As part of my research into methods of revitalizing culture, I am very interested in a game I was referred to by a friend called “Path of the Elders“.
This interactive game attempts to build interest in indigenous cultures through learning about treaties, history, and sharing of other media such as photos and video.
I registered with their site today and will take the time to further explore how the game is played and what there is to gain through interacting within this virtual environment. I can’t help think that this may be a great method to re-engage youth, specifically First Nations youth, who may be disenfranchised or simply uninterested in their past or traditional culture. I have many questions related to this learning platform and hope to shed some light on this game in my posts to come.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Dr. Lorna William’s podcast tonight. As I dug a bit deeper, I found that she, along with Dr. Nancy Turner, also works for UVic.
Dr. William’s specialty remains with linguistics and the revitalization of indigenous languages. The last 5 minutes of her podcast really captured how I feel about technology in a nutshell; if I feel it is useful for my students and myself, I will use it.
To quote from her podcast:
“So what about technology during that period? We always tried whatever technology was around. If it worked we kept it and used it. If it didn’t work, we didn’t. So the question always is, “What part of technology do you use?” Because you could spend a lot of time on technologies that just take your energy and your time away from what you are actually supposed to do. The question is, “What do you want to happen and how can technology support the work that you do?
And also, “What are the limitations of the technologies?” So for example, if you look at the writing systems of people around BC, if you look at people’s orthographies, they are combinations of the international phonetics alphabet and the Roman alphabet…modified, but a lot of that came because we were developing these during the times of the IBM Selectric typewriter. We found somebody in Hawaii who could modify the Selectric IBM ball and put characters on that ball that we needed. So, that’s why, that’s how what was available technology-wise resulted in what we have.
In retrospect, she makes the observation that through the use of technology, limitations are placed on culture, specifically language, in the conversion of an oral means of communication to a literate means of communication. Technology helps “create the context of the orthography of the language.”
I like how she also recognizes that a lot of time, energy, and money is spent trying to learn new technologies, when we could be actually doing the work we set out to accomplish. In our district, BCESIS is a prime example of software that many teachers were forced to use. This technology (a “gradebook” application) was very difficult for most to learn and couldn’t effectively accomplish that which it was designed to do, but because the decision was made “top down” to roll out its implementation, it cost taxpayers of BC approximately $100 million, only to be dropped 6 years after its adoption. This was, in my view, a colossal waste of time and money.
