I was catching up on my Omniglot Blog unread posts and I came across this post asking people When is a language dead? This whole discussion come up because Manx was declared as a dead language even though there are still speakers of the language.The range of opinions posted in the comments was quite interesting, and it serves to point out there is not consensus on when a language is dead, or in some

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group.One

I came across a blog post entitled The Great ID Debate the other day. I actually found it quite interesting to read.I found the last three paragraphs quite poignant:Think about it - these days a good ID needs to be able to write instructional objective. Conduct a content analysis. And an audience analysis. Measure job/performance outcomes. Write a criterion referenced test Create a shared collaborative

I meant to comment on this blog post and the associated news story a while back but I didn't get a chance until now.I think that in the blog post Assessment is confused with Grading based on this comment:It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure

Here's and interesting (short) animated documentary on the history of the internet.For most geeks among us this is common knowledge, but it's a good video to get those among us who don't know much about the origins of the internet up to speed :-)I think this would have been useful as an instructional video at the beginning of our class on business networking (a class for MBA student to understand the

I came across this article the other day on the issue of Good Writing.While I do believe that most people skim read, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Should we really be teaching people to write for skim readers?In my opinion, good writing in contextual. Good writing for the web, is not necessarily good writing for a business journal, which is not necessarily good writing for a research report

It seems odd that you could analyze a blog as a personality type, but I suppose word analysis and construction of ideas could be computed in an algorythm.Typealyzer does an MBTI test for blogs. According to it, this blog is an INTJ (which kinda goes along with my personality).This is their description of this blog.The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking

I was reading this blog post earlier this month about the collapse of the TR-DEV community of practice on an eLearning blog.Now Communities of Practice (or CoP) is something of an interest to me. In the MBA program I viewed it from the lens of enabling employees to share knowledge within the company. In the Instructional Design program I've created a CoP of faculty, students and alumni as a space to

Just as I've started taking a course called "structure of the English Language", which deals with English Grammar, here comes a blog post called "there is no grammar".OK, now that the other blog got your attention, I think that I agree with the original blogger. Grammar is a construct made up to understand the language we speak. From a language learner's perspective though is it useful to start learning

Do you know what cloud computing is?If not, Check this out (even if you do, check it out anyway. Common Craft make awesome videos):