#puliima

This time last week, April Long and myself had the pleasure of attending day 2 of the Puliima Languages and Technology conference in Melbourne.

The conference brought together a number of practitioners from across the country to share their activities and learnings in relation to the transmission and preservation of language, an essential component of Living Culture. In fact, the sessions we participated in touched on a number of outcome priority areas for IDX: Living Culture (preservation, transmission, production), Engaged learning, Youth empowerment, and Digital fluency among them.

It was great to see all the terrific work happening in communities presented in the individual sessions across the day. We were really disappointed that we were unable to swing things to be there on day 1, given the connections we made.

Rather than do a “blow-by-blow” account, I wanted to share a couple of themes emerged for me across the sessions I attended.

Tablets and language apps

One key theme was the prevalence of apps being developed for tablet computers, specifically the Apple iPad. Most of the apps that were demonstrated were tablet based, ranging from interactive story books to dictionaries, some with the capability for local communities to create their own within the app.

Some apps were more bespoke, others were designed to be more broadly applied. Some were designed to publish the finished product on the App Store, others were designed purely for use within/by the local community.

The SharingStories Language Lightbox was one that stands out. It enabled communities to create local-language dictionaries from within the app, collecting supporting images and audio in-situ (rather than to be fed into the app).

Another interesting solution came from the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Language (VACL), where they’ve successfully used the Kiwa platform for a number of projects. Kiwa supports the creation of story book applications with multiple languages (one project saw up to 10 languages) for the same story.

Some examples stored content locally, others relied on internet connectivity. Given more time, I’d have liked to have dived in a bit more to the technology infrastructure “behind the scenes” to learn more about how apps were propagated amongst community (when not published on the App Store) and also how data was managed in these kind of scenarios (local vs. stored in the cloud etc. and the impacts in locations where connectivity is limited or non-existant).

The story book applications to me held the most promise for ongoing engagement and learning. The dictionaries seem important from a preservation perspective, but the story books provide the opportunity for greater longer-term engagement. Both work in tandem, though, so both are valuable contributions.

Youth engagement

All of the projects that I witnessed on the day had some degree of youth engagement. Typically this involved Elders and young people working together to share the stories and their background, and then young people engaged in creating the media to tell the stories, with guidance from Elders to make sure these representations were appropriate.

In the projects that I saw highlighted, this co-creation of content was highlighted as a key part of the process. As an avid advocate of co-creation and co-design methods, this, of course, made complete sense and was something I was really glad to see happening.

But it did raise for me a question about the longevity of the model. For example, if the creation of content is a key component of the engaged learning process, how do we engage the next group of young people once a dictionary is created, or book is completed telling the story? It is important that communities are able to continue to create new stories/books/content etc. so that new groups of young people can be engaged.

Also, can we sustain the development of bespoke apps for each group coming through? This is where platforms like Kiwa are most interesting from my perspective, as it enables communities to continue to create new stories into the future.

Intellectual property

There was one session on day 2 about Intellectual Property (IP) and some of the challenges practitioners have experienced in their projects. I estimate that a whole conference stream could be devoted to this topic, so a 1 hour panel was definitely a challenge to cover all the potential facets of exploration.

One of the key things that was highlighted was the tension between collective ownership of Traditional Knowledge and the individualistic nature of western-framed intellectual property laws.

Another was an acknowledgement that there is no “on-size-fits-all” approach that will work—context, community, and traditions all play a role in shaping what’s appropriate and what’s not.

A third was the tension surrounding materials that were collected historically by non-Indigenous people. The context of this collection, questions of the validity (and veracity) of “consent” and more were raised. This is not only a practical challenge (in terms of gaining appropriate permissions) but also holds significance as some materials may be critical preservation documents (i.e. in some cases the only documented record).

Terri Janke’s work was mentioned, but there was broad agreement across the panel that much more work needs to be done in this area.

Optimising efforts

One of the key things that struck me was how similar a lot of the approaches were. This is a good thing—independently different communities have started to centre around similar solutions and approaches that are engaging, effective and culturally grounded.

However, I couldn’t help but think that a shared infrastructure to support these kinds of efforts would go a long way. Given the similarities in approach and form factor, I suspect there is a prime opportunity for key groups to collaborate and pool their (sometimes scarce) funds to build shared platforms, it would stretch individual project dollars a lot further. I hope that one of the outcomes of Puliima is that this sort of collaboration and cross-pollination emerge.

For things like the story book, platforms like Kiwa are interesting, but being an overseas developed, and as far as I can tell proprietary, technology raises questions for me about its appropriateness in the long term. Even an Australian-based technology such as ChattyKidz, which has been used by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation in the Tiwi Islands, has similar drawbacks.

It strikes me that an open-source platform (i.e. not content) that is community funded and developed would be the most appropriate model. And that any data from the platform be hosted on Aboriginal owned/run hosting/servers located in Australia to further bolster community ownership and resolve potential IP challenges with overseas hosting.

The other risk that came to my mind is that this centring around intensive face-to-face models perhaps is missing other opportunities for self-directed learning and engagement. I’ve had a couple of conversations with Michael about how tools such as DuoLingo could be utilised. DuoLingo incorporates game dynamics to create “fun and addictive” models of learning.

In any case, it would be great to see a more diverse set of approaches at future conferences to understand how different ways of teaching and learning can be applied to achieving this important outcome.

IDX and Flint

April and I also had the opportunity to present on the IDX concept and the work that the IDX team have been doing with inspiring digital making within the community.

There was a lot of interest in the work being done by the IDX team, and particularly in the opportunity to participate in the new Flint program that Zoe and April announced recently at the Torres Strait Island Economic Development Forum.