OliviaC's blog

I've created an archive of the tweets to #netloged255.  The URL is:

http://bit.ly/Uhb0YA

You can look here to refer back to tweets that are more than 7 days old. The archive will auto-update and collect all the new tweets once a day.

Remember, you have to be tweeting from a public account (not a locked/private one) for your tweets to show up in a search for #netloged255!

Best of luck to you all in Ghana!  My due date is this weekend ... but I will tune in whenver I can to the new Ghana trip blog.  And then... "see" you all online for the rest of the semester!

There's a timely feature on the NPR website coinciding with your trip... Check out this recent Black History Month spot on a trip back to the ancestral home in Ghana from Tell Me More:

http://n.pr/zB5i7t

I was recently asked to post about assessing the impact of NGOs in Ghana.  Here are some resources that I found:

Be sure to check out the Institutes, Think Tanks and Reports section of your course guide.  It lists several websites that will have reports from major non-profits in West Africa.

In addition to the general social science article resources (e.g. JSTOR, ProQuest, Google Scholar, etc.) two databases that will have international NGO reports would be:

• Columbia International Affairs Online
• PAIS International

Search these databases for keywords like (NGO or non-governmental organization or intergovernmental organization) and (accountab* or monitor* or evaluat*).  Here are links to two productive searches I ran in Google Scholar's Advanced Search screen:

As promised, here are some resources on linguistic diversity in Ghana:

African Languages: An Introduction(a recent-ish reference book, with maps, to get you started - on the shelves in Canaday 1st Floor)

Ghanaian language listings with various additional info included:

CIA World FactBook - check out the Languages section on the Ghana country page... most interesting is to go to the Dynamic Statstics Tables (just click on the Languages link from the Ghana country page) and cross-compare Languages with other variables like Literacy, Ethnic Groups, Administrative Divisions, etc.

Ethnologue: Languages of Ghana - includes speaker population, region, alternate names, language family and dialects, plus link for more information

GhanaWeb: Ghanaian Languages - includes detailed info for government-sponsored and non-government-sponsored languages

One of the cool things about using Twitter in a class setting is that it allows you to continue the discussion outside the classroom.  For people whose phones have Twitter apps or web access this is pretty easy but you may not have realized that you can also use a regular cell phone to submit and read tweets.

Twitter has an FAQ on phones and also a Getting Started Guide for Twitter via SMS.

In a nutshell here's how you register your phone to your Twitter account and start tweeting via SMS:

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any more Dagbani language learning videos than the ones that Allison already links in her blog post (and it looks like you watched in class this week).

UCLA phonetics lab has an audio archive entry for Dagbani, but it is geared toward documenting the language not teaching a non-speaker.

I did find print resources that might be helpful... with the hefty caveat that since Dagbani, like many sub-saharan African languages, is tonal you really need to physically hear the spoken pronunciations to make progress with the language.  In any case, here they are:

• Dagbani-English dictionary
• Spoken Dagbani for Non-Dagbani Beginners

Sorry I wasn't able to locate more!

Several people have noticed, and I am feeling it myself as well, that it can be challenging to follow particular conversations within our #BMCed250 hashtag on Twitter.  When Twitter hashtags are used at discrete real-time events (like in-class, at conferences, the scheduled #edchat, etc.) conversations are easier to follow because all the participants are attending to the Tweets at the same time.  With our class we're using the #BMCed250 hashtag to converse over a longer span of time and asynchronously (without all necessarily seeing all the tweets simultaneously), so particular conversations within the hashtag are a little more difficult to manage.

Anyway, here are a few tools/techniques I found that might help you sort it all out if you are finding things chaotic:

Within Twitter

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169582-what-s-where-in-twitter-s-new-design#conversations

Just to follow up on some of the posts here and on Twitter about music as a form of literacy... here are some references that might be of interest to anyone who plans to write on this topic in future.

If you missed my Tweet this weekend, I posted a link to an All Things Considered interview with the director of a new independent film featuring the music of the Bayaka pygmies:  http://n.pr/wmrAhh

The film, Oka!, is a fictionalized account of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno's experience living with the Bayaka, who create music ingeniously from all sorts of objects. Certainly we should be wary of the film's old familiar theme: "...man from economically developed, formerly known as civilized world, goes off to live and find meaning in traditional, formerly known as primitive society...", as well as the idea that any society is more "ancient" or "pristine" than any other... but, still the film looks interesting or at least fun and the library will acquire it when it comes out on DVD.  Here's a link to the trailer:  http://imdb.to/y5r16G