eKaqchikel 2009 - Guatemala in Five Minutes or Less
Since 2004 a team from Tulane University has been traveling each year to Guatemala to produce content for a multi-media language application. Next week begins the fifth and final Guatemala road trip collaboration between the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and Tulane Technology Services. The final product of this multi-year effort is a self-paced, online and CD-ROM, Flash-based language learning application. The goal: use innovative new media technologies to teach the Maya kaqchikel language to English and Spanish speakers.
The project is funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant to support "less commonly taught languages." In this case, kaqchikel - one of the 17 Maya languages spoken in the Lake Atitlan highland region of Guatemala. The project is also linked to Oxlajuj Aj, a six week summer intensive course created and taught by Tulane linguist and anthroplogist, Dr. Judie Maxwell.
Last month, Marie and I unveiled the ekaqchikel project at the New Media Consortium Five-Minutes-of-Fame.. Watch a clip of our presentation, Good! ¡Bien! ¡Ütz! Maya Language Learning from Guatemala to Tulane from the NMC summer conference archives. It's all good stuff, but skip ahead to 18:15 if you want to see just our five minutes on the stage.
The online application goes live on Friday, July 17. Once it's active you'll be able to go to http://ekaqchikel.tulane.edu to try it yourself. I'll be blogging about the project and our trip from now until the end of next week, so tune in!
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