Category Archives: mailing-lists

Selling Myself Long

Been attending sessions by Meri Aaron Walker about online methods to get paid for our expertise. Meri coaches teachers about those issues.

MAWSTOOLBOX.COM

There’s also a LearnHub “course”: Jumpstart Your Online Teaching Career.

Some notes, on my own thinking about monetization of expertise. Still draft-like, but RERO is my battle cry.

Some obstacles to my selling expertise:

  • My “oral personality.”
  • The position on open/free knowledge in academia and elsewhere.
  • My emphasis on friendship and personal rapport.
  • My abilities as an employee instead of a “boss.”
  • Difficulty in assessing the value of my expertise.
  • The fact that other people have the same expertise that I think I have.
  • High stakes (though this can be decreased, in some contexts).
  • My distaste for competition/competitiveness.
  • Difficulty at selling and advertising myself (despite my social capital).
  • Being a creative generalist instead of a specialist.

Despite all these obstacles, I have been thinking about selling my services online.

One reason is that I really do enjoy teaching. As I keep saying, teaching is my hobby (when I get paid, it’s to learn how to interact with other learners and to set up learning contexts).

In fact, I enjoy almost everything in teaching (the major exception being grading/evaluating). From holding office hours and lecturing to facilitating discussions and answering questions through email. Teaching, for me, is deeply satisfying and I think that learning situations which imply the role of a teacher still make a lot of sense. I also like more informal learning situations and I even try to make my courses more similar to informal teaching. But I still find specific value in a “teaching and learning” system.

Some people seem to assume that teaching a course is the same thing as “selling expertise.” My perspective on learning revolves to a large extent on the difference between teaching and “selling expertise.” One part is that I find a difference between selling a product or process and getting paid in a broader transaction which does involve exchange about knowledge but which isn’t restricted to that exchange. Another part is that I don’t see teachers as specialists imparting their wisdom to eager masses. I see knowledge as being constructed in diverse situations, including formal and informal learning. Expertise is often an obstacle in the kind of teaching I’m interested in!

Funnily enough, I don’t tend to think of expertise as something that is easily measurable or transmissible. Those who study expertise have ways to assess something which is related to “being an expert,” especially in the case of observable skills (many of those are about “playing,” actually: chess, baseball, piano…). My personal perspective on expertise tends to be broader, more fluid. Similar to experience, but with more of a conscious approach to learning.

There also seems to be a major difference between “breadth of expertise” and “topics you can teach.” You don’t necessarily need to be very efficient at some task to help someone learn to do it. In fact, in some cases, being proficient in a domain is an obstacle to teaching in that domain, since expertise is so ingrained as to be very difficult to retrieve consciously.

This is close to “do what I say, not what I do.” I even think that it can be quite effective to actually instruct people without direct experience of these instructions. Similar to consulting, actually. Some people easily disagree with this point and some people tease teachers about “doing vs. teaching.” But we teachers do have a number of ways to respond, some of them snarkier than others. And though I disagree with several parts of his attitude, I quite like this short monologue by Taylor Mali about What Teachers Make.

Another reason I might “sell my expertise” is that I genuinely enjoy sharing my expertise. I usually provide it for free, but I can possibly relate to the value argument. I don’t feel so tied to social systems based on market economy (socialist, capitalist, communist…) but I have to make do.

Another link to “selling expertise” is more disciplinary. As an ethnographer, I enjoy being a “cultural translator.” of sorts. And, in some cases, my expertise in some domains is more of a translation from specialized speech into laypeople’s terms. I’m actually not very efficient at translating utterances from one language to another. But my habit of navigating between different “worlds” makes it possible for me to bridge gaps, cross bridges, serve as mediator, explain something fairly “esoteric” to an outsider. Close to popularization.

So, I’ve been thinking about what can be paid in such contexts which give prominence to expertise. Tutoring, homework help, consulting, coaching, advice, recommendation, writing, communicating, producing content…

And, finally, I’ve been thinking about my domains of expertise. As a “Jack of All Trades,” I can list a lot of those. My level of expertise varies greatly between them and I’m clearly a “Master of None.” In fact, some of them are merely from personal experience or even anecdotal evidence. Some are skills I’ve been told I have. But I’d still feel comfortable helping others with all of them.

I’m funny that way.

Domains of  Expertise

French

  • Conversation
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Culture
  • Literature
  • Regional diversity
  • Chanson appreciation

Bamanan (Bambara)

  • Greetings
  • Conversation

Social sciences

  • Ethnographic disciplines
  • Ethnographic field research
  • Cultural anthropology
  • Linguistic anthropology
  • Symbolic anthropology
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Folkloristics

Semiotics

Language studies

  • Language description
  • Social dimensions of language
  • Language change
  • Field methods

Education

  • Critical thinking
  • Lifelong learning
  • Higher education
  • Graduate school
  • Graduate advising
  • Academia
  • Humanities
  • Social sciences
  • Engaging students
  • Getting students to talk
  • Online teaching
  • Online tools for teaching

Course Management Systems (Learning Management Systems)

  • Oncourse
  • Sakai
  • WebCT
  • Blackboard
  • Moodle

Social networks

  • Network ethnography
  • Network analysis
  • Influence management

Web platforms

  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Ning
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Jaiku
  • YouTube
  • Flickr

Music

  • Cultural dimensions of music
  • Social dimensions of music
  • Musicking
  • Musical diversity
  • Musical exploration
  • Classical saxophone
  • Basic music theory
  • Musical acoustics
  • Globalisation
  • Business models for music
  • Sound analysis
  • Sound recording

Beer

  • Homebrewing
  • Brewing techniques
  • Recipe formulation
  • Finding ingredients
  • Appreciation
  • Craft beer culture
  • Brewing trends
  • Beer styles
  • Brewing software

Coffee

  • Homeroasting
  • Moka pot brewing
  • Espresso appreciation
  • Coffee fundamentals
  • Global coffee trade

Social media

Blogging

  • Diverse uses of blogging
  • Writing tricks
  • Workflow
  • Blogging platforms

Podcasts

  • Advantages of podcasts
  • Podcasts in teaching
  • Filming
  • Finding podcasts
  • Embedding content

Technology

  • Trends
  • Geek culture
  • Equipment
  • Beta testing
  • Troubleshooting Mac OS X

Online Life

Communities

  • Mailing-lists
  • Generating discussions
  • Entering communities
  • Building a sense of community
  • Diverse types of communities
  • Community dynamics
  • Online communities

Food

  • Enjoying food
  • Cooking
  • Baking
  • Vinaigrette
  • Pizza dough
  • Bread

Places

  • Montreal, Qc
  • Lausanne, VD
  • Bamako, ML
  • Bloomington, IN
  • Moncton, NB
  • Austin, TX
  • South Bend, IN
  • Fredericton, NB
  • Northampton, MA

Pedestrianism

  • Carfree living
  • Public transportation
  • Pedestrian-friendly places

Tools I Use

  • PDAs
  • iPod
  • iTunes
  • WordPress.com
  • Skype
  • Del.icio.us
  • Diigo
  • Blogger (Blogspot)
  • Mac OS X
  • Firefox
  • Flock
  • Internet Explorer
  • Safari
  • Gmail
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Maps
  • Zotero
  • Endnote
  • RefWorks
  • Zoho Show
  • Wikipedia
  • iPod touch
  • SMS
  • Outlining
  • PowerPoint
  • Slideshare
  • Praat
  • Audacity
  • Nero Express
  • Productivity software

Effective Web searches

Socialization

  • Social capital
  • Entering the field
  • Creating rapport
  • Event participation
  • Event hosting

Computer Use

  • Note-taking
  • Working with RSS feeds
  • Basic programing concepts
  • Data manipulations

Research Methods

  • Open-ended interviewing
  • Qualitative data analysis

Personal

  • Hedonism
  • Public speaking
  • GERD
  • Strabismus
  • Moving
  • Cultural awareness

Homebrewing Knowledge-Base from HBD Archives?

Uh-oh!

Started thinking again. This time about a way to repurpose messages on the HomeBrew Digest into a kind of database of brewing knowledge. I can just see it. It’d be ah-some!

Anybody knows how to transform email messages from well-structured digests into database entries? Seems to me that it should be a trivial task, especially for someone well-versed in Perl and/or PHP. But what do I know?
That venerable HBD mailing-list contains a wealth of information about pretty much every single dimension of beer homebrewing. For a large number of reasons, content from the HBD.org site turns up quite often in Web searches for brewing terms.

One issue with the HBD, though, is that it’s a bit hard to search. There used to be a custom-built search feature on the site but we now need to rely on Google and AltaVista. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if not for the fact that those engines search complete digests instead of individual messages. So the co-occurrence of two terms in the same digest can be due to two messages on completely different subjects.

Another issue with the HBD (as with many other mailing-lists) is the relatively high redundancy in message content. Some topics came cyclically on the mailing-list and though some kind souls were gracious enough to respond to the same queries over and over again, the mailing-list often looks like an outlet for FAQs. Among HBD “perennials” (or cyclical topics) are discussions of the effects of HSA (hot-side aeration), decoction mashing, and batch sparging, to name but a few technical issues.

Unfortunately, it looks like the HBD might need to be retired at some point in the not-so-distant future, at least for lack of sponsorship. Also, Pat Babcock, the digest’s “janitor,” recently asked for mirror space and announced the retrieval of some of the older digests (from the late 1980s).

Of course, there are lots of other brewing resources out there. So many, in fact, that it can be overwhelming to the newbie brewer. One impact of having so much information so easily available about homebrewing (and commercial brewing, for that matter) is a “democratization of beer knowledge.” Contrary to brewing guilds of medieval times, brew groups are open and free. Yet a side-effect of this is that there isn’t a centralized authority to prevent disinformation. Also, because the accumulated knowledge is difficult to peruse, people tend to “reinvent the wheel.”

In Internet terms, the HBD is the closest equivalent to a historical source. Few other mailing-lists have been running continuously since 1986.

Luckily, all the digests since October 1988 are available as HTML files. And the digest format has remained almost unchanged since that time.
All of the content is in plain ASCII. Messages never exceed a certain
length. IIRC, line length is also controlled. And HTML was officially
not admitted. Apparently, some messages did contain a bit of HTML
code
, but that shouldn’t be an issue.

Here’s what I imagine could be done:

  1. “Burst” out digests into individual messages (with each message containing digest information)
  2. Put all the individual messages (350MB worth) into a Content Management System
  3. Host the archived messages in the form of a knowledge-base
  4. Process those entries for things like absolute links and line breaks
  5. Collect messages in threads
  6. Add relevant del.icio.us-like tags and slashdot- or digg-like ratings
  7. Use this knowledge-base for wiki-like collaborative editing
  8. Assess some key issues to be taken up by brewing communities
  9. Add to the brewing knowledge-base
  10. Build profiles for major contributors and major groups

Because I couldn’t help it, I started writing down some potential tags I might use to label messages on the HBD. It could be part “folksonomy,” part taxonomy. For one thing, it’d be useful to distinguish messages based on “type” (general queries about a brewing technique vs. recipe posted after a competition) since many of the same terms and tags would be found in radically different messages.

Readership to Comments Conversion

As mentioned recently (among other times), I’d like to get more reader comments than I do now. Haven’t been really serious about it as I’m not using any of the several methods I know to get more comments. For instance, I realise shorter, quick-and-dirty posts are likely to get me more comments than my longer ramblings. Everybody knows that inflammatory (Dvorak-like) posts get more comments. I also know that commenting on other people’s blog entries is the best way to receive comments from fellow bloggers. Not to mention generating something of a community aspect through my blog. And I could certainly ask more questions in my blog posts. So I guess I’m not doing my part here.

It’s not that I care so much about getting more comments. It’s just that I do like receiving comments on blog posts. Kind of puts me back into mailing-list mode. So I (frequently) end up wondering out loud about blog comments. I don’t really want to make more of an effort. I just want my cake and eat it too. (Yes, this one is an egotistical entry.)

One thing I keep noticing is that I get more comments when I get less readers. It’s a funny pattern. Sounds like the ice-cream/crime (ice-crime?) correlation but I’m not sure what the shared cause may be. So my tendency is to think that I might get more comments if I get lower readership. I know, I know: sounds like wishful thinking. But there’s something fun about this type of thinking.

Now, how can I decrease my readership? Well, since a lot of readers seem to come to this blog through Web searches and Technorati links, I guess I could decrease my relevance in those contexts. Kind of like reverse-SEO.

As my unseemly large number of categories might be responsible for at least some of that search/Technorati traffic, getting rid of some of those categories might help.

On this WordPress.com blog, I’ve been using categories like tags. The Categories section of WordPress.com’s own blog post editor makes this use very straightforward. Instead of selecting categories, I just type them in a box and press the Add button. Since WordPress.com categories are also Technorati links, this categories-as-tags use made some sense. But I ended up with some issues, especially with standalone blog editors. Not only do most standalone blog editors have categories as selection items (which makes my typical tagging technique inappropriate) but the incredibly large number of categories on this blog makes it hard to use any blog editor which fetches those categories.

Not too long ago, WordPress.com added a tagging system to their (limited) list of supported features. Given my issues with categories, this seemed like a very appropriate feature for me to use. So the few posts I wrote since that feature became available have both tags and categories.

But what about all of those categories? Well, in an apparent effort to beef up the tagging features, WordPress.com added Category to Tag Converter. (I do hope tagging and categories development on WordPress.com will continue at a steady pace.)

This converter is fairly simple. It lists all the categories used on your blog and you can either select which categories you want to convert into tags or press the Convert All button to get all categories transformed into tags. Like a neat hack, it does what it should do. I still had to spend quite a bit of time thinking about which categories I wanted to keep. Because tags and categories perform differently and because I’m not completely clear on how tags really work (are they also Technorati tags? Can we get a page of tags? A tag cloud?), it was a bit of a shot in the dark. I pretty much transformed into tags most categories which I had only applied to one post. It still leaves me with quite a few categories which aren’t that useful but I’ll sort these out later, especially after I see the effects tags may have on my blogging habits and on my blog itself.

As luck would have it, this change in my blog may have as an impact a decrease in readership and an increase in comments. My posts might end up being more relevant for categories and tags with which they are associated. And I might end up having sufficiently few categories that I could, in fact, use blog editors on this blog.

While I was converting these categories into tags, I ended up changing some categories. Silly me thought that by simply changing the name of a category to be the same as the name of another category, I’d end up with “merged categories” (all blog posts in the category I changed being included in the list for the new categories). Turns out, it doesn’t really work like that and I ended up with duplicate categories. Too bad. Just one of those WordPress.com quirks.

Speaking of WordPress.com itself. I do like it as a blogging system. It does/could have a few community-oriented features. I would probably prefer it if it were more open, like a self-hosted WordPress installation. But the WordPress.com team seems to mostly implement features they like or that they see as being advantageous for WordPress.com as a commercial entity. Guess you could say WordPress.com is the Apple of the blogging world! (And I say this as a Macaholic.)

Just found out that WordPress.com has a new feature called AnswerLinks, which looks like it can simplify the task of linking to some broad answers. Like several other WordPress.com features, this one looks like it’s mostly meant as a cross-promotion than a user-requested feature, but it still sounds interesting.

Still, maybe the development of tag features is signalling increased responsiveness on the part of WordPress.com. As we all know, responsiveness is a key to success in the world of online business ventures.

Beer Explosion and Other Cautionary Tales

Here’s an old message I sent to the Members of Barleyment brewclub mailing-list, a while ago.

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Beer Explosion and Other Cautionary Tales
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:04:41 -0400
From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli@indiana.edu>
To: brewers@wort.ca
Got back from the in-laws this morning. The house smelled like beer.
Not really a good sign.
Had brewed a batch and bottled another one on Thursday. Left Friday
afternoon. Thought the yeasties didn't need their herder for the
weekend. The new Scotch Ale seemed happy, bubbling in a cool carboy
with blow-off tube. The bottles of Mep were all warm and cozy, didn't
seem to want to transform into little bottle bombs, yet.
Where's that smell coming from? Oh, well, people were in the house
during the weekend so if a catastrophe happened, they probably know
about it. But let's check the bottles, just to make sure. Snif.
Snif-snif. Sniffffffff... Nope, no b.o. (beer odour) here. Fine, then.
Talked a bit with SWMBO before she left for work. Thought about going
back to bed (got home before 7am). Hey, it's Spring Break for everyone,
right. But no /Girls Gone Wild/ shooting in perspective. Just this beer
smell...
Speaking of beer: how's the new batch coming? It's always cool to check
on a fermenting beer. Except, that...
OMG! What's that thing where the carboy used to be? Did someone put it
somewhere else? Looks like it. An empty beer pack isn't where it was on
Friday. But, wait. This is the t-shirt that served as a carboy-jacket.
Why's it all wet? And where's the Scotch Ale?
Hey, the blow-off tube's still here. So is the wine bottle at the end
of the blow-off tube...
Uh-oh!
Oops!
There you go. That's where the b.o.'s coming from. And that's where the
carboy morphed into a pile of shattered glass in a pool of wort. Smells
good, though.

Let's learn some lessons:
a) Murphy's Law applies to brewing
b) yeast can be mighty strong
c) a rubber stopper can stick to a carboy more strongly than the
carboy's walls themselves
d) a blow-off tube shouldn't be constricted
e) there's a reason to have a headspace above fermenting wort in a
primary
f) it's a good thing to have your fermenters in the basement
g) carboys break fairly cleanly
h) a 5 gallon carboy filled with about 4.8 gallons of wort might make a
mess of ca. 1.5m^2
i) New Brunswick's blue plastic bags for "dry" trash aren't really
sturdy
j) there are situations where beer odors don't smell so good
k) it's probably a good thing to open-ferment ales in primary

["Whoooooo are you? Who-Who? Who-Who?"]
Sara's surprisingly not in the mood for beer this early in the morning,
so Warrick's the one taking the pictures and sending the yeast to Greg
for DNA analysis. Al establishes time and cause of death: carboy
explosion. Grissom, using his in-depth knowledge of brewing,
establishes a timeline.  Lag time was probably around 9–10 hours,
blow-off tube was blocked after 30 to 48 hours, pression accumulated at
a rate of 2 PSI/hour, carboy exploded about 66 hours after pitch-in,
most of the wort dried off in the remaining 18 hours.
Stokes notices some mud-like substance on a fragment of glass. Analysis
comes back: precipitated protein, yeast sediment... Yup, it's trub. But
how did it get there?
Catherine tours brewpub to identify the victim. The brewmaster at the
pub: "Hey, it looks *somewhat* like Scotch Ale, but real Scotch Ale
would be maltier and bigger." A botched attempt at Scotch Ale? A
lagered Tripel? Maybe...

Ale-X, not in Vegas

References/Apologies to:
http://www.homebrewers.com/product/600671
http://www.hum.utah.edu/english/faculty/brunvand.html
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/nature/nw00/laFontaine.html
http://www.edwards.af.mil/history/docs_html/tidbits/murphy's_law.html
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi/main.shtml

I hope this might help others, if only as a funny anecdote.

TechYesRati!

Woohoo! We’re back on, baby!

Technorati Blog Info: Disparate

Mysteriously, this here main blog of mine wasn’t getting updated in Technorati’s famously unreliable databases. For about six months, my new posts and incoming links weren’t showing up. It now works.  So, that’s cool.

Not that it’s likely to bring me traffic or to increase my ranking somewhere. But it might bring me more of the attention from cool people that some entries have garnered me, on occasion. Call me vain all you want (anyone who discusses blogging eventually calls some bloggers vain, it seems) but there’s something fun about getting noticed if you eventually get to contribute something back.  Usually, non-blog tribunes work better for me to achieve those goals. Mailing-lists are especially good, for me. Or, possibly, forum comments.

Actually, the problem might be that blogging is still not a very natural thing for me to do. And my writing habits are possibly incompatible with blogging culture (though, not with the nature of blogging).

Still, blogging has been fun. Technorati might even make it a little bit more fun.

Who knows, maybe some people will eventually comment my posts… 😉

Stable Bilingualism and Multilingualism in Canada

This is a slightly edited version of one of my posts on the LingAnth mailing-list. Susan Ervin-Tripp had posted a message about endangered languages. I mused about possibilities for bilingualism or multilingualism to be stable. Claire Bowern described such patterns. As a follow-up, Peter Patrick mentioned the Canadian situation. As a Québécois, I felt compelled to post something about what I perceive Canadian bilingualism and multilingualism to be like. This is not meant as an expert opinion on the situation.

Without further ado…

Glad to see such an interesting discussion about language diversity. My two (Canadian) cents, to keep the ball rolling. (I’m sending those comments as a French-speaking linguistic anthropologist from Montreal who is not a specialist of Canada.)
Bilingualism in Canada is quite specific. Unless otherwise specified, the term “bilingual” refers to individuals who are fluent in both French and English. There is a perceived imbalance in the degree of “bilingualism” among French- and English-speakers. Bilingualism in other languages tends to be treated separately. Fluency is evaluated using many criteria, including “accent” and even eloquence.
English and French are the (only) two official languages in Canada. Official status for both languages has important consequences in federal politics and administration. Given the official status of both languages, bilingualism often implies advantages in professional placement. New Brunswick is the only province to be officially bilingual (it has the largest French-speaking population outside of Quebec); Quebec is officially French-speaking (with important political consequences); other provinces are officially English-speaking; territories follow federal regulations, though Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun has official status in Nunavut (not sure on the details).
Functional bilingualism can be said to be fairly stable in some specific regions. However, the situation in most French-speaking communities outside of Quebec is usually perceived as a potential switch from French to English: children of “inter-marriages” are likely to only speak English. This switch is perceived, in French-speaking communities, as tantamount to language loss. Language insecurity is at rather high levels in many French-speaking communities outside of Quebec.
In Quebec, the perceived likelihood that French would disappear has decreased dramatically over the past several years. In such a situation, bilingualism is infrequently perceived as a threat. French-speaking Quebeckers appear quite secure in their (our) language use and they (we) will often use English in multi-lingual situations, without any fear of language, status, or identity loss. Perhaps because of French language ideology, English-speakers fluent in French tend not to speak French with native speakers of the language (outside of formal contexts in which bilingualism might be expected).In short, the general model is one of monolingual communities (either French- or English-speaking) with bilingual individuals.Multilingualism is often seen as a completely separate issue. Apart from the status of the French language here, multilingualism in Canada seems fairly comparable to multilingualism in the U.S., despite significant differences in policies and in perceptions. A simplistic explanation of differences: for a relatively long time, Canadian policies have tended to emphasize the right for immigrant groups to “maintain their cultural identities,” including their native languages (the “mosaic” model instead of the “melting pot”); several languages besides English and Spanish are involved in social and political issues; multilingualism is probably more of an urban phenomenon throughout Canada (most of the Canadian population is concentrated in a relatively small number of cities); languages of First Nations/Aboriginal/Native/Autochtonous groups are the object of some concern but relatively little attention is paid to those issues by the general population.
Regardless of these issues, the three-generation pattern [monolingual to bilingual to monolingual] is perceived as the dominant one throughout Canada, with relatively few exceptions. Stable bilingualism in, say, Punjabi and English or Italian and French is usually limited to specific neighborhoods in one of Canada’s largest cities.
To briefly go back to the original article which sparked this discussion, language diversity in Canada is probably increasing but the notion that this diversity might threaten English is rather uncommon. One of the reasons might be that functional bilingualism is perceived favourably by many people.

I’m posting it here because I’d be delighted to get feedback on it. More specifically, I’d like to be proven wrong on some of those issues. The best way to overcome one’s own biases is to publicly discuss them and it’s quite possible that my perspective or that my observations are flawed.

In fact, I noticed after posting that message that the Northwest Territories (NT) follow their own language policies, giving official status to several Aboriginal languages. From a page on language rights:

The Official Languages Act recognizes the following Official Languages: Chipewyan, Cree, Dogrib, English, French, Gwich’in, Inuktitut, (including Inuvialuktun and Inuinnaqtun) and Slavey (including North and South Slavey). They are given equal status according to the individual provisions of the Act.

I originally thought that Nunavut (NU) was the only Canadian Territory with its own language policies (different from federal policies). My impression is now that the status of Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun in NU is “more official” than the status of Aboriginal languages in NT, but that might have to do with the fact that NU’s governmental website seems to be fully available in Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun and the NT one is only available in English. If I’m not mistaken, Yukon (YK) directly follows language policies from the federal government. Of the three territories, NU has the highest proportion of native speakers of neither English nor French (71.4% in 2001). NT has a much lower proportion of native speakers of neither English nor French (19.4% in 2001). YK only had 9.9% of native speakers of neither English nor French in 2001.

(Interesting statistics on languages in Canada’s provinces and territories.)One thing I’m really not sure about is how different Canada is from the United States in terms of languages of “First Nations/Aboriginal/Native/Autochtonous groups.” From colleagues who work with such groups, I get the impression that some groups are “better off” on one side of the U.S./Canada border than some other groups but that, maybe, the situation is fairly equivalent on either side. I would assume that such a pattern would apply to language policies but I don’t know much about any of this. My general impression is that Inuktitut, Ojibwa, and Cree languages are rather well-protected in Canada and that Navajo and Ojibwa are well-protected in the United States. This impression might have more to do with my rudimentary knowledge about the number of speakers of those languages in the United States and Canada than with actual language policies.Another thing that would merit discussion is the proportion of active bilinguals among French- and English-speaking communities. The overwhelming impression among French-speakers (at least in Quebec and New Brunswick) is that they (we) are the ones who “accommodate” English-speakers by speaking English even in situations in which French-speakers greatly outnumber English-speakers. However, it seems to be a contentious subject as English-speakers are said to feel that they are the ones accommodating French-speakers. Some English-speaking friends alluded to this, but language use is a bit too touchy a subject for conversation among “bilingual” friends. There’s a lot of research on those issues, some of which I have read, but I’m still not clear on what is really going there. So I was walking on egg shells when I wrote my message, trying not to make any specific claim about accommodation. As a French-speaker who has lived in both Quebec and New Brunswick, my strong impression is that we, in fact, do accommodate much more frequently than English-speakers would in most informal situations. I really would like to be proven wrong, as I can’t wrap my head around the discrepancy. I guess that this is the point at which I’m too much of a French-speaker.

Another reason for me to post that message here is that, apparently, a colleague would like to use my message (as is) in class. Not that I expect others to use it but in such a situation, it seems even more important for me to ensure that my message isn’t too inaccurate.

So, again, I’d be really happy if some people could post comments here telling me inaccuracies in my short explanation on language diversity in Canada.

For Those Who Don't Grok Blogging

A friend sent me this link:

How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger – WikiHow
Cute, but not that insightful. Continue reading For Those Who Don't Grok Blogging

“Defending” Mailing-Lists (Draft)

[Should edit this heavily. At some point. If time allows. It’s already somewhat on the long side of things…]

Been on hundreds of mailing-lists during the last thirteen years. Yes, literally.
All sorts of distribution lists, listservs, Yahoo! Groups, listprocs, Google Groups, majordomos, announcement lists, etc. Lists about community projects (ilesansfil.org, BiscuitChinois.net, AcadieUrbaine.net…), academic disciplines (linguist-list, Anthro-L, SEM-L…), open-source projects (BibDesk.sf.net, StrangebrewJava.sf.net…), commercial software (OmniOutliner-Users, EccoPro…), hobbies (MontreAlers.ca, SweetMarias.com…), communities (Causerie, MaliNet…), online stores (CalabashMusic.com, SAQ.com…). The list goes on and on.
Those who assume that “email is dead” probably give little consideration to mailing-lists. To them, mailing-lists may easily be replaced by Web-based forum- or blog-style comment systems. Yet, to me, and despite all the hype about what Tim O’Reilly calls “Web 2.0,” mailing-lists are one of the most interesting things happening online. Yes, even today. Maybe they’re not really here to stay but mailing-lists have yet to be replaced by “better” technology.

Mailing-lists are based on simple technology and vary greatly in the way such technology may be implemented on each list. Several announcement lists are quite similar in effect to XML-based syndication (RSS and Atom). You get a message anytime new content is added (for instance, on BorowitzReport.com or MarkFiore.com). Others are very interactive and dynamic, with dozens of people sending each other messages throughout the day (Members of Barleyment are part of one such list). In either case, a mailreader (Eudora, Thunderbird, Mail.app, Entourage, Outlook…) is a very convenient “aggregator” as list messages can be checked quite regularly, may be routed in different folders automatically or manually, are easy to label and archive, and use relatively little bandwidth or disk space (though my current mail folder weighs in at about 5GB and doesn’t include all of my mailing-list content for even the last five years).
On more interactive mailing-lists, using a mailreader is even more beneficial because mail editors are usually much more efficient than browser- or Web-based editors, especially when replying to somebody else’s comments. Furthermore, editing list posts in a mailreader makes it easy to archive and search their contents in a centralized place. On several occasions, looking through my list archives for my own submissions or those of others has been a very efficient way to find information and put it in its proper context.

Contrary to Web-based content, mailing-lists are not usually about getting larger audiences. While some list subscription numbers are rather impressive, many mailing-lists give more value to what happens on-list and off-list between listmembers than to the possibility of getting advertisement monies. As such, mailing-lists are much less likely to get hyped than Web-based “social” projects. Yet mailing-lists are often where important things are really happening online.

In some ways, mailing-lists are “push technology” done right (anybody remember the hype surrounding PointCast? Anybody believes PointCast had that much impact?).
Some mailing-lists (Humanist, HomeBrew Digest) have long histories and their archives are among the most valuable sources of online information.

Much mailing-list traffic is made of threads. Threads have lives of their own, often splitting in multiple subthreads and follow-ups. As such, they do look like comments on a Web forum or blog, but are quite possibly more fluid. This fluidity might imply a lower “signal to noise ratio” in some cases as off-topic messages multiply, but some of the more open mailing-lists greatly benefit from the “stream of consciousness” effect of having threads develop in different directions.

Many mailing-lists are really about building communities. Though blogs and “social networking” sites are seen as community-builders, mailing-lists are, in my humble opinion, more efficient ways to build stronger and longer-lasting online communities.
Although subscribing to a mailing-list is almost as easy a process as subscribing to an XML-based “feed” (RSS or Atom), becoming a listmember is often an easy way to fully integrate a community. It’s common practise, on many interactive mailing-lists, to introduce yourself as soon as you subscribe to a list or before you start posting queries. Responses to these introductions are typically welcoming and often generate interesting discussions. On some of the more personal mailing-lists, unsubscribing to a list may also be an interesting process as people’s parting words can be quite revealing.
Mailing-lists often emulate societies as group dynamics grow from the meeting of individual personalities. Contrary to blogs, mailing-lists are often based on large numbers of “authors” and “replies” have the same status as “posts.”
Members of mailing-lists often develop long-lasting relationships. This is especially obvious on the more personal lists where members will go to great lengths to visit each other. But even academic mailing-lists often give way to important collaborations between members. In some ways, listmembers know each other on a deeper level than comment writers on Web-based content.
Even more important than list posts, listmembers interact through private messages. Yes, like many might do on “social” sites. The difference here is in the transition from list to private communication which, though not strictly codified, often follows interesting lines. Because listmembers form a specific group (however open and large that group may be), those who interact through private messages already have the possibility to refer to a shared “history,” especially if both of them have been active members of the list for a significant amount of time. Similar processes have been happening on some IRC channels, chatrooms, MMPORPGs, and in some blogging communities but private interactions stemming from mailing-lists tend, in my experience, to be broader-reaching than other forms of online communication.

None of this is meant to say that mailing-lists are the only “cool” thing happening online. In fact, the claim is that mailing-lists are simply more useful than “cool.” The hope isn’t to have mailing-lists remain what they currently are, but for mailing-lists to transform and integrate into other online technologies. For instance, a few Web forum commenting systems send detailed notifications when new messages are added in a thread. This could be improved by allowing replies to these notification messages as an easy way to post Web comments. Mailreader could greatly improve their handling of mailing-lists as, to this day, none of them seems to even facilitate the distinction between a list address and a personal address. While some scripts exist to facilitate the creation of separate folders for different mailing-lists, mailing-list content often remains difficult to distinguish from private messages. List messages received in digest formats are “unpacked” by only a few mailreaders. Threaded mailreading (in Gmail, Mail.app, and Thunderbird) has improved over the years but is still imperfect. Mailing-list software has come a long way but much more could be done in terms of archiving and repurposing list content.

Ah, well…