Being snowed in for a week meant watching a lot of TED talks online, and a few that really interested me focus on certain established environments and how they are not very conducive to education, creativity or motivation.

Sir Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity and the need for a “learning revolution” throughout the world:

Language Mastery also brought my attention to the neat RSA animated talks, such as Changing Education Paradigms which goes along with the above TED talk on education systems.

Dan Pink on the science of motivation:

All of the recent talk about failing education systems makes me wonder why more people aren’t advocating for a Results-Only School Environment similar to the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), especially for language education. It doesn’t matter how or where or sometimes even when you do something, all that matters is that you actually do it. It’s the same principle for work or school – as school essentially is work. Why should students be forced to learn something they don’t want to when they know it will not be beneficial to their future career? Or why should they be expected to remain in a certain classroom at a specific time every week? Or spend four years earning a degree when all of the material could be learned in much less time?

Most of the research on how the brain learns, and more importantly remembers, information goes against the established school schedule and curriculum. In addition to studies showing that self-study or mixed mode classes are better for learning, more and more schools should be catering to what educational research encourages in order to help students learn the most and in the most beneficial environment.  I’ve expressed my views on self-study in the past, and I still believe it is the best way of learning for motivated people. The problem is that current education systems in place do not provide this choice to the many motivated students, besides the occasional online courses which are still bound to schedules set by the school.

I learned everything in my Anthropology 101 textbook before the semester even started, and the actual class was nothing more than lectures of the various chapters of the textbook. I did not learn anything extra by going to class, but I still had to waste 3 hours every week for 15 weeks because the professor lowered our grades if we did not attend. It was incredibly frustrating to feel that more value was placed on students occupying seats in a classroom than on learning the material. In addition, I was only taking the class because it was a General Education requirement, and not because I wanted to or because it had any direct relation to my declared majors of French and Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition. An entire year of my four year Bachelor’s degree was nothing more than Gen Ed classes, all of which were similar to the Anthropology class: class time was simply a reiteration of the chapters in the textbook. Perhaps for students who did not actually read the book, the class was helpful, but for those of us who did the readings, it was a waste of time.

Even when I was in high school, I felt that I could learn much better and much more by studying on my own, away from the distraction of American high school life where sports and popularity were more important than academics. I was always tired (starting at 7:45am, seriously?) , hungry (25 minutes for lunch!) and uncomfortable (you try sitting on plastic chairs for 7 hours) which left me in a constant bad mood. I begged my parents for years to let me be home-schooled though I knew it wasn’t possible financially. I skipped a year of French by learning everything in the textbook over the summer because the other students were just holding me back. If I learn much faster than others, why do I still have to be in the same class as them just because we’re the same age? I did graduate at the top of my class with a 4.0 GPA, but I still felt that school was too easy and not enough of a challenge for me. I did not care for football or Prom; I valued education and learning. Unfortunately I wasn’t surrounded by people who believed the same.

Obviously, results-only environments cannot be applied to all forms of education and they do not work for all people, especially for those who have no interest in autonomy and think they need very specific schedules and deadlines to function properly. Nevertheless, I truly believe that simply giving students the choice and flexibility of learning the way that humans are supposed to learn would improve overall results, especially for foreign languages. When people are free to do what they want, when they want and how they want, they are more motivated and more productive – and the end result is what matters most, not how you got there. If you feel that you learn better at midnight instead of 8 am, or while eating instead of just before or after, or on the couch instead of in front of the computer, then by all means do the things that make you the most comfortable. The only question that should matter is: Did you learn something or not?

Never let your schooling interfere with your education. – Mark Twain

Kinder eignen sich eine Sprache mit Leichtigkeit an. Wie gut aber geht das noch mit 30, 50 oder 70 Jahren? Erstaunlich gut, sagen Forscher – wenn die Bedingungen stimmen.

Sehr interessante 7 Seiten aus ZEIT Wissen 6/2010 jetzt auch online.

By Seonag MacKinnon BBC Scotland education correspondent

Children who are taught all subjects in Gaelic keep up with their peers in English classes, according to a study.

The evidence suggested that Gaelic taught children catch up rapidly on their English skills

One of the Edinburgh university study's authors said parents should not be hesitant about Gaelic medium education over concerns it may hold pupils back.

The report said those in classes where only Gaelic was spoken in the first two years, caught up rapidly once English was introduced in primary three.

The research is to be debated at a major conference in Edinburgh.

The research, welcomed by Education Secretary Mike Russell, also indicated that by primary five, children had caught up with their counterparts in English classes and some had overtaken them.

The study suggested that greater proficiency in English reading was still evident in primary seven.

'No diminishment'

And results in maths and science were broadly equal across the board, the study suggested.

The researchers said the strong results could not be explained away by the home background of children in Gaelic units and schools.

The team sought out a sample of children from similar backgrounds in English and Gaelic classes.

Professor Lindsay Paterson, a member of the team who carried out the study, Gaelic Medium Education in Scotland, said: "This indicates there is absolutely no risk, no harm, no diminishment of attainment at all in putting your children into Gaelic medium education.

"The attainment is exactly the same as in English education.

"In fact, there may even be some positive benefits as far as English reading is concerned.

"And in addition, children acquire the capacity to speak and understand Gaelic."

Asked why many children are ending up ahead in English, he said: "There is good international research in other linguistic contexts to show that learning bilingually stimulates children's brains, seems to stimulate their general development, their capacity to learn right across the curriculum.

"It may be that this is what we are seeing in Scotland."

Speaking ahead of the Holyrood conference in Edinburgh, Mike Russell said he hoped the report would encourage more families to opt for Gaelic education.

He said that many parents seemed to be unaware that it existed, or assumed it was only open to children from homes in which Gaelic was spoken.

'Scottish culture'

Researchers found that Gaelic attracted parents who were keen to connect the children with part of Scotland's heritage and those who were keen on stimulating a child's ability to learn other subjects, including other languages.

Numbers are modest with about 2,000 pupils in bilingual primary classes - less than 1% of young Scots.

In Ireland it is 7% and in Wales 21%.

Commenting, Mr Russell said: "Compared to Ireland and Wales, it is a low number but we have increased the number and I've been very strong in arguing for the creation of a new generation of speakers.

"Gaelic medium education is an important part of the process."

He added: "I am heartened by the growth in Gaelic education in recent years and hope that this trend continues - and certainly this report should give parents reassurance that choosing this path for their children will only benefit their educational journey."

Arthur Cormack, Cathraiche (chair) of the development agency Bòrd na Gàidhlig, said: "We welcome this report, which adds to a growing body of research confirming that Gaelic education is a success for the pupils involved, and for the Gaelic language.

"This report shows that attainment among Gaelic pupils is at least as good as that of their peers educated in English.

"Pupils in Gaelic medium education gain an advantage by being educated in two languages, their attainment is excellent, and they gain access to important aspects of Scottish culture."

Miriam Plieninger is the Head of Content Production at Babbel. Over the years she’s edited courses and taught languages in classrooms in Germany and the UK. German is her mother tongue, but she also speaks English, French, Norwegian and Latin, not to mention the languages she’s learned at Babbel: Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese and — as she tells Babbel Blog in the interview — Italian. Here she talks about the “communicative approach” for teaching beginners new languages and how it allows for quick progress.

Miriam, do you use Babbel for learning yourself?

Actually, I do every day, because I edit the courses.

Of course , though, I work on them before they are done. It takes a few weeks until a lesson is finished, but by then I’m already working on the next lessons. So to see what the courses feel like when they come to life, I sometimes go back to earlier lessons and have another look at them with all the pictures, sounds and interactivity, and I work through them myself.

Sooner or later you’ll be able to speak all the Babbel languages!

(Laughs) Some of them were new to me, Italian for example, and now I know it on a beginner level. I think it’s a good thing to never lose the beginner’s  perspective. That way I know what a beginner course has to look like. I see what’s difficult, I can say “stop, that’s too much for one lesson, we have to put that into two or three lessons.” And I know what being a beginner feels like. I had a nice situation a few weeks ago, I worked on the Italian beginner course before and I went to Sardinia for holiday. That was the first time I really spoke Italian to Italian people. Just basic sentences, but I was so proud because I could make myself understood. Not only with the sentences from the course, but I could also combine stuff.

So though unintentionally, you did learn some Italian?

Seems like I am an auditive learning type. I always have the Babbel speakers in mind. That’s sometimes not such a great thing… I mean, you don’t want to be dreaming  about  recording people and have their voices in your head. But on a holiday this can come in really handy. I went to a bar, heard my speakers’ recording of the word for “I want something” and “a drink” and I was able to combine.

My masterpiece was ordering vegetarian food when there was no vegetarian food. I managed to ask the waiter if I could have two side dishes instead of having the meat course. I got what I wanted. I was so proud. My beginner course worked out as planned.

Did you understand what the waiters were answering?

Most of it. I think that’s also an important thing to learn, that you don’t have to understand each and every thing. You can understand just three quarters of a sentence and know what the sentence is about. I also keep that in mind for the dialogues and courses. The main words, the most important chunks and phrases are introduced at the beginning. But then there are always little words, like prepositions, which you don’t learn explicitly. You understand them from the context.

And if I don’t?

In real life you look them up in a dictionary. At Babbel we never leave the learners alone. There are always translations on all the beginner levels and in all the vocabulary and sentence trainers. You’ll never have to go to your bookshelf and take the huge dictionary to look up stuff.

Speaking of huge dictionaries, how many words do I have to learn to get along in a foreign language?

In general  you need around 2000,  3000 words for basic communication.

That sounds like a lot of work.

But obviously there are a lot of fillers, lots of prepositions, lots of these small words. With the communicative approach that we take at Babbel, you don’t need to learn those explicitly in vocabulary lists. You’ll just know them after a while.

Communicative approach?

In more old-school approaches to didactics you used to learn a thousand single words and then you would have to learn how to combine them. It took a while before you were even able to formulate a four-word sentence.

With the communicative approach you learn chunks and short sentences, useful ones, very very quickly. This way, after the first ten minutes with the first tutorial of a beginner course, you make basic smalltalk, you can say hello, goodbye, how are you and I’m fine. After maybe an hour you can already tell people where you’re from, which languages you speak, order a beer and so on.

But I still have to memorize chunks and sentences. How does it differ from old style vocabulary learning?

In context and linking. If a word or chunk is linked to a picture in your mind, it is much easier to remember. Memorizing things works best when your brain can link them to other things. That’s why in all our lessons, tutorials, vocabulary trainers, sentence trainers, we always try to offer “connected material” for different learning types. Images, sounds, typing and word order exercises. And good example sentences are really important to us.
For each and every of the 3000 words in the basic and advanced vocabulary trainers we have one example sentence. So you learn ten or twenty words for one word field actively, but you learn a lot more words around that because of the example sentences.

What is a good example sentence?

A good example sentence explains the word you learn. Let’s take the word “airport”. A bad example sentence would be “I live near the airport”, because you could live near anything and anywhere. A better sentence would be “I pick up my friend from the airport, his plane lands at two”.  You need context, more words from a field, to get a picture in your mind. The sentences should also be somehow interesting. If they are fun, emotional and close-to-life, the picture will stick in your mind.

Some of our sentences are outright funny. For example I remember one from a vocabulary trainer about parts of the body, which was something like: “His nose is so big, he can smoke a cigar in the shower”. I read that out loud to the people sitting in the room and everyone just busted out laughing. But for sure, everyone will remember the word from now on.

That’s what I like about self-directed learning, that I can just learn the stuff which is fun to learn.

… and the more fun you have, the easier will it be to learn. Another important point of autonomous learning is that you can do it at your own  pace. We have those really small portions, you just need 10 to 15 minutes to work on one lesson. If you want to go on, you can go on, if you want to have a break, you have a break. Nobody will nag you to go on or tell you that you’re lazy or something. You can learn when you want, as long as you want.

… and what you want.

Well, to really early beginners I recommend starting with the beginner course. There they are taken by the hand, they’ll find everything they need to know. Pronunciation, grammar and communicative situations, it’s all connected. Then after the beginner course, they’re really free to choose from anything. They can choose topics of interests, they can go and take grammar lessons, they can add more words to certain word fields.
Or if they know that there’s a specific situation where they need their foreign language soon, we have those sentence trainers of a thousand useful sentences. For example you want to cook with friends and want to know what the food is called in their language, then you could just go into these sentence trainers and pick out a few really authentic phrases and practice them. With our speech recognition you can also check if your native speaker friends would understand your pronunciation.

How do you choose your topics and content?

Most of the time I’m sticking to the European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) by the Council of Europe. This framework provides so-called “Can Do” descriptions for different communicative skills on reference levels from A1, basic, to C2, proficient.

So for example, what can I do on an A1 level?

You can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases “aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type”. You can introduce yourself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where you live, people you know and things you have. You can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly.

Is that CEF the framework that schools [in Europe] are using for reference?

Yes, schools try to make their students have a B1/B2 level after their degree, but to be honest most people have more of an A2 level. And especially after a few years of not using the language A2 is a very common level to be on.

You have a lesson about time machines and flying carpets. Does the CEF mention that?

Well, there is no “I can talk about teleportation”. But isn’t that a very concrete type of need? (Laughs.)

Our vocabulary, sentence and grammar trainers aren’t linked to the framework levels. They just float on top of everything. Every learner of every language level can learn basic and advanced words, which we don’t limit to the CEF. If you say you have a basic vocabulary that has to do with fantasy or backpacking or sex, that’s not an A1 thing to learn. But it’s a basic set of words for a language situation in which you might find yourself in real life. I think that’s what makes language learning fun. It needs to be close to your real life. You might not be teleported, but it’s useful to be able to talk about fantasy – and what’s possible or not.

That’s the second time you mentioned that G-word. Grammar.

Personally I think that most people who think they need grammar, don’t really need to learn grammar. But they do need to use the foreign language actively: listen, read, write and speak. We do have grammar tutorials for those learners anyway, because it just gives them more confidence if they refresh the rules and use the rules in context sentences. But what’s really important is to practice the communicative situations in the course.
We try to make Babbel as easy as possible to work through for people who don’t have a university degree in philology. Babbel is not just for linguists, it’s for everyone.

Miriam, thank you for your time.

How music videos are triggering a literacy boom

(Jaydeep Bhatt)

Tiny, sun-soaked Khodi on the western coast of India’s Gujarat state is the kind of village where cattle still plough the fields and women fill clay pots with water from the village well. In the past few years, however, the town has been changing: Thatched mud huts are slowly giving way to sturdy, single-story concrete blocks; farmers conduct their business on cellphones. The state buses, which until a decade ago were only filled with men, are now crammed with women. Enrollment in the local school has soared.

These changes can be attributed partly to India’s recent economic liberalization, which has raised incomes and brought unprecedented growth across the country. But in Khodi, there’s another, more unlikely contributor: the soaring local literacy rate, courtesy of music videos.

Every Sunday in villages across India, groups of people — an assortment of turbaned men, sari-clad women, and gap-toothed children — gather around old television sets to watch their favorite Bollywood film stars sing and dance in song videos culled from movies. These song shows, a popular component of mainstream television programming, are often the only way rural populations can see the stars or access the latest films.

Nine years ago, India’s national television network decided to introduce karaoke-style subtitles to these programs — not in a foreign language, but in Hindi, the language the stars were singing in. The first state to broadcast the subtitles was Gujarat. People in Khodi, and in the rest of the state, saw the captions as an opportunity to sing along with the songs. They began paying attention to the moving strip of lyrics at the bottom of the screen. Often, they would copy the words on paper, going back to them after the show was over. And as they did, the reading level in Khodi slowly improved.

According to Hema Jadvani, a researcher who has been studying the effects of the subtitles on Khodi, newspaper reading in the village has gone up by more than 50 percent in the last decade. Her research also shows that the village’s women, who can now read bus schedules themselves, are more mobile, and more children are opting to stay in school.

India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled. And the subtitles have acted as a catalyst to quadruple the rate at which completely illiterate adults become proficient readers.

In the fight against poverty, this is big news. Development organizations the world over have long been grappling with the challenge of increasing literacy, which is linked not only to economic growth, but to better health, greater gender equality, and a more transparent political process. Against this background, the apparent effectiveness of subtitles — along with their low cost, only 1 cent per person per year — has attracted the attention of academics and educators. Viewers in India have shown reading improvement after watching just eight hours of subtitled programming over six months; conventional literacy teaching methods typically require much more time and far greater resources to achieve the same results.

Same-language subtitling extricates literacy from the tangles of school infrastructure and teacher availability. And since television, more than any other medium, has the power to reach out to billions across the developing world, it holds unique promise for hard-to-access groups like rural women, who are discouraged from venturing outside their villages once they hit puberty.

Perhaps most importantly, though, SLS has the ability to make literacy fun. In Khodi, for example, children watching song shows read the lyrics and write them down so that they can sing the songs with their friends later — an enthusiasm they rarely show for school work. Ultimately, by making reading easy and entertaining, SLS can change the way a child feels about school. “I was always tired and lazy. Then I began reading better, and everything just became easier,” says Rajesh Sodha, a ninth grade student from Khodi, in a phone interview. “School is more fun now.”

The idea of SLS was born in 1996 at Cornell University. Brij Kothari, an Indian PhD student at Cornell, was learning Spanish for a research project. He’d been watching a lot of Spanish cinema but found that the English subtitles made it harder for him to “hear” the original dialogue. Kothari realized that if the films were subtitled in Spanish itself, he’d learn the language more easily. “Then it occurred to me that if all Indian television programming in Hindi was subtitled in Hindi, India would become literate faster,” says Kothari, who is now a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and founder of PlanetRead, an educational nonprofit.

Five years later, Kothari managed to persuade the Indian state channel to subtitle its first batch of song shows, and since then he has campaigned tirelessly to popularize subtitling as a literacy tool.

But even as far back as the early 1990s, there was some research support for the idea that television subtitles can improve reading skills. Finland, for example, a country that has repeatedly placed first on education rankings created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has attributed much of its educational success to captions. For several decades now, Finland has chosen to subtitle its foreign language television programs (in Finnish) instead of dubbing over them. As a result, Finnish high school students read better than students from European countries that dub their TV programs. They are also more proficient at English.

A Belgian psychologist named Gery d’Ydewalle looked at the effects of subtitling in a 1991 study. He found that reading of subtitles on a screen is almost involuntary. In other words, viewers find it nearly impossible to ignore subtitles, regardless of whether they can hear the sounds or understand the language. We’ve all experienced this — the inescapable pull of closed captioning when we’re watching a film, or find ourselves near a TV in a loud bar or an airport.

Following d’Ydewalle’s findings, academics began researching the link between foreign-language subtitles and the ability to learn that language. What they found matched Finland’s experience with English shows — children and adults who watched television subtitled in a foreign language were likely to be able to pick up that language easily. As for same-language subtitles, research by Kothari and others has shown that viewers with low-level reading skills show considerable literacy and vocabulary improvement after watching subtitled television.

Importantly, researchers found that the best results come from subtitling music. “Songs build phonemic awareness — the ability to break a word into syllables — more than dialogue,” says Clara Schmidt, an American educator who has independently evaluated the effect of Kothari’s system in India. Songs repeat lyrics, which gives viewers more time to make the sound-letter association. Viewers also often want to memorize the lyrics to a song, which motivates them to make an effort to read the subtitles — a factor that’s missing with ordinary dialogue.

As helpful as subtitling appears to be, it isn’t a cure-all for literacy problems. One important shortcoming is that it can’t teach people to read from scratch: Viewers who can’t recognize letters aren’t likely to benefit from seeing subtitles scroll by. The method works best with what educators call early-literates: children and adults who have basic familiarity with the alphabet, but can’t read fluently enough to make productive use of their skill. Primary schools or basic reading classes are still needed to teach students that the letter “a” makes an “ah” sound.

As its results suggest, however, SLS may hold promise in other arenas where readers are struggling to move beyond basic skills. Greg McCall, a special education teacher in Hawaii, created his own same-language subtitles to help his students, including learning-disabled students. McCall says he stumbled upon SLS while looking for ways to engage ninth-graders with difficult texts like “Les Miserables.” Instead of asking them to read the book, he showed them the musical and found that students were instantly more involved. Soon, he began adding subtitles and saw a marked improvement in reading ability. With traditional literacy software, says McCall, reading among his students improved by the equivalent of 0.7 classroom years in a year of teaching. Using SLS he saw a jump of two classroom years.

McCall has been campaigning for his research to be discussed at a national level and suggests that it has applications across a wide spectrum of people: from children who are just beginning to learn how to read to teen dropouts to adults who never learned how to read fluidly. “America is not being honest about its literacy problem,” he says. Three out of five Americans in jail can’t read. Fifty million adult Americans can’t read beyond a fifth-grade level, leaving them at a semi-literate level that is often ignored in mainstream literacy campaigns.

The solution, say educators like Schmidt and McCall, is to make closed-captioning compulsory for all children’s programming. “The government should also subtitle all MTV programs,” recommends Schmidt.

But academics do warn against a potential pitfall: If subtitles become part of mainstream education, students may start to see them as “learning” rather than entertainment. For SLS to work, they argue, it must be seen primarily as fun, and it must stay out of schools. “My fear is that once it enters the classroom, it will become boring and turn people off,” says Stephen Krashen, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.

The problem of semi-literacy, of course, is a worldwide one — in India, for example, out of the 650 million officially literate people, only 300 million can read fluently. The low cost of SLS makes it easily replicable even in the poorest parts of the world. Gradually, says Kothari, governments and private organizations have begun to show interest in the idea. South Africa and Rwanda are considering implementing SLS on their state television channels. In Pakistan, a private television channel is talking about using same-language subtitles in Urdu on film song programs watched in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the international educational landscape, where every small victory means spending hours negotiating with inefficient bureaucracies and a constant battle for funds, SLS is a rare bright spot. Using nothing more than a television set and a few songs, the method brings real literacy improvement and reading practice to people right in their living rooms. The simple system can inherently change the way we look at reading; it promises to exchange the tedium of the classroom for the entertainment of an hour of MTV.

In the words of Khodi’s local school principal, Bachchubhai Lakhabhai: “SLS manages to achieve in a few hours what we haven’t been able to do for years.”

Riddhi Shah is completing her master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She has written for Salon, Saveur, India Today, and the Hindustan Times.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

English has become Europe's second language of choice with two thirds of people in the continent able to speak it, according to a survey.

Published: 6:00PM BST 04 Oct 2010

English is becoming the dominant language of the European Union Photo: Corbis

The study found that English is the first foreign language studied in secondary schools in every country outside Britain and Ireland.

The results of the survey are a particular blow to the French, who recently launched a failed bid for their language to be made the sole official language of the EU headquarters in Brussels, claiming their mother tongue was "more precise".

However the report by Eurostat, the EU's statistics body found that only 12 per cent of people wanted to be French speakers, compared to 66 per cent for English and 20 per cent for German.

"English is far ahead of any other as the first choice as a foreign language," the report said.

"Behind English, people are choosing to learn German and Russian. Knowledge of French as a foreign language is low."

It has also prompted calls for the EU to cut back on the £1 billion it spends every year translating official documents into the organisation's 23 recognised languages.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "It's only right that the EU institutions think carefully about every penny they spend to ensure that they're getting the most from their money.

"Governments across the EU are reining in their spending and EU institutions should do exactly the same."

Last month, Pascal Smet, a Flemish-speaking Belgian politician outraged his country's French speaking community by calling for English to become Europe's "common language".

"I note that the engine of European integration is sputtering. One reason is that we do not speak the same tongue, hence my plea for a common European language," he said.

"It seems logical to me that this is English, which is already the lingua franca of international economics and politics. French is not spoken anywhere in the world while English is now increasingly becoming a global language."

Some people have a hard time learning a new language; others find it baffling when someone imitates a foreign accent (here's how the stars do it).

Ping Li, of Pennsylvania State University's Brain, Language, and Computation Lab, wants to know what distinguishes someone who can easily pick up a new language from someone who struggles.  Research has shown that early exposure is key to mastering a second language, but scientists have lots of unanswered questions about how the brain learns a new language or dialect.

The two parts of the brain that are critical for language and speech development are called Broca's area and Wernicke's area (here's more on those).  Broca's area is involved in speech articulation and producing sounds, while Wernicke's area deals more with comprehension of words, Li said.  Recent research has also implicated nearby brain regions that include the parts of the temporal lobe for storing and retrieving meanings, the parietal lobe for for mediating speech and motor representation, and the angular gyrus for integrating different sources - for instance, understanding idioms.

It turns out that the language you speak does change the way your brain processes language, studies have shown.

Li's research has compared the brains of native English speakers and Chinese speakers who are bilingual in English.  The Chinese language does not differentiate verbs and nouns in the same way that English does, and some interesting brain patterns result from that distinction:

In native English speakers, the Broca's area appears to handle verbs and the Wernicke's area deals with nouns.  Chinese speakers who are bilingual from an early age show the same brain behavior, Li said.  But when presented with the same nouns and verbs in Chinese, the Chinese bilinguals do not show a difference between Broca's and Wernicke's area with nouns and verbs.  What's more, Chinese bilinguals who learned English in college do not show the noun-verb distinction in the brain when presented with English, even though their language ability is not necessarily worse.

Research has demonstrated numerous advantages to learning a new language beyond mere communication. People who are bilingual are better able to carry on two tasks at once, switching back and forth between activities more seamlessly and weeding out irrelevant information better. But here's the downside:  Languages can actually compete in your mind, and you may start forgetting some vocabulary of the language you use less.

And it pays to start early.  Research suggests that true native fluency in any language can only be gained in early childhood; some studies found that sensitivity to foreign accent goes down after age 1!  It's not impossible to learn a new language late in life, but it does get more difficult: a 40-year-old will have a harder time than a 20-year-old, says Grant Goodall of the University of California, San Diego. Here are some resources for computer-based language learning.

Very little is known about picking up a new accent specifically, Li said.  We recently wrote about foreign accent syndrome, but it's unclear whether the speech changes in this condition can truly be considered a "foreign accent," Li said.

Li speculates that perhaps people who are good at accent imitation – such as Steve Martin in "The Pink Panther" – may have better-developed parts of the brain that handle speech sounds, or that those areas have better connections to other brain regions.

"We can make some speculations as to whether people like Steve Martin have better abilities to process sound systems of languages," he said.

Der 26-jährige Muhamed Mesic spricht 56 Sprachen - "Andere spielen Fußball, ich lerne Krimtatarisch"

Als er 13 Jahre alt war, sprach er sieben Sprachen, der Eurovisions-Songcontest und UNO-Soldaten waren seine Lehrer. Heute hält Muhamed Mesic bei 56 Sprachen, aber es werden laufend mehr. Warum er sich das antut, wie er dabei vorgeht, und welche Sprachkenntnisse er in seinem Lebenslauf verschweigen würde, hat er Maria Sterkl erzählt.

derStandard.at:  Herr Mesic, wie viele Sprachen sprechen Sie? Sind die kolportierten 56 Sprachen noch aktuell?

Muhamed Mesic: Sagen wir, dass es aktuell ist. Ich zähle sie nicht, mir geht es ja nicht um die Zahl. Aber gut: Ich kann ein gutes Dutzend Sprachen so gut wie Deutsch, und gute zwei Dutzend weitere Sprachen so, dass ich Verträge lesen kann. Andere Sprachen wie Koreanisch reichen für eine Unterhaltung.

derStandard.at: Warum lernen Sie so viele Sprachen?

Mesic: Weil es mich glücklich macht. Manche spielen Computer-Spiele, andere gehen Fußball-Spielen, andere ins Theater, ich lerne Sprachen.

derStandard.at: Und wie entscheiden Sie, welche Sprache als nächstes kommt?

Mesic: Jetzt zum Beispiel habe ich das Krimtatarische im Programm, weil ich die Geschichte der Krimtataren irrsinnig interessant finde. Türkisch habe ich gelernt, weil ich verliebt war. Es muss halt eine persönliche Motivation geben.

derStandard.at: Wie gehen Sie vor, wenn Sie mit einer neuen Sprache anfangen?

Mesic: Meistens kaufe ich mir erst einen Reise-Sprachführer: "Wo ist die Bank? Wo ist die Post? Wo kriege ich Briefmarken?" Das ist gut für den Einstieg. Auch sehr gut sind Missions-Videos. Kurze Filme, die irgendwelche christlichen Geschichten für kleine Völker in Afrika oder Zentralasien erzählen. Die eignen sich gut für Sprachen mit relativ wenigen Sprechern. Aber die wichtigste Ressource ist das Internet. Ich arbeite viel mit YouTube-Videos, Liedern, Filmen.

derStandard.at: Wie präsent ist Ihre Muttersprache Bosnisch noch?

Mesic: Ich spreche zwar im Alltag Deutsch und schreibe 80 Prozent meiner E-Mails auf Englisch - aber zuhause, allein mit meinem Bügeleisen, ärgere ich mich auf Bosnisch. Das Bügeln ist ja eine der Aktivitäten, die ich bewundere, ich finde das schwieriger als georgische Grammatik - und die ist wirklich erstaunlich kompliziert.

derStandard.at: In welchen Sprachen träumen Sie?

Mesic: Das ist ganz unterschiedlich. Vielleicht deshalb, weil es im Traum diese ganzen Grenzen nicht gibt. Ich träume auch auf Isländisch. Das hängt wohl davon ab, was bei mir gerade „in" ist. Ein Vorteil am Mehrsprachig-Sein ist ja, dass man sagen kann: "Okay, heut hab ich Lust auf Russisch."

derStandard.at: Warum sollten Menschen mehrere Sprachen lernen?

Mesic: In Österreich nicht mehrsprachig zu sein, ist eigentlich eine Beleidigung der Tradition dieses Landes. Früher haben Geisteswissenschafter in Österreich ja nicht nur Deutsch, Französisch und Latein gekonnt, sondern auch Ungarisch oder Tschechisch. Mehrsprachig zu sein, hilft - man kann im Alltag stehen bleiben und sagen: "Okay, ich habe jetzt ein Problem und komme nicht mehr weiter. Also denke ich es in einer anderen Sprache durch." Das kann wirklich ein Vorteil sein.

derStandard.at: Gibt es für bestimmte Probleme jeweils bestimmte Sprachen - eine Sprache fürs Beziehungsproblem, eine für den verstopften Abfluss?

Mesic: Ich tu mir eigentlich schwer, einen qualitativen Unterschied zwischen einem Beziehungsproblem und einem verstopften Abfluss zu finden. Probleme sind Probleme.

derStandard.at: Vermitteln bestimmte Sprachen andere Grundstimmungen als andere?

Mesic: Ich bezweifle das. Ich glaube eher, dass die Umgebung, in der sie gesprochen wird, auf die Sprache abfärbt. Dass Menschen, die rein klimatisch aus einer fröhlicheren Gegend kommen, auch fröhlicher reden. Norweger haben 200 Tage im Jahr schlechtes Wetter - kein Wunder, dass sich Norwegisch irgendwie deprimiert anhört.

derStandard.at: Anders gefragt: Gibt es Sprachen, die sich besser für den Wutausbruch eignen?

Mesic: Ich kenne genügend Menschen in Wien, die zuhause Deutsch nur dann sprechen, wenn sie sehr böse sind. Weil sie einfach Deutsch mit dem offiziellen Leben, mit der Arbeit, dem Amt verbinden. "Was machst du da?", schimpfen sie mit dem Kind, oder "Du Depperter" - und dann reden sie wieder Türkisch oder Serbisch.

derStandard.at: Weil das Deutsche für sie jene Sprache ist, in welcher der/die ChefIn zu ihnen spricht?

Mesic: Genau. Außerdem haben viele Zuwanderer einen großen Respekt vor dieser Sprache, weil man nicht die ganze Palette an Gedanken in ihr ausdrücken kann. Das hat nicht unbedingt mit Wortschatz zu tun: Ich kenne zum Beispiel viele Serben, die auf Serbokroatisch keinen wahnsinnig großen Wortschatz haben, aber sie können viel besser ihre Gefühle erklären. Auf Deutsch müssen sie ganz genau überlegen, welche Wörter sie verwenden, um den gewünschten Effekt zu bekommen. Wenn man den Gasmann auf Serbisch anschreit, dann bringt das meistens wenig.

derStandard.at: Wann haben Sie begonnen, Sprachen zu lernen?

Mesic: Ich bin im Bosnien-Krieg aufgewachsen. Und im Krieg ist man isoliert, nur von Pessimisten umgeben, aber sieht ständig Bilder von draußen. Also habe ich angefangen, pakistanische oder schwedische UNO-Soldaten nach Wörtern in ihrer Sprache zu fragen. Mein erster Text auf Schwedisch war die schwedische Nationalhymne, die kann ich heute noch auswendig. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt konnte ich bereits Englisch und Griechisch. Englisch kann ich, seit ich denken kann, wir haben immer englische Lieder gehört zuhause. Griechisch habe ich mit fünf Jahren im Griechisch-Urlaub gelernt. Dann kam Französisch, Italienisch, Portugiesisch und Deutsch dazu. Mit 13 lernte ich dann Ungarisch mit einem Sprachführer auf Deutsch und ungarischen Frauenzeitschriften.

derStandard.at: Wie lernt man als Kind im Krieg Portugiesisch?

Mesic: Eine wichtige Quelle für mich war der Eurovisions-Songcontest. Ich habe keinen Songcontest seit 1989 verpasst. Sogar in den Kriegsjahren hat meine Schwester immer irgendwas mit der Antenne herumgetan, damit der Empfang passt, und glücklicherweise hatten wir zum Songcontest immer Strom. Portugiesische Liedertitel waren einfach schön, also why not. Dann habe ich 1995 aus Italien ein Taschenwörterbuch Italienisch-Portugiesisch mitgenommen, und das habe ich tagelang nach der Schule von A bis Z gelesen.

derStandard.at: Hatten die Eltern ihre Finger im Spiel?

Mesic: Meine Mutter war Englisch-Lehrerin. Und was mich bei meinem Vater immer fasziniert hat, war, dass er Bücher in Sprachen gelesen hat, die er eigentlich nicht versteht. Er ist Bauingenieur, und liest heute noch viel Wissenschaftliches auf Deutsch. Bei Straßenbau und Tiefbau ist sein Wortschatz unendlich - aber ich glaube nicht, dass er sich in Wien einen Kaffee bestellen könnte.

derStandard.at: Wie halten Sie die 50 Sprachen frisch?

Mesic: Ich höre viel Musik, und im Fitnessstudio Audiokurse und Podcasts. Bei mir geht viel über die auditorische Wahrnehmung. Das ist bei einigen Menschen so. In Bosnien gab es nach dem Krieg eine regelrechte Flut an Telenovelas aus Südamerika im Fernsehen, alle mit Untertiteln. Und heutzutage gibt es eine Menge Leute zwischen 18 und 30 Jahren, die erstaunlich gut Spanisch sprechen, weil sie die Sprache damals stundenlang gehört haben. Alle wollten so sprechen wie die Esmeralda und die Marisol, und wie die Heldinnen alle heißen. Die Leute haben dann bei Sprachschulen angerufen und Spanisch-Kurse gefordert.

derStandard.at: Was halten Sie vom Sprachen-Lernen in der Schule?

Mesic: In der Schule geht es nur um die Angst vor Fehlern - "Wehe, du sagst 'das Maus' ". Dabei ist es für viele Menschen unlogisch, warum auch die männliche Maus "die Maus" sein soll. Man sollte einfach nur reden - auch, wenn ein Fehler passiert. Ich mag es auch ganz gern, wenn man mich berichtigt. Manche Leute sagen zu mir: Es ist unmöglich, dass du all diese Sprachen fehlerfrei sprichst. Dann sage ich: Das habe ich eigentlich auch nie behauptet. Mir ist wichtig, zu verstehen, und verstanden zu werden. Und natürlich, es so gut wie möglich zu tun, damit möglichst wenige Missverständnisse entstehen.

derStandard.at: Wie viel Zeit verbringen Sie eigentlich mit Sprachen-Lernen?

Mesic: Ich weiß nicht, wann ich Sprachen lerne und wann nicht. Ich spreche zum Beispiel sehr gut Hebräisch. Wenn ich nun eine israelische Zeitung lese, lerne ich dann eine Sprache? Insofern ja, als ich pro Artikel fünf Wörter finde, die ich dann im Wörterbuch nachschlage. Aber ich definiere es nicht als Lernen.

derStandard.at: Aber bis Sie soweit sind, dass Sie eine Zeitung lesen können, vergeht doch ein mühsamer Prozess des Vokabel-Lernens.

Mesic:  Also mühsam würde ich das nicht nennen. Ich merke mir Sachen einfach leicht - von Kennzeichen bis Telefonnummern, das ist fast schon etwas zwanghaft bei mir. Aber ob es mühsam ist - auf jeden Fall ist Disziplin wichtig, regelmäßiges Lernen. Wenn du einmal pro Woche lernst, dann mach es einmal pro Woche, aber nicht einmal so, einmal so. Ich sage ja auch nicht: Ich mache Diät, also verzichte ich auf Süßigkeiten, aber nur montags. Wenn, dann jeden Tag.

derStandard.at: Konzentrieren Sie sich immer nur auf eine Sprache?

Mesic: Jetzt lerne ich Krimtatarisch. Dass ich jetzt gleichzeitig mit Kirgisisch anfange - eher nicht. Ich will mich ja richtig einleben können. Es gibt sehr schöne Lieder auf Krimtatarisch, die höre ich beim U-Bahn-Fahren.

derStandard.at: Wann hören Sie auf, sich in eine Sprache zu vertiefen?

Mesic: Ich lerne eine Sprache nur so weit, wie es mir Spaß macht. Wenn ich ins Baskenland fahre, lerne ich so weit Baskisch, dass ich mich im Alltag verständigen kann und die Leute sagen: "Wie schön, du sprichst Baskisch, das ist doch so selten." Aber dass ich die Gesetze des Baskenlandes in der Originalfassung lesen kann - nicht wirklich.

derStandard.at: Ist Ihre Mehrsprachigkeit auch manchmal ein Nachteil?

Mesic: Mir ist einmal geraten worden, ich solle die sogenannten unnützen Sprachen in meinem Lebenslauf nicht erwähnen - Haida zum Beispiel, eine Sprache, die nur von circa 200 nordamerikanischen Ureinwohnern gesprochen wird. Man könne sonst denken: "Der arbeitet nix und lernt nur tagelang irgendwelche Sprachen."

derStandard.at:  Verbinden Sie mit dem Sprachen-Lernen ein gesellschaftspolitisches Programm - gegen das reine Nützlichkeits-Denken?

Mesic: Jein. Ich definiere "nützlich" anders - nützlich ist alles, was mich oder andere glücklich macht. Mich hat einfach noch niemand überzeugen können, dass Vielfalt etwas Schlechtes ist. Und Sprachen können als herzzerreißende Türöffner fungieren - etwa wenn du mit Roma in ihrer Sprache sprichst. Plötzlich wirst du nicht mehr nur als Außenstehender gesehen.

derStandard.at: Wie kann Zugewanderten der Einstieg in die deutsche Sprache erleichtert werden?

Mesic: Man muss ihnen auf eine freundliche Art die Tür zur Sprache aufhalten, nicht nur Kurse anbieten. Im Kurs ist ein Lehrer, der wahrscheinlich überfordert und unterbezahlt ist und seine eigenen Probleme hat, und dort soll ich lernen? Nein: Wir müssen schauen, dass wir die deutsche Sprache in die Familien bringen. In manchen Ländern gibt es eigene TV-Sender, wo die Hauptnachrichten zwar in der Landessprache, aber in viel langsamerem Tempo gesprochen werden. Wo nicht nur gesagt wird, "Gegen Herrn X. wird ermittelt", sondern auch, wer dieser X. ist und was er gemacht hat. Oder dass im Leberkäse weder Leber noch Käse ist. Die "Zeit im Bild" mit türkischen Untertiteln - why not?

derStandard.at: Sie halten nichts von der Deutschtest-Pflicht vor der Einreise?

Mesic: Von solchen Forderungen kann man nichts halten. Wenn es nur heißt, "Lernt's Deitsch und passt scho", dann werden die Österreicher nie beginnen, sich für andere Sprachen zu faszinieren. Konflikte entstehen ja immer nur dann, wenn man sich gegenseitig nicht versteht - oder weil man glaubt, dass man nicht verstanden wird. Manche Österreicher reden ja gar nicht mit den türkischen Nachbarn, weil sie denken: "Der spricht eh kein Deutsch" - auch, wenn es gar nicht stimmt. Interesse zu zeigen würde auch uns helfen. In Chicago macht der Bürgermeister eine Ansprache auf Ukrainisch, weil dort eine große ukrainische Community lebt. Und das ist ganz selbstverständlich. Stellen wir uns vor, der Wiener Bürgermeister würde eine Ansprache auf Türkisch halten - er würde sofort als Staatsverräter denunziert werden.

MUHAMED MESIC (26) ist Jurist, Judaist und Japanologe und zurzeit Doktorand an der Uni Wien. Er spricht 56 Sprachen und beherrscht an die 12 Schriften. Nebenbei füttert er Online-Wörterbücher mit seinem Sprach-Wissen. Mesic ist in Tuzla, Bosnien, aufgewachsen und lebt seit acht Jahren in Wien. Seinen Blog führt er dreisprachig.

Der Europäische Tag der Sprachen

wird am Sonntag gefeiert. Er soll die Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa attraktiver machen und das Sprachen-Erbe Europas bewahren helfen

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2010) — Scientists long have recognized that many perceptual skills important for language comprehension and reading can be enhanced through practice. Now research from Northwestern University suggests a new way of training that could reduce by at least half the effort previously thought necessary to make learning gains.

The research also may be the first behavioral demonstration of metaplasticity -- the idea that experiences that on their own do not generate learning can influence how effective later experiences are at generating learning.

"Prior to our work much of the research into perceptual learning could be summed up as 'no pain, no gain,'" says Beverly Wright, first author of a study in the Sept. 22 Journal of Neuroscience and communication sciences and disorders professor at Northwestern. "Our work suggests that you can have the same gain in learning with substantially less pain."

The findings could lead to less effortful therapies for children who suffer from language learning impairments involving perceptual skills. And they hold potential for members of the general population with an interest in enhancing perceptual abilities -- for musicians seeking to sharpen their sensitivity to sound, people studying a second language or physicians learning to tell the difference between regular and irregular heartbeats.

Previous research showed that individuals become better at many perceptual tasks by performing them again and again, typically making the training tedious and long in length. It also showed that mere exposure to the perceptual stimuli used during practice on these tasks does not generate learning.

But the Northwestern researchers found that robust learning occurred when they combined periods of practice that alone were too brief to cause learning with periods of mere exposure to perceptual stimuli. "To our surprise, we found that two 'wrongs' actually can make a right when it comes to perceptual learning," says Wright.

What's more, they found that the combination led to perceptual learning gains that were equal to the learning gains made by participants who performed twice as much continuous task training (training which by nature of its repetition and length often is onerous).

"It's as though once you get your system revved up by practicing a particular skill, the brain acts as though you are still engaged in the task when you are not and learning still takes place," says Wright, who teaches in Northwestern's School of Communication.

Wright and Northwestern researchers Andrew Sabin, Yuxuan Zhang, Nicole Marrone and Matthew Fitzgerald worked with four groups of adult participants aged 18 to 30 years with normal hearing and no previous experience with psychoacoustic tasks. Their goal was to improve participants' ability to discriminate between the pitches of different tones.

The researchers initially determined the smallest difference in pitch that participants could discriminate from a 1,000 Hertz standard tone. They then divided the participants into four groups, each of which went through a different training regimen.

Participants in one group were trained for 20 minutes per day for a week on the pitch-discrimination task. Over and over again, they were asked to tell the difference between the 1,000 Hertz tone and a lower tone but showed no improvement.

Of greatest importance for the study, participants in a second group showed significant learning gains when the same amount of target task training (20 minutes) was combined with 20 minutes of work on an unrelated puzzle while repeatedly presenting a 1,000 Hertz tone through headphones.

Impressively, the learning of the second group also was comparable to that of a third group that for a week practiced the pitch-discrimination target task for 40 minutes per day.

A fourth group of participants repeatedly exposed to a 1,000 Hertz tone for 40 minutes per day while performing an unrelated task showed no learning gains.

Further experiments revealed that the order of presentation -- whether the 20 minutes of target task training occurred before or after the 20 minutes of the related task -- did not affect learning. Each scenario yielded equal pitch discrimination learning gains.

In addition, the researchers discovered that the effectiveness of the combination of the target task training and of the unrelated training plus stimuli presentation began declining if the two tasks were separated by more than 15 minutes. Pitch discrimination learning -- or evidence of metaplasticity -- disappeared completely if the sessions were separated by four hours.

The research is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders-National Institutes of Health.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2010) — Scientists long have recognized that many perceptual skills important for language comprehension and reading can be enhanced through practice. Now research from Northwestern University suggests a new way of training that could reduce by at least half the effort previously thought necessary to make learning gains.

The research also may be the first behavioral demonstration of metaplasticity -- the idea that experiences that on their own do not generate learning can influence how effective later experiences are at generating learning.

"Prior to our work much of the research into perceptual learning could be summed up as 'no pain, no gain,'" says Beverly Wright, first author of a study in the Sept. 22 Journal of Neuroscience and communication sciences and disorders professor at Northwestern. "Our work suggests that you can have the same gain in learning with substantially less pain."

The findings could lead to less effortful therapies for children who suffer from language learning impairments involving perceptual skills. And they hold potential for members of the general population with an interest in enhancing perceptual abilities -- for musicians seeking to sharpen their sensitivity to sound, people studying a second language or physicians learning to tell the difference between regular and irregular heartbeats.

Previous research showed that individuals become better at many perceptual tasks by performing them again and again, typically making the training tedious and long in length. It also showed that mere exposure to the perceptual stimuli used during practice on these tasks does not generate learning.

But the Northwestern researchers found that robust learning occurred when they combined periods of practice that alone were too brief to cause learning with periods of mere exposure to perceptual stimuli. "To our surprise, we found that two 'wrongs' actually can make a right when it comes to perceptual learning," says Wright.

What's more, they found that the combination led to perceptual learning gains that were equal to the learning gains made by participants who performed twice as much continuous task training (training which by nature of its repetition and length often is onerous).

"It's as though once you get your system revved up by practicing a particular skill, the brain acts as though you are still engaged in the task when you are not and learning still takes place," says Wright, who teaches in Northwestern's School of Communication.

Wright and Northwestern researchers Andrew Sabin, Yuxuan Zhang, Nicole Marrone and Matthew Fitzgerald worked with four groups of adult participants aged 18 to 30 years with normal hearing and no previous experience with psychoacoustic tasks. Their goal was to improve participants' ability to discriminate between the pitches of different tones.

The researchers initially determined the smallest difference in pitch that participants could discriminate from a 1,000 Hertz standard tone. They then divided the participants into four groups, each of which went through a different training regimen.

Participants in one group were trained for 20 minutes per day for a week on the pitch-discrimination task. Over and over again, they were asked to tell the difference between the 1,000 Hertz tone and a lower tone but showed no improvement.

Of greatest importance for the study, participants in a second group showed significant learning gains when the same amount of target task training (20 minutes) was combined with 20 minutes of work on an unrelated puzzle while repeatedly presenting a 1,000 Hertz tone through headphones.

Impressively, the learning of the second group also was comparable to that of a third group that for a week practiced the pitch-discrimination target task for 40 minutes per day.

A fourth group of participants repeatedly exposed to a 1,000 Hertz tone for 40 minutes per day while performing an unrelated task showed no learning gains.

Further experiments revealed that the order of presentation -- whether the 20 minutes of target task training occurred before or after the 20 minutes of the related task -- did not affect learning. Each scenario yielded equal pitch discrimination learning gains.

In addition, the researchers discovered that the effectiveness of the combination of the target task training and of the unrelated training plus stimuli presentation began declining if the two tasks were separated by more than 15 minutes. Pitch discrimination learning -- or evidence of metaplasticity -- disappeared completely if the sessions were separated by four hours.

The research is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders-National Institutes of Health.

Leider findet in der E-Learning-Welt Git (und die anderen verteilten Versionskontrollsystemen) noch keine große Beachtung. Dabei hat die Existenz von Git eine ganz neue Dynamik in die Weiterentwicklung von Informationen, Software und Projekten gebracht. Anil Dash beschreibt es so:

… in just a few short years, changed the social dynamic around forking, turning the idea of multiple versions of a work from a cultural weakness into a cultural strength.

Wenn man kein Software-Enwtickler ist, fragt man sich im ersten Moment, was man mit so einem verteilten Source Code Managementsystem (aka Versionskontrollsystem) denn zu schaffen hat. Aber die Idee hinter Git beschränkt sich nicht auf Softwareentwicklung sondern steht ganz generell dafür, wie man Informationen, Werke und eben auch Software sehr effizient adaptieren, verändern, weiterentwickeln kann, und zwar mit eine unbegrenzen Zahl an Beitragenden. Die Wikipedia-Idee auf Git übertragen bedeutet, dass man sich mit einem Klick eine Kopie erstellen, diese Kopie verändern und diese Veränderungen wieder in die Wikipedia zurückspielen kann. Als Graphen dargstellt kann es dann so aussehen:

Das ist ein Ausschnitt der Bearbeitungen des Buches Pro Git auf GitHub (GitHub ist ein Hostingdienst, der die Verwaltung von Git-basierten Projekten übernimmt). Die Idee bei einem Wiki ist, dass man dokumentenorientiert von einer aktuellen Wikiseite ausgeht. Mit Git kann man dagegen parallel beliebig viele andere Versionen einer Seite pflegen, beobachten und adaptieren. Wenn einem eine Seite nicht gefällt, erstellt man seine eigene Version davon. Anderen, denen diese Version gefällt, übernehmen diese dann mit einem weiteren Klick.

Das klingt komplizierter als es tatsächlich ist. Anil Dash' Blogbeitrag Forking is a Feature liefert einen wertvollen Beitrag zum Verständnis dieses neuen Git-Ansatzes in der Informationsverarbeitung und Online-Zusammenarbeit.

Auch kleine und mittlere Unternehmen können jetzt Werkzeuge des Web 2.0 (z.B. Wikis, Blogs, Twitter) nutzbringend zum Lernen einsetzen. Der “LERNET 2.0-Praxisleitfaden” hilft allen, die in einem kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen Verantwortung für das Thema Bildung tragen, sinnvolle Anwendungen des digitalen Lernens zu finden und einzuführen.

Er erläutert ausführlich das Web-2.0-Fachvokabular und bietet ganz konkrete Anleitungen, die Schritt für Schritt die Einführung von Blogs, Twitter, Mikroblogs, Wikis und Virtuellen Klassenräumen beschreiben. Der Leitfaden, der im Rahmen des BMWi-Projekts “LERNET 2.0″ entstand, steht allen Interessierten am Ende dieses Posts kostenlos zur Verfügung:

Der Leitfaden verschafft einen Überblick über die neuen Lerninstrumente des “Web 2.0″ und zeigt an praktischen Beispielen, wie sie sich in Ihrem Unternehmen einsetzen lassen. Praktiker geben Tipps zu den “Do´s and Don´ts”, die man bei der Einführung von E-Learning im Unternehmen beachten sollte. Für die Argumentation bei der Einführung werden die Vorteile bei der Nutzung von E-Learning 2.0-Werkzeugen beschrieben.

Gewonnen wurden diese Erkenntnisse im Projekt „LERNET 2.0“, das in den Jahren 2008 und 2009 vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie gefördert wurde. Projektträger ist das Deutsche Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR). Durchgeführt wurde das Projekt im Team vom Deutschen Netzwerk der E-Learning-Akteure e.V. (D-ELAN), MMB-Institut für Medien- und Kompetenzforschung und der centrestage GmbH – in enger Kooperation mit dem Netzwerk elektronischer Geschäftsverkehr (NEG).

Die im Leitfaden verwendeten Quellen, Zitate und weitere Materialien sind im Delicious-Quellenverzeichnis zusammengestellt.

PDF-Download: http://www.lernetblog.de/podpress_trac/web/929/0/LERNET-20-Praxisleitfaden-We...

This weekend, to mark the new academic year, Schott’s Vocab is soliciting definitions of education:

Lord Henry Brougham said that “Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”

Mark Twain argued: “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”

And Will Durant observed: “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

BildungsSysteme International

Der Internet Wegweiser zu Bildungssystemen weltweit

• Erweiterte Suche

Suche mit der Weltkarte

Internationales
Arabische Länder
Frankophone Länder
Commonwealth
Pazifischer Raum
Mittelmeerraum
Islamische Länder

 

It's become the norm in America for parents to capture their children's smiles, tantrums, and impish shenanigans—sometimes cute, sometimes deeply embarrassing—on blogs, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds. But MIT professor Deb Roy makes even the most obsessive at-home documentarians seem inattentive: He recorded, on video and audio, nearly every waking moment of the first three years of his son's life—not as an exercise in parental vanity, but in the name of science. His goal was to create as complete a picture as possible of how one child learns a language. For his study, "The Human Speechome Project," he embedded 11 cameras and 14 microphones in the ceilings of his home, and set them to record for an average of 12-14 hours a day. Now Roy and his team have begun the enormous task of trying to make sense of the data—all 120,000 hours of it.

Roy's decision to use his own child as a research subject makes people uncomfortable: When the New York Times wrote a story about Roy, the comments were on the outraged side. Recording a child for amusement is one thing, but taking those recordings to the lab for analysis may be quite another. It may seem unethical—perhaps even dangerous to the child's mental health.

But it's crucial to realize that while Roy's using the latest technology, his tactic is not new: Language researchers have long used their children as subjects. All parents feel a sense of wonder as they watch their children piece together their first words, and their first phrases; scientist parents can't help but feel professional curiosity as well. Because some have given in to the pull of this curiosity and turned their observations into data, we're a little bit closer to figuring out the mystery of how humans acquire language.

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One of the early notable studies of a child by his parent was published by the philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann in 1787. From Tiedemann's careful notes we learn that his son Friedrich began to communicate by pointing at 8.5 months, that he first said "duck" and "potato" at 23 months, and that he had a much easier time pronouncing p, t, and k than z, w, and sp. In those days there was plenty of philosophical discussion about the nature of children and what they knew when: Were they blank slates, or did they possess innate knowledge? Did they understand concepts before language? For the most part, these issues were debated in armchairs. Tiedemann's approach was more practical: Here is a child, let's see what he actually does. He rejected anecdotal evidence and out-of-thin-air wisdom, relying instead on carefully recorded observations. His study didn't settle the blank-slate debate at the time, but it encouraged others to try an empirical approach to scholarship. Tiedemann's conclusion—that children do, in fact, posses some pre-linguistic knowledge—has since been borne out by a couple centuries' worth of research.

In the 1800s empiricism gained in popularity and many scientists published studies of their own children, Charles Darwin among them. But it wasn't until the 1900s that parents went beyond jotting down things that struck them as interesting and started keeping thorough journals of everything their kids said. The psychologists Clara and William Stern published their Kindersprache in 1907—a detailed study of the first three years of their children's lives that catalogued the sounds, words, and parts of speech they used at various stages. Jean Piaget completed studies of his children in the 1920s. In the 1940s, the linguist Werner Leopold published four volumes of notes on every aspect of his two daughters' bilingual language development (they were raised with German and English), including a meticulous phonetic record of the girls' pre-lingual babbling stage.

The sheer size of these studies meant they could be mined by scholars for data. They offered enough information to investigate questions like: How many nouns and at what age? What kind of sounds and in which order? Such information had never been catalogued in this way or in this quantity before, and it helped advance the field of linguistics. Roman Jakobson, one of the most influential linguists of the 20^th century, pulled from these studies to support his theory that languages are not collections of particular sounds, but systems of contrast. Children acquire language by sorting out the difference between, say, words articulated with the lips (labial features) and those articulated with the tip or blade of the tongue (coronal features). Put another way: They're not figuring out how to pronounce man so much as recognizing the difference between man and ban. (The former word starts nasally, the latter does not.)

Until about 1950, there was a sense in which researchers had to use their own children as subjects. How else would it be possible to get the kind of access needed to collect evidence? But advances in recording technology made it possible to gather data from a child without actually living with him. Scientists started tape-recording interactions between children and their parents for a few hours at a time, either in the home or in the lab. And the birth of cognitive science introduced a new method for looking at child language: the controlled experiment. You didn't have to look at everything the child did, you could just come up with a specific hypothesis and then test it. In 1958, for example, Jean Berko Gleason developed her famous "Wug Test." By asking a brief series of fill-in-the-blank questions, such as "This is a wug. These are two …?" she showed that even very young children internalize the word-building rules of language and can produce correct examples of those rules ("wugs") that they had never heard before.

Yet researchers continued to use their own children as subjects, because the practice was always and will always be more than a matter of convenience. It's not as if scientists have children in order to test out a theory. Rather, they have children and then find that the experience of watching them acquire language raises all sorts of questions. Then they follow where the children lead them.

In 1962, Ruth Weir published Language in the Crib, a study of the monologues her toddler son produced alone, while drifting off to sleep. A senior colleague of hers had a hard time believing that children really did this—they are learning language from others at that stage; why would they talk to themselves?—so he asked around, and all the mothers he talked to said, "Of course! Children do this all the time!" Any mother could notice this behavior; it took a linguist mother to identify it as an area for research. The monologues of Weir's son showed that very young children rehearsed and experimented with linguistic structures on their own. And the study of "crib talk" became a new way to find out how toddlers come to understand the world.

In the 1980s, Jeri Jaeger, another linguist mother, decided to write a book on children's slips of the tongue after a colleague informed her of the "well-known fact" that children didn't make slips of the tongue until age 7. She subsequently sent him a list of 100 slips that her daughter had made before the age of 3. Kids don't make slips of the tongue very often, but if you're around kids all the time (because they live in your house), and pay special attention to their language (because you're a linguist), you'll find that there's a lot of territory between "not often" and "never."

Parent-child studies helped popularize the use of empirical research in linguistics; they have inspired new theories and exposed facts about language behavior that no one had yet considered. They have, in brief, been good for the profession.

They also don't seem to have done any harm to children. The point of these studies is to describe nature, and so nature is allowed to take its course—it's just being observed and documented more closely than it might otherwise be. There is still, of course, the potential hazard of exposing intimate details of a child's life that he or she might not like to have exposed. It's lucky that the obscure 1919 study "Parallel learning curves of an infant in vocabulary and in voluntary control of the bladder" was made in the pre-video era. For reasons that they don't explain very well, the parents of the little girl in this study thought it would be interesting to compare her toilet-training success rate with her rate of word learning. So they logged over 4,600 entries on her potty "successes" and "accidents." (Their approach didn't have much of an impact on science. In retrospect, it looks more like a harbinger of the Facebook status update.) But as long as scientist parents follow professional guidelines about subject privacy and leave highly personal information out of their studies, kids are more likely to feel violated by their parents' YouTube accounts than by their journal articles.

The child's potential embarrassment is not the true issue here, though. Often the real objection arises from a harder-to-explain feeling that there is something unfair, or just cold, and a little icky, about a parent turning the microscope on his or her own child. The child has no choice; the parent has all the power.

Ironically, however, Roy's study indicates that the balance of power could shift as technology becomes more sophisticated. With Roy's Speechome project, it's possible to analyze not just what the child is doing, but what he hears—which is to say, what Roy and his wife are doing. At the recent conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Roy's team presented a paper that turned the microscope on the parents, showing how the way they alter the complexity and prosody of their speech influences the way the child learns. In an e-mail, Roy told me that he set out thinking that "language development" described a process that the child went through, but in analyzing the data he came to see it as a process that the parents go through as well. The more all-encompassing and detailed the study of child language becomes, the more we end up looking at what goes on around the child. The parent becomes a subject of his own study.