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Re: [Air-l] Why not make Aoir 5.0 "Virtual conference"?
by Lauren Langman 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Dear Wu Mei : I hate to sound like a sociologist, but I am one, let me say that human beings do have needs for networks and connections that can only be realized face to face contact, even if we all had webcams and could see each other, it would not be enough. I know its a bit essentialist, but I am not a pomo, but I would go so far as to say that contect, connection and attachment are in our DNA. While professional and colleagial relations are not like deep friendships and relationships, it does happen that meetings can lead to such (I met my wife at a meeting. But even for our scientific work we gain much from sitting and talking with each other in a face to face context. As Durkhiem, in his analysis of primitive religion, the otherwise dispersed clans came together once a year to affirm their common roots, shared identities, and rekindle the bonds of solidarity. In this way, many of our conferences serve very similar functions. And while most of us are quite comfortable with emails, websites, blogs, virtual communities and who knows, someday teledildonics, a community of scholars, not all that different from premodern Australian nomads, do have a need to come together and enact rituals and beliefs that join us together in a scholarly community. And as we know, those of us who do internet stuff, from a number of disciplines, are not typically likely to meet each other in most other venues. Hope to see you in Chicago next year, and perhaps have another great dinner. Warmly, Lauren >>> meiwu(a)umac.mo 10/05/04 9:02 PM >>> As we are all researchers on the "virtual world", why should we still keep to the old, pre-Internet tradition of holding an annual conference in a "real venue," but not in a "virtual venue"? All the technologies to hold a virtual conference are available. What we need is to be more innovative in practising what we have been campaigning in our research: being global and connecting to as many people as possible with the help of the internet. What I suggest is that Aoir 5.0 could select one "real venue," and at the same time, set up a "virtual venue" for those who have registered, but for whatever reasons (be entry regulations, cost consideration, busy schedules, hurricanes, etc..) could not come to the "real venue" to participate, specially for panel discussions. Virtual participants can also organize local panels. Just throw my little thought here. Wu Mei University of Macau _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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Re: [Air-l] How can we identify critical thinkers in the sample of a research project?
by Jeremy J. Shapiro 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

The person to write to about this is Stephen Brookfield (sdbrookfield(a)stthomas.edu) he is one of the world experts on critical thinking. Jeremy Shapiro At 02:49 PM 10/5/2004, your brain seems to have output the following: -------------------------------------------------------- Dear colleagues I am in the middle of designing a questionnaire to get information about the sample of my study (Phd degree). In addition to obtaining all necessary demographic information I also need to find out about their previous critical reflection experiences-if any- so that I can identify the critical thinkers in my sample. Would anyone have any knowledge or ideas on how can I identify this via the questionnaire method and/or related theory-critical reflection indicators? Many thanks. Kate Pavlidou aikaterini.pavlidou(a)durham.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org --------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [Air-l] Hungarian and others
by Bram Dov Abramson 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

>Partly it's out of date but also it's skewed by >measuring pages on secure servers. Those are >largely used for e-commerce and a very high >proportion of them are in English (or at least >were in English as of 2001, it's hard to say how >that might have changed by now). If I remember right, the OECD report in question's look at links to secure servers (https, really) -- outsourced to Netcraft, who did the actual work -- was an explicit attempt to measure e-commerce activity, not general Web activity (which is being referred to here as "Internet" activity, apparently). I think that right next to it was a comparative figure for http (non-secure) links, where English was a bit lower. >Some statistical work was done for UNESCO here last year that indicates >that there is vastly less language diversity on the internet than is >routinely claimed. > >And I'm talking about whole orders of magnitude of difference, >here, not just a few percentage points. Elijah, that sounds quite interesting -- can you describe the methodology? cheers Bram

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How can we identify critical thinkers in the sample of a research project?
by kate.pavlidou＠netceptions.net 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Dear colleagues I am in the middle of designing a questionnaire to get information about the sample of my study (Phd degree). In addition to obtaining all necessary demographic information I also need to find out about their previous critical reflection experiences-if any- so that I can identify the critical thinkers in my sample. Would anyone have any knowledge or ideas on how can I identify this via the questionnaire method and/or related theory-critical reflection indicators? Many thanks. Kate Pavlidou aikaterini.pavlidou(a)durham.ac.uk

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Re: [Air-l] Hungarian and others
by Mark Warschauer 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Here's the paper I was looking for. Based on data collected in 2002, the authors estimate that 72% of public Web pages are in English (a percent that is, according to the authors, unchanged since 1999). Unfortunately, they only report on the most frequent 12 languages, and Basque is not included. People can judge for themselves the methodology. The article is publicly available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/lavoie/04lavoie.html Mark At 4:06 PM +0000 10/5/04, P.J. Oiarzabal wrote: >Hi, >Could you let me know where did you get the statistics? I would like >to know the percentage of websites on minority languages such as >Basque. >Thanks > >Pedro J. Oiarzabal

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Hungarian and others 2
by Jakob Linaa Jensen 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Let me add to my previous comment that I think we should definitely welcome contributions from other language areas and countries than those traditionally contributing. My comments addressed the question of the working language for the AoIR conferences alone, just to avoid any misunderstandings .... :-)

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RE: [Air-l] Hungarian and others
by Cunliffe D J (Comp) 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Hi, I tend to agree with Mark's estimate of the percentage of websites in English. Another interesting figure estimated by Global Reach was that almost 95% of the online population in 2004 were native speakers of just 11 languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Korean, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and Dutch). UNESCO had a figure on their web site that suggested that 90% of the world's languages were not represented on the Internet. All of these figures need to be taken with a huge pinch of salt of course. The issue of scholarly publishing in lesser-used languages is a complex one as it has impacts on post graduate and undergraduate teaching in that language. This in turn raises questions about the use of the language in schools and so on. There are also issues of whether publications in lesser used languages will be included in assessments of research quality (which then impact funding) such as the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK. In an environment where dissemination is electronic it should be possible for authors to provide native language and English versions of their papers. There is a newly started paper-based journal "Cyfrwng: Media Wales Journal" in which half the papers are in English and half in Welsh. All other information, such as the Editorial is bilingual. Translations of the Welsh papers are provided online for subscribers. No Welsh translation is provided for the English papers, presumably because Welsh speakers are all fluent English speakers too. If there was a will to include other languages in AoIR there are possibilities, but there is also likely to be more work and to raise other issues (do I have to provide an English translation before my paper is reviewed - if so isn't that a waste if it is rejected and aren't you favouring people who only summit in English (less effort, less cost) - if not, can you really find Welsh speaking specialists to review my paper fairly?) Be seeing you, Daniel. ==== Daniel Cunliffe Minority Cultures & ICT Group University of Glamorgan Wales, UK.

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Re: [Air-l] Hungarian and others
by J. J. 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

I agree with your sentiment, but I think your information is out of date. The percentage of Websites in English is probably in the range of 60-65%, or perhaps even less by now --- still out of proportion to speakers of English, but far less than 97%. Mark Thank you for the correction. My information came from Robert Kozmas article in International Journal of Educational Development 24 (2004). Although recently published, Kozma quotes a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 2001 that puts the worlds Internet content at 94% in English, as measured by the number of links to pages on secured servers (p. 362). The information very well might be dated. Jarek About 10% of the world's population has access to the Internet but 97% of web sites are designed in English. If you need reference for these statistics let me know but unless we recognize the importance and validity of other languages in cyberspace, we can find ourselves on the receiving end of the global spectrum. If anything, we should encourage research and scholarly contribution in other, lesser known (to the English-speaking world) languages. Jarek Mark Warschauer Associate Professor, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Informatics University of California, Irvine tel: (949) 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 markw(a)uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! hthttp://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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RE: [Air-l] Hungarian and others
by St-Amant, Kirk 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

Hi Jarek, I would like the references for these statistics. Thanks, Kirk ________________________________ From: air-l-aoir.org-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org on behalf of J. J. Sent: Tue 10/5/2004 10:30 AM To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-l] Hungarian and others About 10% of the world's population has access to the Internet but 97% of web sites are designed in English. If you need reference for these statistics let me know but unless we recognize the importance and validity of other languages in cyberspace, we can find ourselves on the receiving end of the global spectrum. If anything, we should encourage research and scholarly contribution in other, lesser known (to the English-speaking world) languages. Jarek Santiago Canyon College Orange, California _________________________________________________________________ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org(a)listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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getting hysterical
by J. J. 05 Oct '04

05 Oct '04

>I assure you that if the Department of Homeland Security could >fingerprint Mexican and Canadian travellers without re-negotiating the >treaty, it would. And stressing the importance of other languages DHS sounds like KGB to me ... Hyesterical? Disillusioned maybe for now ... Jarek Santiago Canyon College Orange, California _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! hthttp://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

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