Is Learning Chinese a Mind-Hack?

Mind Hack image from psd.

It has been said that learning a language is a type of mind hack, it is good for the brain and gives you a different perspective on many things. Written Chinese however has a peculiar feature compared to English and that is simply that it takes rather less characters to write something. Many Chinese words are just one or two characters and there is no space between words. Some of the space gain is lost because each Chinese character takes the same space and English fonts can take advantage of proportional spacing but on the whole a block of Chinese text takes up less space. On Twitter and other micro-blogging sites you are typically given 140 characters, a fairly short message in English but a Chinese writer can potentially pack in a lot more information. As a couple of examples (美女) and (帅哥) map to (beautiful women) and (handsome guy). I also believe from my own early experience and observation that the Chinese reader can read noticeably faster than English readers (could be useful if you have a lot of information to scan).

Sometimes it is unfortunate that so much emphasis is given to ease of use and quick learning/understanding, often the thing that is initially easiest to learn, understand and use falls short in the long run when compared to something that initially takes more effort. Douglas Engelbert is credited with developing the computer mouse which was widely adopted, he also developed a special one hand keypad that in conjunction with the mouse was proven to significantly improve typing speed. This keypad was not adopted though simply because the learning curve was considered too high (taking into account all the typing I do though it makes me wonder).

I feel that an often overlooked mind expanding element of language learning occurs when you are prepared to open your mind to a new culture however. It is possible and sometimes illuminating to see something from two points of view simultaneously. A recent Newscientist article How to keep your head in scary situations (unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to view full text) stated "find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural but who disagrees with you. You are likely to give this person's arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset the natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different from our own." The cultural element is important because you are not likely to believe or entertain an argument coming from a culture that differs from your own. I found that being prepared to start adsorbing another culture suddenly hugely expands the number of people that you can learn from. As Steve Kaufmann puts it History is a good example. Students should be obliged to read history books from different countries, in order to see how different these perspectives can be.

A final thought, many people who have learned English as an additional language (and or adsorbed Western culture) have undergone a mind-hack of some sort, doesn't this leave many mono-lingual English speakers at a disadvantage?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Via a Muse

This is what learning Mandarin means to me in respect to learning about the Internet, no Wait! let me explain ;)

Like the artist's muse my language learning gives me a focus, a filter, a point of reference and a reason to learn more about Web(n.0) and to judge whether a new technology is really helping me. Perhaps because I often spend more time working on the back-end of websites I used to find it difficult to learn about using web-technologies via learning about web-technologies. I often felt I was in a kind of "echo chamber". Although this work that sold for so much money probably doesn't fully represent a muse.

At Dconstruct08 Aleks Krotoski explains how Web developers can learn from game developers, this is her own summary on at the Guardian. I think learners can learn from game players also, make it fun, get passionate and the learning happens before your realize.

What is your muse, or if you don't have one, how do you avoid the echo chamber?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Potential of the Internet

The Rue Sophie Germain named for the French mathematician (1776 - 1831).

I believe that the Internet has boosted learning potential in a way that most of us have not caught up with yet. The full impact has yet to be realized but I think many subjects, or the foundation of many subjects can be easily acquired and practiced by an individual with no need for teachers, classes, university etc.

Of course to learn successfully requires dedication and interest but this is almost always the case, no matter what the method. The internet gives us unprecedented access to information, unprecedented access to fellow learners and experts and supports more media and approaches than most traditional methods.

A big hint lies in the IT sector, of there are many that are formally educated, but due to the ever changing nature of IT and due to fact that the barrier to playing with and building real things with real technology is so low, many people in successful IT careers have no formal qualifications at all, many have learned everything that supports their career via the very same devices and infrastructure they use in their daily work.

Take the mathematician who inspired the French street name above, she taught herself mathematics from books in her fathers library despite all the efforts of her family to stop her (not the done thing for a middle class girl at the time), she had to pretend to be a man initially to correspond with famous mathematicians of the time and develop her theories. Think how much lower is the barrier to entry for a modern day Sophie Germain, the vital inputs and opportunities to communicate are so much more now. The interesting questions is will the availability of information create many more autodidacts like Sophie?

In language learning we have access to media, learning resources, foreign speakers, fellow learners, free tools (Audacity for audio for example, your own personal language lab), I firmly believe that any reasonably motivated learner can learn a language to a significantly better level than most university students in less time as a hobby (it really seems that farcical).

I hear people moaning about informational overload but this is a personal problem we just have to learn to adjust the way we view learning and knowledge, nowadays the possession of information is less important than the understanding of it and the ability to do things with it. The memory tricks of savants like Kim Peek seem much less impressive today, although Kim has show an increasing ability to work with his facts and develop his social skills due to his fame allowing him to practice and use what he knows. Many of us today can retrieve information as reliably Kim does and almost as fast, it is up to us to understand and use it.

I understand that some areas will always need professional qualifications, and some will need access to special equipment (particle physics springs to mind at the moment). But the basis of knowledge acquisition in these areas can still be acquired outside of special institutions.

How many times have I heard someone say "I really want to learn XXXX, I haven't started yet though I am waiting to see if there is going to be a course at the college next year...." how much do you want to learn???

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Social Network Portability

Attended the Dconstruct conference last week and as last time I'll try to process the information I got from it over the next few weeks. As I am also attending BathCamp next week I will start with the talks that have any kind of potential connection with my BathCamp presentation.

Tantek Çelik gave an interesting talk on Social Network Portability a brief summary of which is provided by Tom Hume.

The point Tom makes that there may be instances where we don't want to share aspects of ourselves between different social sites is one that immediately came to my mind also. In my case an excellent example is when using some social sites for language learning. I don't see this a significant barrier though, unless I am mistaken in the application side of things, a profile page that you create on a social site is not going to be able to make those connections or allow others to make them unless you provide the initial link into your social network, it will still be easy to create completly separate identities. Also the connection to your identities on other social sites will be limited to public information.

The basic aims that Tantek initially expressed certainly need to be addressed, my own AHA moment recently came whilst using the microblogging service at identi.ca, thanks to the openmicroblogging specification I was able to follow a user on http://openmicroblogger.com/ simply by adding the url of his profile page. The exchange of avatar icons and who is following, being followed by who happened automatically (try doing that on Twitter).

I guess at that moment the microblogging AHA moment sums up my interest in this area (although I have not looked under the hood I don't thing it uses the same technology Tantek was discussing), unless I am doing something at work that is impacted by Social Network Portability then I will leave the implementation and specifications to others and wait to see how it affects me. I have installed the Operator Firefox extension for microformats and so far it doesn't appear that much if anything I am using online is using them (or if it is, then it doesn't impact what I am doing).

Information on the technologies that Tantek discussed can be found here on the microformat wiki.

BathCamp Presentation

For the last two and a half years I have been learning Chinese, for the last two and a half years I have also been learning about learning especially how the learning landscape is changing thanks to the web technologies.

Learning Chinese has become my muse for learning about new web technologies. My job has involved me in many different aspects of developing web applications (possibly too many) and a while ago I had totally lost touch with the front end and more importantly how to "use" the emergent technologies. Because I don't feel you can really understand something until you can use it and because I was interested in learning a language I decided to learn a language as much as possible via the internet.

I like to write down my thoughts sometimes especially to refine ideas, when I came to think about a presentation for Bathcamp the obvious thing to do was to write down anything I feel I have learned so far and then pull out the more interesting points(in my opinion) for a short spoken presentation. Whatever happens the writings will be useful to me in the future, I have found it very useful to review what I wrote about Dconstruct last year.

I tend to write in more than one place and may have some other resources to add so I am going to try to pull all the background material to the presentation in a twine. By the time I make the short spoken presentation (or at least shortly afterwards); hopefully everything underpinning it will be available on the twine.

Dconstruct and Bathcamp

Interesting couple of weeks ahead, this week I am attending the Dconstruct conference in Brighton and the following weekend I will be attending Bathcamp. Attendance of Dconstruct last year provoked lots of thought and posts about Internet related matters but I suspect that this year Bathcamp will generate or refine even more.

I strongly suspect that Bathcamp will generate more this year, primarily because being an unconference I will be making my own small presentation, this requires a lot of thought....

This post will be a small part of the background to my upcoming Bathcamp presentation.

BathCamp

Short post this, but there will be more. I am signed up to attend Bathcamp later in the summer and looking forward to it, it will be my first attendance of a barcamp style un-conference. I am not entirely sure what to expect, but I am sure it will be interesting and well worth the time.

Twine has started opening little bits to the public now, I quite like a few elements of Twine but there are some things that don't seem to work very well still, building a Twine of language learning resources is going OK, I am building a Bathcamp Twine but already it seems more work than it should be (I am going to have to make a logo for it, add lots of links and text by hand etc. etc.).

Now I wondering how to make a presentation for Bathcamp, I guess as much of my internet interaction that is not work related has been to do with learning Chinese via the internet this will be the theme, there are a lot of web technology goodies in there I just have to shake them out and dust them off. Trouble is I always leave these things to the last minute. Emergency plan is to juggle whilst harmonic throat singing (Tuvan style), I hope it doesn't come to that...

More on the Demise of Email

A while ago I posted on my feelings about email, it was a brief post provoked by frustration at the time, I was intending to come back to the topic but this post at ReadWriteWeb entitled Is Email In Danger says it all really for now.

I think the frustration that I am feeling is not so much to do with email still being used but more to do with the fact that other tools that fit communication needs are not being used in so many organisations.

What flavor of Stone Soup is Twine

I have been playing with Twine for a little while now. Some aspects I really like but there are one or two things that puzzle me, and one or two that I am not sure about. I think the twines themselves have potential, I have slowly started building up one that I hope will be a good way to share some resources, particularly when Twine goes public. I am sure that some will think that the aspects that bother me are simply down to not knowing enough about how Twine works, or more likely because I am not using Twine enough yet. This "not using Twine enough" is the thing that bothers me most, the mantra used to answer criticisms of Twine is that "the more you use it, the more you get out of it". Well that seems reasonable but I also think that a cutting edge semantic web app. should do some things almost from the get go.

There is the story of the stone soup, it doesn't really matter if you don't know it and don't wish to read the Wikipedia entry, hopefully my point will still make sense. Is it that the flavor of the Twine soup is mainly derived from all the ingredients that are added to it by the users. A cunning but relatively simple starting framework could attract a critical mass of interaction and this mass then be used to develop a semantic application. Of course you need content to be added and categorized at some level, but once you have content why does it seemingly require a lot of activity to guess what kind of new content a user may be interested in.

My best example so far is a story on Mandarin immersion learning , here are the things that Twine could know.

1. I have created one twine so far, it is tagged with mandarin


2. I have posted a high percentage of items tagged with mandarin


3. I have read a number of other items tagged with mandarin and shared one or two to other twines


4. I have conducted a search for mandarin


5. I have pulled an RSS feed against the mandarin tag search


6. The mandarin tag is relatively rarely used on twine

Yet when a new item is bookmarked on Twine and has a mandarin tag, I am not alerted. Given all the information above and not withstanding any smart programming that may be monitoring my activity across twines or connections I cannot imagine not picking up on at least enough of the low hanging fruit above to alert me somehow on the item. In fact if I had been involved with the programming I would have a red face at this point because Twine is touted to be smart etc. There is a remote possibility that I missed something I suppose but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to discover or tell me of the important fact, also the twine where the article appeared wouldn't normally hold my interest enough to make it worthwhile subscribing to it, so the standard Twinerian approach of subscribing to a huge number of twines wouldn't have helped either

There are a number of other things I am looking into that worry me. There is a "bug" where if you post a bookmark that is already in Twine you get duplicated items, even if you post to the same Twine. Putting on my programmers hat this is more than a bug, unless I am mistaken it seems that the url of a bookmark is its unique identifier, this should be enforced at the back-end and unit-tested, not allowed to bubble through to the user interface. Other opportunities to cut down on information clutter have been missed for example my Twine digest email informs me of items I have posted myself.

What I have at the moment to discover things I may be interested in a marvelous hack-up of RSS feeds, pumped and tweaked and combined through Google Reader, Netvibes and now increasing Yahoo pipes. This chaotic system has the amazing ability to (assuming I apply a little regular maintenance and tweaking) to supply me with a pretty good overall picture of things I may be interested in. Now I am increasingly adding Yahoo pipes to the mix I can see another big step-up in the ability of my ad-hoc distributed tangle to serve this purpose. In fact if you didn't know how it worked you could even be mistaken for thinking the system I am using has some kind of intelligence (Yahoo pipes probably being the major potential contributor here).

Twine is a useful social repository to drop information into, they have convinced me of that, also it is supposed to automatically tag things (well sometimes), why haven't the simple quick wins to link people with interesting information been picked up on, especially when I can get so much mileage from tweaking and manipulating RSS feeds from disparate sources all over the Internet? The recommendations that are supposed to kick in once Twine has learned enough about me haven't show me anything yet. My experiment is going to be to see if I can get more interesting and relevant content to read from Twine simply by the manipulation of its many RSS feeds (and become a Yahoo pipes power-user at the same time ;)). At the moment I am betting on my system to win, to be fair I am interacting with Twine in a manner that should help their recommendation system, but not as fast as some (anyway a system that only works for power-users is not a mainstream system at all).

As it happens a helpful Twine user called Twain (thank you twain) told me about the Mandarin post in a reply to a comment on an unrelated thread, which was nice, even though I was already aware of it. This however does not count as Twine informing me of it.

Ultimately the stone soup story can be interpreted in a number of different ways, with both a positive and negative slant, lets hope the Twine story has a happy ending.

BBC go full fat RSS

Just a quick YAAAYY. Due to pressure from some of their users, more BBC RSS is full feed. As I have said before I much, much prefer full feeds.

It is supposed to be a conversation (part1)

A chain of thoughts that started a little while ago and ended up in me resolving some personal thoughts about what a semantic web actually means (to me at least). Bear with me because in part 1 the semantic bit is not really obvious.

It all started when I came across a forum that had a "correct this grammar" link next to each post. I am not sure if this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen or just a very, very clever way to divert the time and energy of pedants whilst quietly direct all their corrective output to /dev/null/ (a place where the sun don't shine). If it was a diversion it was very authentic looking as it even had instructions telling you to retain the original meaning, your corrections were supposed to be approved by a moderator.

I came across this whilst I still had the "well intentioned??" efforts of some grammar/spelling actionists fresh in my mind. They hadn't been directed at me but they easily could have been and we had crossed swords. Often the grammar pedant will start with something like "I hate to be a pedant but it irks me when..." so we have to assume that in this case irk > hate.

There are places where writing as correctly as possible is important, however consider that people do not speak grammatically, when having conversations they do not use correct grammar (amazingly some people haven't even realized this). I view comments, some types of blog posts etc. etc. as conversations and the word conversation is often used to describe many interactions on the web. We are pulling in more and more information, and engaging in more and more online conversations, usually testing/refining ideas, for many people now this is not a place to worry too much about the technicalities of language so long as the meanings and concepts are exercised. I consider many of these conversations are supposed to be quick and snappy, and people adapt to this environment. We don't have same pressure to use l8r for later as we would when texting but there is a pressure there

English is often not the first language of the conversationalists but is the default language of many places where they have to interact (not so smart or sensitive to pick holes in what they have written). This was the case when I lost my rag a little and had to intervene (it irked me to intervene but I hated what was going on).

By all means strive for correct grammar and spelling in a CV or presentation or highbrow blog etc. but apart from that I think those that are upset by non-perfect English should deal with the irksomeness out of the public eye.

How do I think this relates to the semantic web, well that is coming soon.

Languages are made by ordinary human beings not by God or the pundits who stand in for him.
Anthony Burgess loved language and was a linguist. He enjoyed the play of words and the technicalities of grammar and pronounciation. However in his books on language he was consistent in objecting against those that were overly sensitive to its usage, ending on one occasion with
When we think we are making such a judgment we are often merely making a statement about our prejudices.