language-development
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The science of language, community, and MMORPGs
Back in August, Massively wrote a little post about Swedish research on MMOs and language learning. That article provoked me, a gamer and teacher of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), to hunt down the original research and talk directly to the researchers, Dr. Liss Kerstin Sylvén from the University of Gothenburg and Dr. Pia Sundqvist from Karlstad University, to better understand their research and findings. Note that we'll be talking here about games and language learning specifically, not other forms of game-related education. Also, Sylvén and Sundqvist don't consider themselves "gamers." Sundqvist remembers Pac-Man as her first game, both admit to playing Angry Birds on their cell phones, and Sundqvist is "allowed" to sometimes watch her 17-year-old son play League of Legends. I find this interesting because they are non-gamers who seriously consider games capable of being educational without specifically being developed to do so. This isn't a simple merger of a hobby with work; this is work in a field of interest that's still being explored.
Microsoft's experimental English-Chinese dictionary mines the web for data (video)
When it comes to quick and dirty machine translation it may not supplant Google Translate anytime soon, but for those who would actually learn another language, Microsoft's working on some fairly impressive tools. Engkoo is an search engine for Chinese speakers that scours the web for its data, finding articles that are written in both Chinese and English to create an continually-updated lexicon, plus provide interactive (and audible) sample sentences that explain nuances of the language. See a rundown (in English) of what's possible so far in a Silverlight video after the break, and try it out for yourself at our source link -- if you must, you can even search for "tiananmen."
