¿Su LMS habla español?

Posted on by David Grebow






Why build a Spanish LMS?

First, more and more of the schools with whom I’ve spoken this past year, individually and at conferences and meetings, have told me they need one and need one now. So I did some research and that brings us to the second point. The surprising facts: 

Spanish is spoken by almost 400 million people worldwide. Even more compelling, when you realize that about half of the population in the Western Hemisphere speaks Spanish, it becomes the primary language for as many people as English in this region of the world.

Within the United States, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language after English, by a very wide margin, and the Spanish-speaking population within the U.S. is growing as a percentage of the total U.S. population every year.

· According to the U.S. Census, the number of Hispanics in the U.S. grew by 57.9% between 1990 and 2000 – from a total of 22.4 million people to a total of 35.3 million people. This figure means the United States has the fifth largest Hispanic population worldwide (trailing Mexico, Colombia, Spain and Argentina – just barely behind Spain and Argentina).

· Of this group of over 35 million people, well over 3 out of 4 say that Spanish is their primary language.

· Within the United States, a total of over 28 million people speak Spanish at some degree of fluency. A few states have a large percentage of these Spanish speakers – California has 5.5 million, Texas has 3.4 million, New York has 1.8 million, and Florida has 1.5 million.

· In the U.S., the 28 million people who speak Spanish at home is well over half of the approximately 47 million people who speak a language other than English at home. That means that Spanish is spoken by more people than all other languages combined within the U.S.

· The 35 million Hispanics in the U.S. as of 2000 was projected to be close to 40 million people as of 2003. Moreover, by 2050, the number of Hispanics in the U.S is projected to grow exponentially to over 100 million people. At that point Hispanics will be about one quarter of the total U.S. population. That’s over triple the 2000 figure in a 50-year span.

· In the New York City area, the newscast on the Spanish-language Noticias 41 and Noticiero Univision, often have higher ratings than ‘the big three’ network news shows on CBS, NBC and ABC.

· Approximately 5.8 percent of Internet users speak Spanish, making it the 4th most common language among the Internet community, trailing only English (about 50%), Japanese (about 8%), and German (about 6%).

· A recent study of 25 metro markets in the U.S. found that Spanish-language programming was the sixth most popular format.

· It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the spread of Spanish in the United States. Bank ATMs offer instructions in Spanish. The Yellow Pages in many cities adds a Spanish-language insert. And Spanish is working its way into everyday use. Is there an American left who can’t order fajitas with spicy jalapeños using the proper Spanish-accented flair? (Say the J like an H: fah-hee-tas …)

· Over the past decade, the demand for Spanish Language courses worldwide has just about doubled, and the demand is almost as close in the U.S.

According to Paula Winke and Cathy Stafford of The Center for Applied Linguistics rapid demographic changes and an increasing recognition of the critical need for professionals who are proficient in languages other than English (Brecht & Rivers, 2000; Carreira & Armengol, 2001) have led to an interest in developing language programs and classes for “heritage language learners”. These are students who are raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken and who speak or at least understand that language (Valdés, 2001).

The fastest growing heritage language population in the United States is Hispanic Americans (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2010), and the number of Spanish speakers studying Spanish is on the rise. As a result, language educators are developing programs, classes, and instructional strategies to address the needs of these students, which are different from those of native-English-speaking students studying Spanish as a foreign language.

Appropriate instructional materials are essential for these classes, which are often referred to as Spanish for Spanish speakers (SNS) classes. Although the development of SNS materials has a 30-year history, and many new SNS textbooks and materials continue to appear, developing a well-articulated sequence for SNS instruction continues to be a challenge (Peyton, Lewelling, & Winke, 2001).

So is anyone listening? Here is a tremendous opportunity for this large group to learn new career skills using their native Spanish language. Are we so Anglophile that we do not care? Let me know. I always value and look forward to your opinions on these important subjects

All About “Learning” Not “Education”

Posted on by David Grebow


About time we made the distinction.

Learning is the name for the natural process that we use all the time. It uses the relatively new architecture of the brain’s pre-frontal cortex and invokes (among others) imagination, creativity, and critical thinking.

Education is an unnatural institution, expanding most dramatically during the Industrial Age, that often relies more on short-term memory and memorization than the higher brain functions required for learning.

When you learn something the learning is available for life. When you are educated about something the information in your brain begins to degrade almost immediately.Could you still get a PASS on any test you took one year ago? Even if your memory is good to great, knowledge in the new global Idea Economy has a rapidly shrinking shelf life coupled with an exponentially increasing amount of detail and new information.

That’s why continuous independent learners are the smartest people. It’s also why we can still fallback on the old cliche “Experience is the still best teacher.”

As always, TED hits it spot-on. Watch and learn Grasshopper …

The Birth of the Global Mind

Posted on by David Grebow


In the year 1989, I was standing at the end of a pier in Provincetown, Massachusetts looking out at the sunrise over the Atlantic with my good friend Jacques. I was a young researcher at Digital Equipment Corporation and had been working on DECnet, the world’s first corporate Internet. I remember turning to my friend and describing my work and telling him that we were entering a new amazing age where we were creating a “world brain” in which everyone would be connected and be able to work together.

Hello 2012. This amazing video has been popping up all over the place this week. It’s about the way we will learn to collaborate and innovate as a species. It’s over one-hour and worth every minute. I watched it in chunks. It’s a chronicles of the birth of the global mind, the only hope we really have for moving to the next stage of our evolution, away from several billion little monkey brains running around the planet in so many directions they cannot remember who they really are or why they are here. The answer by the way is

We are spiritual beings on a human journey

Tim O’Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

 

I just wish I knew where to send the card congratulating the earth on the birth of the global mind.

Continuous Learning, Corporate Learning, Future of education, Informal Learning, Learning, Learning Technology

Independent Learners Cannot Use A LMS

Image | Posted on by David Grebow


Independent Learners Cannot Use A LMS

Learning has become an ongoing process and the CLS is destined to take over where the older event-driven LMS stopped.

Innovative CLS Starts Where LMS Stops

A new program, the Certify Learning System (CLS), has been developed and designed to track and reward continuous independent learning for your most talented employees who learn what they need to know to stay at the top of their field.

Learning today is an ongoing anytime and anywhere process driven by independent learners who learn what they need to know to stay at the top of their field. When learning was formal and event driven, Learning Management Systems (LMS) were developed to help track and record programs that employees were assigned to attend. That was then.Today, learning has become a continuous informal process that occurs independently whenever and wherever people need to learn. Employees can choose on their own to take a webinar, attend a conference workshop or read an important new industry whitepaper. Until now there has been no way to track and record what they are learning.

The Certify Learning System (CLS) was developed to modernize the process and pick-up where the older LMS drops off.Independent learners are often the most knowledgeable and talented people in any organization. Being able to reward them is important. Being able to identify, hire, promote and assign them to key teams is even more valuable. The old LMS cannot provide you with this information, or reward your independent learners for their efforts.The CertifyLearning System (CLS) registers employees online from any device, and records every kind of learning event from a wide variety of providers. By assigning credits to these events, the cloud-based system allows employers to maintain an up-to-date record of employee’s informal ongoing and independent learning.

“Since learning never stops or even slows down, you want to be able to identify the people who are always learning.” states David Grebow CEO, KnowledgeStar and worldwide expert in informal learning. “Highly motivated learners are the smartest employees, and CLS is like a GPS that guides you to them when you need to know who they are.”

With everything online and no software to install, CLS is quick and inexpensive to setup and maintain.  The system is designed to be customized to reflect the brand and identity of your organization.  Because the CLS records are cloud-based they are portable and follow the registered individual from company to company. This again differs from Learning Management Systems where records are kept private by a single employer. This makes CLS especially useful for people who frequently work for different employers in the same field.

The CLS has just completed a successful 3-month pilot with one of the largest educational publishers in the country and is ready to help your organization identify your knowledge stars.

If you would like a free demo, let me know so I can send you a pair of warm stockings since it will blow your socks off and I wouldn’t want you to get cold feet!

Voices from Future Learners

Posted on by David Grebow


Good idea to take a moment and watch and  listen to the video … feels like they sent a camera into a time machine and came back with this report. If you want to move forward you’ll pay attention to where education (aka learning) is headed.

Badges for Learning

Posted on by David Grebow


Good Idea? You tell me …

How to Help Our Children Succeed in Life (and School)

Posted on by David Grebow


 

Host Ira Glass talks about his experiences reporting on education and the unending question of how we can make schools better. He discusses the Chicago Teachers strike and an essay by writer Alex Kotlowitz that talks about how the strike raises questions about the severity of this challenge.
  • Ira talks with Paul Tough, author of the new book How Children Succeed, about the traditional ways we measure ability and intelligence in American schools. They talk about the focus on cognitive abilities, conventional “book smarts.” They discuss the current emphasis on these kinds of skills in American education, and the emphasis standardized testing, and then turn our attention to a growing body of research that suggests we may be on the verge of a new approach to some of the biggest challenges facing American schools today. Paul Tough discusses how “non-cognitive skills” — qualities like tenacity, resilience, impulse control — are being viewed as increasingly vital in education, and Ira speaks with economist James Heckman, who’s been at the center of this research and this shift.Doctor Nadine Burke Harris weighs in to discuss studies that show how poverty-related stress can affect brain development, and inhibit the development of non-cognitive skills. We also hear from a teenager named Kewauna Lerma, who talks about her struggles with some of the skills discussed, like restraint and impulse control.

    We then turn to the question of what can schools can offer to kids like Kewauna, and whether non-cognitive skills are something that can be taught. Paul discusses research that suggests these kinds of skills can indeed be learned in a classroom, even with young people, like Kewauna, facing especially adverse situations, and also the success of various programs that revolve around early interventions. Ira reports on a mother and daughter in Chicago, Barbara and Aniya McDonald, who have been working with a program designed to help them improve their relationship — and ultimately to put Aniyah in a strong position to learn non-cognitive skills.

  • Our story picks back up with the question of how non-cognitive skills can be taught to older kids — who have gone much longer without learning things like self-control, conscientiousness and resilience. Ira returns to the story of Kewauna, the Chicago teenager, who talks about the dramatic ways in which she changed her life. They discuss an intervention by Kewauna’s family, and the programs that have helped her thrive. Economist James Heckman then discusses they ways in which this shift in emphasis could change the way we practice education and the way we think about learning.

    SONG: “YOU DON’T LEARN THAT IN SCHOOL”, LOUIS ARMSTRONG

    SONG: “BACK TO SCHOOL AGAIN”, MOROCCO MUZIK MAKERS