Hi Don,
Thank you for your answer. Re:
Donald Z. Osborn wrote:
Claude, I'm glad you made the points you did, but I also see two sides to this. Having lived for a while in Niger, with poor connectivity and at the time relying on the parastatal telecom monopoly for the only connections, I know the frustration of encountering blithely high bandwidth web presentations (some by development organizations no less). But I still see an advantage in judicious and creative use of image and audio for the many multilingual markets where the dominant internet languages are not that widely used. Why not find appropriate ways to exploit the image and sound potential of the media?
Research should go that way too, granted.
My answer at the europalearning forum actually ended with </rant> and I perhaps should have slept over it.
I'm tech-ignorant, but an end-user whose experience has involved connection only from public places with no shockwave plug-in, no sound, where you weren't allowed to save to floppy, juggling 2Mb web e-mail accounts for mailing lists and precariously storing things in so-called free online hard disks. So I bust a gasket at these affluent academics' arrogant ignorance of lowly tech dimensions.
There is a divide between education theoricians and tech people too, at least in Europe. I just translated a book on e-learning by an education person who at least has lead great projects in distance learning with ICT - but is still befuddled as to the use of titles and the difference between an index and a table of contents in Word. At least he knows how to delegate - and listen to the people he delegates to.
Fortunately, now the Free (as in freedom) movement has been getting more interested in sound and pics in the last years, from the mailing-lists I'm subscribed too. This will mean a greater range of lighter, less hi-tech possibilities. The bandwidth theft issue remains, though.
The alternative option is great, and should be used more often. The WSIS sites didn't have it though. As to audio files in attachments, though, would it not be better to have them for download on a web page, saying how big they are and indicating approximate download time on dial-up, then sending the URL for the page? Same for PDFs and other heavy formats.
In Niger and several years ago in cybercafes in Mali I did not usually have too much problem with loading simple images, though my tactic was always to run more than one browser window concurrently so I could work on one thing while another was loading. Much appreciated were pages that use JPEG or GIF images but also have a text only option. Including the latter should be a general rule for any international development site. (Re audio, I know of a couple of people in Bamako who received audio file attachments to e-mail, and downloaded and listened to them in cybercafes.)
My impression is that bandwidth issues are improving in a lot of places in the global South (certainly did in Niamey) to where loading a less flashy set of simple images is not as much a problem as it used to be. However many such places will likely remain behind the curve for a while so that mobilizing the latest tech for the maximum multimedia effect will always be inappropriate for them.
That's where the prospect of Microsoft launching the Longhorn OS in 2006 (?) is worrying. Will the new programs running on it still be compatible with the old ones? From what I read, no way my 15Gb HD, 128kb ram, 800 MHz laptop bought in 2001 will be able to run Longhorn and its programs. How many access points in the South will be able to afford the needed hardware?
At the same time, development of text content in diverse languages where appropriate, and machine translation for text that won't get otherwise translated, should definitely be on the agenda.
Machine translation is certainly a vital area - and one that, as a (still) human translator, I'm very interested in. But again, the above-mentioned divide between educators and tech people must be bridged too. Too many European educators tend to poo-poo at the gobbledygook produced by translation programs, without deigning to try and understand why programs do that, and even less try and write in a manner that can be more accurately machine-translated. Their attitude to machine translation - and spell-checking btw - suggests an assumption that a little man is crouching in their computer and that they can insult him into greater cleverness...
Far more than that, Don - thanks for correcting my rant.
Just my ¥0.02 ...
Impressive project, from the few pages I browsed! Are you in touch with the Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Technologie du Langage at Geneva university? http://www.latl.unige.ch/french/projets/liste_projets.html for their projects. They are interested in the accessibility aspect (at one poin, some of them were working on a geometry course for blind people). Their secular (start-up) branch is http://www.latl.ch/ , in English, but they are presently jazzing up their pages. Wish they'd stop using frames. Well, the contact page still works, lol.
Don Osborn Bisharat.net
cheers
Claude -- Claude Almansi www.adisi.ch [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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