Seven Master's students are about to head to New Delhi for a couple weeks as PRIA and Unesco chair Interns.  Several of them will be taking up research assignments within the UNESCO Chair for CBR framework.  We will have more to report later.  In the meantime, the usual batch of eclectic and useful links and stories for you:

Google supports preservation of languages of the land

The First Peoples’ Cultural Council, a first nations-run Crown corporation based on Vancouver Island, has been chosen to oversee a project developed by Google that seeks to preserve endangered indigenous languages.

Text your friends in your own indiginous language!

As we all know texting is the way that the young communicate all over the world.  What happens if there is no keyboard for your language?  This has been the story for almost all Indigenous Languages up until now.  Growing out of work in the teaching of Sencothen, a language of the Wa'Saanich First Nations on Vancouver Island in Canada and the work of the First Peoples Cultural Council with technology to preserve Indigenous languages, there is now an 'app' so that most of the Indigenous languages in the world that have alphabets can now be used to send text messages!

Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources

The Paris OER Declaration was formally adopted at the 2012 World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress held at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris from 20 – 22 June 2012.

Over 400 delegates including representatives of Government, educators, NGOs, and universities attended the Congress which was organized in full partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (USA).

Jonah Lehrer: Cities Are the Knowledge Engines of the 21st Century – story and video

Cheers,

Budd and Rajesh

Co-Directors

UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility of Higher Education
University of Victoria and PRIA (Victoria, Canada and New Delhi, India)

Twitter account: @buddhall