Re: NA lanugages and multi-media

Henning (germany.eu.net!dtmgmbh.uucp!riebe)
Mon, 16 May 1994 09:39:50 +0000


I saw a show just last night (92.05.15, in Germany) on the Kodiak bears.
Part of the thrust of the show was to illustrate that the native people
of Kodiak Island are working hard to regain/maintain control of their
environment for the survival of the bears and to improve their own
living standard.

One of the people they introduced was a young man named Sven Harkaanson
(excuse me if I didn't get the name exactly right...) who is/was attending
Harvard. In one scene he was using a Hypercard program on one of the Aleut
languages (I don't know if it was one of the ones recently mentioned - it
was a bear show not a language show), going over the pronunciation with
an Elder. A short but very moving/motivating scene.

After seeing the show I wanted to try contacting Sven to ask him about the
program; then I read all this mail about exactly this subject. I can't
believe in coincedence...

A practical question comes to mind: seems like there's several programs
developed for the Mac; is this the accepted platform for these apps?
Are Macs _widely_ available, eg. in schools, etc.? Multimedia platforms
are becoming very affordable/widespread in the PC world. Will there be
a swing to the PC environment for these types of applications?

H. Henning Riebe
email: riebe%DTMGmbH@Germany.EU.net

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Comments from NativeNet moderator, Gary Trujillo (gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us):

Being that Harvard is just "down the street," so to speak, I decided to
see if I could track down Sven. I got as far as determining that he's
a graduate student in the department of anthropology, and I got a phone
number for him. He's not there at the moment, which might be explained
by the fact that it's exams week at Harvard. I left my name and number
with Sven's office-mate. I'll see what I can do in the way of finding
an e-mail address for him. His name, by the way, is Sven Haakanson.
I'll post a followup article if and when I hear from Sven. Of course,
it would be ideal to see if we can get him involved with this list!