INTRODUCING BILINGUIMS IN COMPUTING TITLING IN ALMERIA

Introducing bilinguism in the computing titling of Almeria

1-Introduction

In this work, we present the activities done during the innovation group first year. This group is dedicated to the design of IT tools to facilitate the learning of bilingual material related with computing. 

The new information and communication technologies can be utilized as a tool to get the difference competencies of the subjects. In this way, for example, we can use IT to:

-The use of portfolio in which pupils put their work and use it as evaluation tool.

- Design of multimedia materials en different languages, such as “videotutoriales, lessons records…”

- The design of a common wiki to the join of implicated subjects.

-  Define in a glossary, specific terms in different languages.

- PostCads’ design.

- Design of different WebQuest that guide interactively to the student through web

2-  Topic used in the teaching group.

 In the titling of Official Master in Advanced Informatics Techniques, 51 of the 109 credits ECTS optative offered are given in a bilingual way. The majority of the subjects started with this plan last year and this year, there are more bilingual subjects.

The teaching group gives bilingual lessons within the master titling TIA. This teaching group centers their activity in the IT material development and in the activities for bilingual subjects of the master TIA

3-Results and applications practices done.

The teachers have done use of E-PEL as portfolio of the languages to know all the possibilities and offer it as tools to the student in the next course.

One of the most interesting teaching activities to the objectives achievement pose in this project, it’s about the use of computing tools that permits the professor exposition and the student learning of the master activities in a collaborative way. In this way, we get a work where the discussion predominate, the freedom to present creativity and ideas.

EXAMPLES OF SCHOOLS WITH TECHNOLOGICAL EXPERIENCES

Here we have two examples of two schools which have introduced new technologies in their educative policy. In the first experience of the Bilingual School, La Devesa de Carlet, they have developed and interesting project called AULATICE which pioneer in its introduction. In the other hand, the second experience of Liceo Sorolla school of Pozuelo de Alarcón focuses on Apple Education.

FIRST EXPERIENCE

One of the main pillars of the Bilingual School La Devesa de Carlet, is the use of the latest technologies. From the center, these tools are incorporated into the teaching and learning preocess. Aware that competition in its use will be an essential tool for our youth to integrate into the society of the future requirement.

As evidence of this concern, the school is under a project called AULATICE organized by the DIM (research center " Didactic and Multimedia" at the University of Barcelona) led by Pere Marqués , pioneering the use of new technology the field of teaching in Spain.

This project aims to integrate the use of new technologies in the field of education in order to facilitate student learning and be a tool for teachers when transmitting knowledge.

In collaboration with DIM , last January the first seminar of the project  took place at the Bilingual School La Devesa "For a bimodal curriculum and combating school failure " given by José Antonio Blesa as coordinator , teacher, pioneer in the use of interactive whiteboards and the first to introduce the tablet PC in the classroom.

The purpose of it, apart from the fight against school failure, is also to improve academic outcomes, taking into account multiple intelligences and skills.

As a pioneer centre in the use of the latest technologies and recognized as Microsoft Innovative School , Devesa Carlet Bilingual School participates in these projects to follow in his line of innovation and maintain their "Olympic mentality " of constant improvement .

The conclusions to be drawn from both the project and the AULATICE bet Colegio La Devesa by ICTs are all positive. On the one hand students have extra motivation because every new thing attracts them and makes even the shyest people to participate. This is only a mention of some of the advantages they offer. Here we would add the infinite possibilities of the Internet, blogs that teachers serve to link both classroom work as you can do at home...

From this we extract that to train students today current tools are required, where "Learning Sharing" is the educational paradigm of the education in the present. This can only be achieved in an open center out, not just the classroom where on the walls and where the teacher acts as a guide and manager of all the information flowing into it from books, audiovisual, internet and students. The classroom becomes a workshop where knowledge is created from individual work and group, and where people develop in all its dimensions and diversity.

SECOND EXPERIENCE

Every year, in the Liceo Sorolla school of Pozuelo de Alarcón, we try to keep our academic level and also improve everyday. We know how much important it is for our students to have a modern technology available, appropriate to nowadays’ needs. We know how much important it is to create new systems of teaching that makes learning easier and enjoyable. And we know how much important it is to offer updated facilities to enjoy a good academic atmosphere.

Among the main innovations of this year, we bet on Apple Education. Last year we made a study of the didactic benefits from working with iPads in class. We visited pioneer schools which have already introduced them in London, Madrid and also Barcelona. One of the most important advantages is the child’s capacity for working in a faster and more efficient way, using the same tools that are being used today in companies, with the opportunity of sharing works with colleagues and teachers in an immediate way and, above all, obtaining feedback. The last point is basic for learning, since when a student knows where his mistake is, he can change it automatically, being faster and more efficient.

However, our association with Apple goes further. We have chosen this company, not just because it offers a big amount of educative applications or the quality of its devices, but because they also give training to our teachers about the use of iPad in class or the creation of contents with iTunes or eBook author. In addition, we are one of the first privileged schools in Madrid that joins this adventure.

We have Apple TV in every classroom, which enormously facilitates teachers’ labor when they have to explain something in their lessons. What is more, each teacher has their iPad and our objective is that each child has their own one too. He have also updated our computer classroom once again and we have increased the number of computers so that each student is able to use their own one. Besides, we have installed optical fiber in our school, thinking about the future, since in less than a year, there will be lots of devices downloading data and sharing contents.

We are at a turning point. Technology will finally play a key role in education and it will influence in the learning process. We must be careful but brave. The sector of education has always been very conservative, however, technology offers a lot of advantages and we must try to get the best of it.

                                                                                                                                 

We have keep on searching information although it has been difficult because there is not a lot of information about our issue. Here we have an article about the application of technologies in multilinguism schools.

MULTILINGUALISM ON THE NET

Mr Toru Nishigaki
Professor
Institute of Social Science
University of Tokyo
Japan

Introduction

What will be the effect of the Internet upon natural languages in the 21^st century? It is widely accepted that, generally speaking, any new media change languages. For example, the prevalence of TV has dramatically homogenized spoken accents over the past few decades. Young people tend to speak in almost the same way as TV casters, and local dialects and accents remain only among the speech of older people.

This TV effect, however, is insignificant as compared with the enormous effect of print media on languages over the past few hundred years. The prevailing print texts, especially newspapers etc., enabled millions of people who had never met each other to think about the same topics in the same language, thus creating a sort of community identity. This community identity was transformed into national identity, upon which in turn the nation-state was established, as discussed by political scientist Benedict Anderson [1]. Print languages are widely acknowledged as standard national languages, for which dictionaries are edited, and lessons are given in schools. On the other hand, other languages gradually declined. Since the market economy requires any printing business to have a certain amount of readers, print languages tend to be limited to so-called major languages spoken by millions of people. In short, the number of written languages on the earth decreased after the arrival of print media.

What, then, will the arrival of the Internet bring about? ---- Roughly speaking, we can predict two distinct directions. The first one is English monopoly. The Internet has originated in the United States, and it is obvious that at present most international correspondence takes place in English. This is partly for the historical reason that the Internet has developed as a communication tool for the researchers of science and technology whose common language is English. Now general people in addition to science and technology researchers often utilize the Internet, but English is still the dominant language if one wants to look at foreign Web sites or send E-mail across state borders. Therefore there is the possibility that, sooner or later in the 21^st century, English will become the sole common language for international communication, thereby accompanying the inescapable decline of other languages. In this case the term globalization means the hegemony of English-based, United States-centered single culture spreading all over the world.

On the other hand, however, we may expect the second direction where various cultures in different countries thrive and interchange with each other, resulting in fruitful and plural global culture. The globalization of the Internet, if a multilingual environment is realized, is expected to attain this plural culture.

One of the noteworthy features of the Internet is, as opposed to print media, that one need not have many readers when writing texts for public consumption. As long as we have the system to transmit and display inputted texts correctly, we can expect to see diverse texts in various languages freely moving around on the Internet. In Japan, for example, we presently have few print texts in languages other than Japanese or English. However, her

eafter we may have the chance to see abundant texts in any language flowing into Japan through the Internet, be they in Arabic, Hindu, or whatever.

Which of these two directions is taken largely depends upon the information processing technology for the Internet. In the last few years there has been noteworthy technological progress towards the second direction. A key issue consists in the development of an international character code system. The well-known Universal multiple-octet Coded character Set (UCS), authorized as ISO/IEC-10646-1 in 1993, offers a large number of characters for various languages. The current UCS is based on Unicode which is 16-bit character code system [2]. The noteworthy fact is that a lot of de fact standard software like Web browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape) and mailers (Outlook Express, etc.) have recently come to support UCS. Therefore users, once they have downloaded the necessary character fonts, are able to exchange message texts in diverse languages across state borders.

1. What are the main issues?

The end of this century is becoming a major turning point in the character of the Internet, as it changes from an English-monolingual to a multilingual environment. It is obvious that this new direction is preferable, because proficiency in English can be expected only from a relatively small part of the world’s population. Nevertheless many problems still face the development of a true multilingual environment.

There are three technological issues involved in the realization of a multilingual environment on the Internet. Firstly, an international character code system as stated above. The conventional character code systems are different from state to state. For example, Japan, China and Korea have independent code system called JIS, GB and KS respectively, and within these systems the same Chinese (Han) characters have different codes. Obviously this causes great problems in international communication. The UCS of ISO/IEC-10646-1 determines universal codes for 38,885 characters in 25 scripts, namely Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bopomofo, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmkhi, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Latin, Lao, Malayalam, Oriya, Phonetic, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan. There are 20,902 Chinese characters included in the UCS. However, critical comments are often heard in Japan and China because the total number of Chinese characters is said to be much more than 50,000. In addition, such scripts as Ethiopic and Mongolian are still excluded in the current UCS. It would be necessary for the UCS to expand itself towards the development of a code system of 32-bit or more, if this wider range of characters and scripts is to be included. At the same time manufacturers would be required to make their products able to handle the UCS.

The second issue is an input/output system. That is, we need the technology to input various characters using keyboards or touch panels, and conversely, to display them on screens or papers. This is an important point, since oriental characters are generally more complex than occidental ones. The input/output systems of Chinese characters were studied intensively during the 1980s, and we now have highly refined ones in Japan and China. In general the technological level of input/output systems in northern Asia are fairly satisfactory, including Hangul handling systems in Korea. As for southern Asia, on the other hand, we can see much more variance. The levels of information technology in Singapore and Malaysia are advanced, followed by those of Philippines, Thai and Indonesia, but there are other countries whose levels are still unsatisfactory. The inherent complexity in their scripts often hinders the rapid development of text processing technology.

The case of India is especially worth mentioning. Highly developed information industries and excellent engineers are already found in some cities of India, indicating its high potential in this technological field. Despite that, the language situation of India --- with as many as 18 official languages --- is too complex to realize a satisfactory multilingual environment on the Internet [3]. It will be difficult to achieve a simple and easy-to-use multilingual environment on the Internet in southern Asia, where many nations and languages are intermingled.

The third issue is translation-support technology. This is the technology to realize people’s quick understanding and composition of foreign texts by the use of computers. Probably it is considered to be the hardest part of the technologies for multilingual environment on the Internet. The ability to handle diverse characters would be of little use if one cannot understand foreign texts at all. For example the inflow of Arabic texts into Japan could hardly promote international communication unless at least a certain amount of Japanese people can easily grasp their meaning. Therefore one may rightly expect that the technology to translate a foreign text automatically by computer would be of great help.

It is well known, however, that so-called machine translation remains a dream technology with few practical applications. During 1980s a lot of research work was done in the field of artificial intelligence with the aim of realizing machine translation, but without much success. This is mainly because computers find it hard to grasp the ever-changing contexts in which human languages are used [4]. Nevertheless computers can rightly assist the understanding and/or composition of foreign texts by human being. By memorizing vocabularies and grammatical knowledge in computers, and by retrieving them interactively on demand, even a beginner of foreign language study may quickly grasp the general idea of texts and/or carry on simple compositions. What is important in the Internet age is not perfect translation of each sentence but improvement of communication ability interconnecting different languages. Interactive translation-support technology is considered to become indispensable for this purpose.

2. Language/Power Forum – An Experiment of Multilingualism

Global academic efforts are indispensable for the realization of multilingualism on the Internet. We would like to introduce here an experimental online forum termed Language/Power (L/P) which we are carrying on in Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo.

The L/P forum is an interdisciplinary academic forum of which participants are specialized in a variety of fields such as sociology, politics, economics, law, computer science, religious studies, anthropology, linguistics, literature, etc. Among them are engineers and journalists as well as researchers. The discussion centers on how people with different nationalities and languages can constitute an online community. An example of discussion theme is "online communities and the individual, language and state", which focuses on the relation between the individual and the state in the 21^st century. The forum name Language/Power symbolizes that language is always related to questions of social power.

Everybody is welcome to follow the discussions of the L/P forum on the Web page at the following address, although it is basically a closed forum where invited participants are allowed to express their views: http://lp.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

A distinctive feature of this Web page is that contents are displayed in five languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean and Indonesian. We plan to add French, German and others in due course. In order to display various characters side by side on the screen, we utilize the Unicode (UTF-8) which corresponds to the UCS of ISO/IEC-10646-1. Therefore one needs a Web browser which supports the Unicode like Internet Explorer 4.0.

The participants of the forum send messages for discussion to a moderator by E-mail, and the moderator displays the messages on the Web page after translating them into other languages. We make use of translation-support software in this process, but our staff members often modify the outputs of machine translation to improve translation quality.

The L/P forum as such is an experiment in multilingual international communication on the Internet, as well as an interdisciplinary discussion on 21^st century multilingualism. It thus offers a sharp contrast to conventional arguments criticizing the monopoly of English on the Internet, but which have no choice but to be put in English for international communication. In the L/P forum, on the other hand, people are able to search for solutions to the problem in a multilingual environment. Concrete technological issues as well as theoretical ones are addressed, to find ways of bringing machine translation software closer to the needs of users in order to achieve effective translation for mulilingual communication.

3. Summary and Conclusion

The language situation on earth will change greatly in the 21^st century and will have enormous effects on cultures and societies, as the globalization promoted by the Internet gathers pace. If English continues to be the sole language of international communication, those proficient in English will tend to control a cyberspace from which most people of non-English speaking countries are excluded. There is a possibility that the whole earth will be covered by the culture of English speaking countries, especially that of the United States. Despite that, the recent development of information technology is bringing about an opposite situation, where a variety of languages circulate in cyberspace, thus opening the way for a fruitful world culture of intensive linguistic exchange.

The key technological issues for realizing a multilingual environment on the Internet are the development of an international character code system, character input/output systems and translation-support systems. A 16-bit international character code system UCS has already been authorized by ISO/IEC, but further efforts are required with its expansion to 32-bit code. As for character input/output systems, more efforts are needed in and for developing countries like those in parts of southern Asia. And computer-supported translation technology is now expected to contribute significantly to the multilingual communication on the Internet.

Everybody on earth ought to be able to participate in the Internet society in the 21^st century. To achieve this goal, it is important to enable everybody to send messages in his/her own mother tongue. The more different language texts are exchanged on the Internet, the more people get interested in foreign languages. In short, a multilingual environment on the Internet can be expected to have preferable effect on foreign language education, which will result in the promotion of deep cultural interchange.

Print media have partitioned the earth into independent nation-states each with its own national language. On the other hand, new electronic media like the Internet are now interconnecting those different languages with each other, in the hope of creating something which may be called a new global culture.

REFERENCES

1. B. Anderson "Imagined Communities", Verso, London, 1983.
2. "The Unicode Standard", Version 2.0, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
3. K. Keniston "Politics, Culture, and Software", Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, Jan. 1998.
4. T. Winograd and F. Flores "Understanding Computers and Cognition", Ablex, New Jersey, 1986
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   We are going to look for information more concrete in order to be able to structure the other blog and start working on it.

Introduction

Firstly we have been serching general information about the inclution of technologies in Bilinguel Education and here there is the link where we have obtained it from.

http://education2.uvic.ca/Faculty/gpotter/ncs/ICT_in_Bilingual_Education%20editing.htm

 We have summary some of the information and this is the result:

Most bilingual programs involve two languages: English and one other. The usual purpose of a bilingual program is to teach a student English and to maintain and enhance the use of  native language. The challenge for bilingual educators is the development of an instructional process that not only does both of these things, but also properly teaches a full and approved curriculum.

A substantial array of processes must be considered, ranging from understanding how the mind stores and uses information in two languages; to whether or not thorough comprehension of content is possible when it is delivered and received in a foreign language

A recent challenge has been to determine the appropriate role for information technologies in a bilingual instructional environment. How well can computer, audio and video-based instructional devices and software enhance the program?

There are many bilingual schools in the world, and the authors of this descriptive paper refer to two particularly interesting ones: New Century School in Dongguan China and the new bilingual international school being constructed at Rangsit University in Thailand.

The Role of IT in bilingual education 

The introduction of information technologies into educational practice has been a haphazard process in most schools. Few educators doubt the wisdom of using computer-based instructional systems; and virtually all parents want their children to be thoroughly familiar with digital and computerized processes. While the vast majority of teachers remain technologically illiterate, many Education ministries around the world have established clear policies encouraging the incorporation of IT into the daily operations of a school.

The International Society for Technology in Education has established a set of guidelines for the role of IT in educational practice. There are many of them, but those germane to the creation of bilingual instructional environments include:

1) Teachers who understand how technology systems function.
2) Teachers who are proficient in the use of common input and output devices; can solve routine hardware and software problems; and make informed choices about technology systems, resources, and services. 
3) Teachers whi can use technology tools, software and information resources to increase productivity, promote creativity, and facilitate academic learning.
4) Twho eachers can use content-specific tools (e.g., software, simulation, environmental robes, graphing calculators, exploratory environments, Web tools) to support learning and research.
5) Teachers who know how to use technology resources to facilitate higher order and complex thinking skills, particularly problem solving and critical thinking.
6) Teachers who can use technologies to obtain instructional materials and evaluate their effectiveness.
7) Teachers who can make effective the use of telecommunications systems.