Some Interesting Links

Not a lot to report here in Katherine. I had a really nice birthday including unexpected gifts, birthday cake with candles and ice-cream, and a long lively discussion on the American versus Australian uses of the terms "squash" and "pumpkin" (among other topics). It turns out, when hanging out with linguists who speak three different Englishes (American, Australian, and British) and have knowledge of a further number of accents and dialects, that the conversation always comes round at some point to "you say what?" and "can you say that?" because the variations really are (almost) endlessly fascinating.

Today I went over to the Greening Australia office to find out about volunteering there. Volunteers work out in the plant nursery every Friday morning, so I'll begin this week!

I've been doing a bit of reading online, so I thought I'd share some sites with you. While visiting the Solar Cookers International website, I came upon this link about Mohammed Bah Abba who won a Rolex Award for his invention for keeping vegetables fresher for longer in his native Nigeria. It turns out that a layer of wet sand sandwiched (as it were) between two clay pots will quite markedly prolong the life of the produce kept inside the inner pot. A damp cover, possibly of leaves, is placed over the veggies. The website, by the way, is attractively designed, with great sound and graphics. It's designed to keep you actively engaged, so rather than give you all the info at once, you have to mouse over things or click on things to get more of the story. I think it's good website design. Beware, though, that it might load slowly if--like me--you have dial-up.

I also just read about Dave Calland's permaculture work with indigenous people out in remote communities. The paper is called Garden Djama In Arnhem Land:Permaculture Design With The Barrara And Djinang. It's not only cool work that he's doing, but he talks about cultural differences and the importance of respecting and learning about the values of the people you're working with.

Speaking of cross-cultural learning styles (I was, wasn't I?), I have also just been re-reading Peter Ninnes master's thesis Culture and Learning in Western Province, Solomon Islands in which he also looks at the literature on culture and learning--that is, comparing informal community/family learning with learning in a formal classroom setting--among Aboriginal Australian children, Hopi children and children in several African countries. If you want to know more, check out Chapter 2 particularly.

Along a related theme, I've also been reading about the Northern Territory Teacher Induction Program, at least as it was prior to 1997. I've no idea whether it's the same now or not. There seems to have been an academic conference with one of those typical academic conference titles: From Students of Teaching to Teachers of Students: Teacher Induction Around the Pacific Rim. The part I was rereading is called, tellingly, Strangers in Their Own Country: Teachers in the Northern Territory , as most teachers up here (and indeed a good portion of all people in Katherine) are from somewhere else.

That's all the online reading suggestions I have for now. Anyone want to recommend a single favorite online source of international news?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

" a couple of weeks ago, i read an article in the sunday new york times about the writer john berger. when he was around sixty, he abandoned his fine urban woods to go live with peasants in the french alps. he was quoted as saying that the only way to earn the peasants' respect, is by trying to do the things they do, doing those things ridiculously badly, and then asking their advice, so that they become the teacher, and you the learner."
~rick bass

catalin: i came across this a couple weeks ago and thought of you. i don't think i sent it along though...or did i? anyhow, thought from your experiences you may esp. appreciate it. missing you as i walk about my town in the sun and the scent of violets wafts up to greet my snout, polly

Anonymous said...

Eeeek!!! Technology let me down (again)... I got all accustomed to reading about your doings in my email Inbox, thanks to the miracle of RSS. Then it silently failed or something, and I just now realized that a couple weeks have gone by without hearing from you. Damn.

Anyway, I'm getting all caught up on your doings. Very exciting stuff; I'm envious.

On our end... oh, if you could only imagine the fun we're having, what with trying to get real estate agents in to look at our place so that they can make a reasonable estimate of a fair selling price so that we can make an offer to our friend who wants to buy the house. I can't wait to get through this; it's traumatic to deal with it, and getting a friendship caught up in sordid money matters is perilous.

Also, the closer I get to the end of work, the more crazy and heinous and pointless it all seems. Having declared my intention to eff off has released all my latent sloth and loathing. I feel as though I will be dragging my broken spirit across the finish line, and then it's off to freedom and faraway places. That'll be pretty sweet.

I'll try to jerry-rig the RSS again, or else be better about cruising by here.

-- David

Catalin said...

David,
I was starting to worry about you, but didn't want you to feel obligated to read/comment.

I seem to have two reactions to quitting a job: either it brings out all my sloth and loathing, as you say (which is why I didn't write a thesis when I knew I was leaving linguistics), or it inspires me to get to things I had been meaning to get to (which is why we were building a smokeless stove during the two days leading up to our evacuation from S.I.).

Good luck! That house stuff is hard. We, fortunately, really liked our real estate agent who helped us buy our house and she brought us pages of houses that she thought were similar to ours in features. We'd cruise by them, check out the pricing, check out how fast they moved, etc. Turned out, we sold our house to the friends of our neighbors almost without them having seen it; practically didn't need to list it with the agent at all. It was nice letting all the money & inspection stuff go through the agent, though. Sort of felt like we didn't have to sully ourselves with the economic aspect of the transaction. Anyway, if it's any help, our thinking was this:

If we get back everything we've put into it, including closing fees, new windows, etc., we're already ahead because otherwise we'd have been paying rent all this time. If we get extra (which we did), it's a bonus. So we set a price that seemed fair, got what we asked and didn't worry when people said, "Oh, but you could've got more!"

And hey, how about a news site suggestion list? (in your spare time)

Anonymous said...

Me again (David, that is).

News, huh? Well, I operate well outside the orbit of the mainstream media these days. No TV, & I very rarely read the major papers, even online.

Also, I'm a crazed leftwing nutjob, so I only seek out news from that perspective. Um, and I don't really immerse myself in international news as much as I should, so anything I say here might just be beside the point.

That said, here are some of the better places for US news from a progressive/left viewpoint:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com
http://alternet.org
http://www.commondreams.org
http://truthout.org

Most of those publish daily sets of links to interesting articles, somce from the mainstream press, others from wherever.