Pancultural

What shall we do for a Classrom then Raylene?
Jason Bell, one of our learnscope team members, left last week after contributing significantly to our project. Up to the plate steps Raylene Ferguson our new staff member in Student Services. Raylene was born and raised in Central Australia and comes with a wealth of local knowledge,. So, I'd organised a one-on-one 3 hr slot to 'induct' Ray into the learnscope hall of fame. But, after an hour attempting to dictate/record Audio Podcast Bush Tucker segments we were getting nowhere fast. People wanting her attention in Student Services, phones ringing in my demountable, unwanted light aircraft and truck noises ruining recordings on the campus lawn. I used to think Alice was a quiet sorta location for a city... We just couldn't settle, me wanting to throttle people and things and ray fluffing her lines.
Anyway I was whinging to Ray about the noise and she suggests we go to the back of the house where she grew up, I was ready to try anything. Apparently Ray and her 2 sisters used to horse ride into school and leave the horses parked at the causeway. Anyway,about 5 Km out of town on the Ross River Highway we ease round the back of a tumble-down shack [an old Commonwealth Linesmans House]and into/onto the Todd River.
Well then, things just got a whole lot simpler. Ray lit a small fire as I set up the laptop and mikes and things just kinda flowed very straightforwards and simply. Ray parking herself on a convenient log [as I burnt my fingers on the billy] Ray's off and running. No more stutters or flutters, no more misreading, and a Natural voice.
And so it was that I was privileged enough to 'hang about in the creek' with a local on a blissfully cold Alice Springs winter morning, get a shitload of work done, and drum up some passable billy tea. I wouldn't swap it for quids.

Pancultura

End Users As Moving Targets
As a kid I wondered why on earth God spent time devising elaborate schemes to teach his minions lessons. 'God said to Abraham kill me your son', Lotte morphed into a pillar of salt, Job got the pimples big time, the list goes on. In our case God got really cranky about some dudes building the Tower of Babel and in an off moment decreed we'd all be speaking in tongue's of a different flap rate. I still struggle to find the lesson...don't skyscrape on my patch?
An eon or two later IAD are plumbing the murky depths of this lingual legacy. We're in the process of modulating text suitable for inclusion into a cultural awareness program. Target audience; Public Service inductees, interested local individuals and the odd resourceful tourist. Our man Gavan [the Gandolph] Brean is on the job. Gavan's a metallurgist-turned-linguist and he's massaging the text supplied by our team members into a quality end product for ACAP delivery. Audio Podcast syntax requires a different set of rules. Shorter sentences, a more flowing prose leading the listener effortlessly on to new sensate vistas of endless delight. Okay, so we're playing with this particular construction now; our end users are anything from European 'larger louts' to middle American 'blue-rinse' retiree's. We had to start somewhere! so the team had a look at the schematic at right and came up with the following list of audio 'fills' segments. This has helped focus the team onto manageable/achievable audio segments. Jason's Aunty has been nominated [in absentia] as being perfect for the bush tucker scripts and her inaugural journey into e-learning production begins tomorrow! We wish her well! The team are more at ease and focused now, they know what we need and they're off tomorrow with camcorders, mp3 mikes and a bunch of ideas. Bring it on.

Medicine	Toys	Food-bush tucker	Music
Insects	Animals	Body Decoration	Birds
Trees	Plants	Weather/Seasons	Games
Children’s stories	Spirits	Indig Sport slots
Children of the future audio and audio/visual segments; kids at school, sport etc

Evolving Babel
Meanwhile, Li Ting, our Asian ambassador informs us we really need a different sort of text that readily translates across into our proof of concept Asian translations: Japanese and Chinese. And this is where God got really tricky with the Babel stunt, 'world-views' deflect say Chinese folk away from comprehending the cultural richness of Aboriginal terms wrapped inside Aboriginal world-views.
If anyones got Huey's email I need it pronto.
It's delicious really, now we're about to get Shin and Eunice in, our Japanese and Chinese translators, to look at ways of educating our team so we may moderate/manipulate text suitable for Asian tourism ingestion.
I'm impressed with the Firefox add-on "FoxLingo" and would like to recommend it. It's performed well under unusual conditions, like it can't find a Kanji character for 'Western Arrernte', I mean what was Confucius thinking, really.

Pancultur

BabelAsia and AUSLAN
As part of our multicultural project we will be translating a sample selection of our mp3 audio podcasts into Chinese and Japanese. This will demonstrate the process of promoting Cultural Awareness information into the Asian region. Li Ting has made real progress into preparing a customized website that we will use as the 'vehicle' to deliver our IAD Cultural Awareness program, ACAP. As such the site has to be capable of multilingual text and audio display, mp3, mp4, Flash and photos. We've decided on using a website rather than a PowerPoint presentation to deliver the F2F component of our Cultural Awareness program. This will give us greater flexibility to include a broader range of multimedia, and also to apply more effects to in-site media.
Not only but also....
Onto this broad canvas walks our very own AUSLAN professional Carmel Batson. I'm helping Carmel with the IT/multimedia construction of her keynote address in Spain, July 07 at the Bi-annual CODA meet[Children of Deaf Adults]. Carmel complained, and rightly so, that we are utter cads for not including sign language translations in our Learnscope project.
So after a quick phone call from Betty Pearce [our director] to the Imparja Television studios Carmel, Li Ting, Gina and I are in front of a blue screen capturing 'signed' [if thats the right word] descriptions of sacred caterpillars gouging out hills and valleys across the Central Australian dreamscape. The studio technicians were calling this technique 'chromo' something or other. We just know at this stage we'll have to shoot the video this way to peel it off at a later stage and stick it against some suitable panoramic back-drop.
Our new Business apprentice Gina, pictured in the blue top, narrated the piece. We got it right on the 3rd pass and contrary to rumors Carmel did not dislocate her wrists trying to keep up with Gina!
On Monday 28th May 07 we are set to nominate the 15 or so particular sites around Alice Springs that we'll be using to construct our MP3 and MP4 podcasts. I put up another post shortly after. All I can say at this stage is that the project seems to be almost driving itself now, like a caterpillar on a mission!

Panc

Pancultural-e diary of events.

Arrived back in Alice tired and inspired last week [8/4]. Great to visit Darwin in 'the wet' again and feel the rain! and meet the other Learnscope Staff and Team members. Also it was a great open atmosphere to air views, like that pun?, ask questions and generally make connections

Okay, so now the work begins. The line's been running hot between Georgina, Li Ting and Moi as we pull the threads together from Darwin, float ideas and get re-acquainted with the software platforms we'll be collaborating on/with; Moodle, elluminate, Blogspots, Wiki's, Instant Messaging a nifty 'ARED' tool and etc, etc.

Sat in at IAD for an Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Program [ACAP] last week [12/4]delivered by Pat Dodds. A great session with a stimulating audience mix: Indigenous Australians, Muslim and Europeans. It was good to attend to:
[1] get re-acquainted with the source material we'll be using to help construct the projects.
[2] enjoy the delivery and the banter that Pat always draws from participants
[3] get some mp4 video, photos and mp3 audio files for file. We'll be using these as test material when we start running the Pancultural-e workshops for the staff at IAD Fri 20/4.
Met with IAD Board Fri 13/4 and am pleased to say we have their full support. And given their 'demographic' [thanks Surya Silva] it's great that they understand the Pancultural-e concept and it's potential.

Short meet with all the team members this week and we are ready for our first online session with Georgina this Friday 20/4. We'll have a round table talk before going online just to get the neurons firing, foster input generally and to float the idea of breaking the ACAP program into manageable chunks. This will be less daunting when we can each go off and do our individual research.

The ACAP program has about 12 separate sections so on our first meeting we'll get team members to select an area they're interested [e.g. Family, Kinship, Language etc]. From there we treat it as a research topic and members populate powerpoint presentations with material they are able to find. The idea is to use this as source as we commence construction of the mp3 and mp4 podcasts and look at how we may use it towards online delivery of ACAP.

We've also scheduled in a brainstorming session aimed at adding a bit of spice to Pat's delivery. So we'll be looking for ACAP related activities, puzzles, quizzes and the like that Pat can use during delivery to engage participants. Delivery is f2f and includes a bus tour of selected Indigenous sites around Alice.
To learn more about this and other NT Learnscope 2007 projects please visit http://ntlearnscope2007.wikispaces.com/IAD