Avatar and Rosetta Stone

Responding to the comment (LOVE getting comments!) about the avatar -- the dreamcatcher background reflects my desire to be another foot soldier spreading the good word about how our blogs, wikis, Facebooks, Beboes, podcasts, Google, etc. other "it" things of the given moments are really on the same literacy/communication continuum with books and how important and handy it is to try to have them all support one another, using them with common sense. -- I actually heard a teacher spell B-O-O-K one day to a student, slightly frustrated, but only slightly, I so admire teachers' patience. They and librarians work on the above every day! -- I forgot the spectacles, it must be possible to add them on the avatar afterwards. I use them to do cataloging at my new workstation here at Harding.

And if I go back, really back here to the real Rosetta stone -- I happened to take a look at it again at the British Museum in September on my way -- it is relevant all right. As a native Finnish (Finno-Ugric language) speaker I have had to learn the hieroglyphs of several (Indo-European) languages just to communicate in the world, and English is not the end all and be all although it functions fairly well as a lingua franca at this time. Then again when I attended my (Finnish) nephew's wedding in France, the working languages were French, Finnish, German and Polish. I google a lot in Finnish, of course, Google is so multilingual. Here at Harding Hmong and Spanish, e.g. function as working languages, with American English as lingua franca. But the automatic translations in Google - C'est horrible! Still, they do the rough work. Google works!