tools for aquiring and extending both the first and the second language, where given a whole new life once published on the internet. Out there, on Web 2.0, the books could be read by a wide variety of people, and certainly including relatives ‘back home’, adding to the students feeling of creating something important, something to be proud of, and something meaningful. This obviously falls within the category of ‘meaningful output’, and it felt as just another example of how powerful the tools of ICT can be, if utilized properly. And, it should go without saying: These books where as multimodal as any!

For further reading:

...sorry about the (at times) weird lingo, and thanks for tuning in

t.