The Seminario began on Saturday evening. I had contacted folks to let them know that I was available as of Friday evening, but there wasn't any evident interest in meeting earlier. On Saturday evening, I arrived at MIT and met two of the other participants who had evidently crossed signals with the organizers and waiting hungrily for the others to arrive before going to dinner. We wrote haiku on the board while waiting -- the best one (by one of the others) was
atendante nun
cxu fusxeg' aux fiasket'
mi volas mangxi!
After a few minutes one of the organizers arrived and we walked over to the student union for people to eat. I had already eaten, so I got something to drink and chatted with folks a bit. There was going to be an interkona vespero at the hotel, but there wasn't enough room in the car for everyone to go (and I didn't feel like trying to navigate the T late at night, so I went back to my hotel to spend the rest of the evening with my family.
The Seminario began in earnest the following day. The organizer provided an overview of the activities of the seminario. Not everyone had arrived yet so they held off on having introductions and instead invited me to describe the project I was interested in, which they thought might be compatible with their Interkulturo project. I outlined the project.
My idea is to: (1) select real-world topics that can only be accomplished using a global approach (e.g. by gathering scientific data from many points around the world), (2) divide the topic into a series of weekly authentic tasks that students can do, (3) build a set of Esperanto lessons that are tailored to accomplishing those particular tasks and sharing the results, and (4) create a technology environment that can support collaboration and sharing among the groups. As far as I'm aware, this is a unique approach to teaching Esperanto: to embed the Esperanto learning in an authentic task that requires the specific benefits that Esperanto proposes to offer.
Afterwards the team had lunch and walked to the far side of the MIT campus for the afternoon's activities in a computer lab. When we arrived, the organizer announced that they had decided that my project was not really compatible with the Interkulturo project and further activity in that direction would be discontinued. I asked to speak with one of the other organizers, indicating I was still interested in finding out more about Interkulturo. I spoke with her for maybe an hour, trying to explain what I saw as problems with traditional approaches to teaching Esperanto (which I think also apply to the approaches they're using) and demonstrated some of the technology resources I've developed at UMass. At the end, however, it was pretty clear there wasn't any flexibility in the Interkulturo project regarding the principles I was suggesting. I spent the rest of the afternoon observing some of the on-going development of their technology resources and then hanging out with the team chatting in Esperanto.
It was exactly what I had expected. I have to give them credit that they were interested in my project and listened to what I had to say. Having done that, however, they pigeon-holed my idea as being the same as something they had tried before which had failed (even though the two are entirely different). They never asked me what I thought about their project, so I didn't try to tell them. I thought I'd provide my critique here in any case.
It was already apparent to me before I arrived that they were already developing tools and resources without having any clear vision of what the student activities will be. They're building a meeting tool and a scrabble game and I don't know what else. They haven't yet defined the tasks that students will be doing, but they have a bunch of geeks who want to build stuff. So they're building a bunch of generic stuff in anticipation it will be close enough to support the tasks they ultimately decide they want to do. I think their project would be much better off if they decided what tasks they wanted to do first and then built tools to support those tasks. Otherwise you end up choosing tasks that use the tools you have. This is like going to the hardware store, buying tools and supplies, and then designing your house based on that you're able to build with what you have.
They have committed to using generic Esperanto teaching resources to teach Esperanto (through lernu.net). This demonstrates the principle above: They've already created a bunch of generic "teaching Esperanto" resources and now they're looking for ways to use them. This is exactly what I want to avoid. If we depend on students to say, "I want to learn Esperanto", I'm convinced we're never likely to get more than a trickle of students learning Esperanto. By piggy-backing Esperanto onto something else we know the students will choose to learn, I think we can get significant numbers of students learning Esperanto. They argued this was narrowing the range of potential participants, but the way I see it, there are at least 4,000 students who are studying Biology at my University and 0 who are studying Esperanto.
Finally, they're organizing their new project around generic intercultural chat -- about music and food and clothes. I don't think its going to be very effective. People have been doing this since the internet started. It that were going to make a difference it already would have (and it has, actually -- there's probably more pressure on everyone else in the world to learn English than ever before). Their argument is that, instead of having concrete projects for students to work on, students prefer to chat about more general topics. While its true that students like to do that, I think most students are fairly strategic about the projects they choose to work on. Imagine you have two universities: University One offers degrees in science, technology, and business. University Two offers degrees in "chatting". I simply don't believe many students will sign up for "Rapping about Pop Culture in Esperanto". I think you're only likely to get serious interest if you propose some authentic task that people will value.
One thing that did suprise me was how quickly and completely my ideas were dismissed. It was what I expected would happen, but I had expected the project to elicit more interest than it got. Interestingly, non-esperantists seem to like my project idea more than esperantists do. I think it elicits a knee-jerk reaction from Esperantists that they don't want their Esperanto contaminated with any other topic. I think most Esperantists chose to learn Esperanto for Esperanto's sake and don't like the idea of people learning it for some other reason. I'm not sure. In any case, the project is 0 and 3 for exciting interest in Esperantists. Time to move on to something else.