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OER and the language problem (part 2) – the status and function rationale
Critical scholarship ought to analyse the strong forces that are at pains to create the impression that English serves all the world’s citizens equally well, or those who uncritically assume this is so, when this is manifestly not the case. (Phillipson, 2001) In my first post on this topic I put forward some high level statements on why I think OER has a language problem. The “problem” may largely be one of awareness and as the movement evolves into its adolescence I think it will be increasingly important to surface the intersection of language, OER, and social justice. My specific concern is with the uni-directional nature of OER from English…
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Language and the OER problem
I have about 3 posts I could write about this topic and eventually I might get to my 2 half-baked drafts and book reviews, but the topic is complex and multifaceted, so let’s see where this goes. One of the shifts in OER movement that I’ve really appreciated has been the thread of declaring social justice as part of what we do in the OER space. I’m hoping that as we evolve we can remember that social justice is inherently tied to language which has been so well argued in Ingrid Pillar’s recent book: Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. OER has a language problem. The majority of OERs are in…
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open learning and language
An interesting (old) quote from geolinguist and sociolinguist extraordinaire, William Mackey. I’m parking it here because it’s related to discussions on open learning, and in line with my last post on language and the open access movement. “The combined impact of this accelerating mobility, globalization of instant information and uniformization of mass media has lessened the contact between neighbours while increasing the impact of dominant cultures whose massive loudspeakers silence the small voices of local speech and minority cultures. In sum, the far erodes the near and eventually drives it out.” Mackey, W.F. (1992). Mother tongues, other tongues and link languages: What they mean in a changing world. Prospects, 22,…
