SNF New Media Lab in Whitehorse to support First Nations language project

The SNF New Media Lab was at Yukon College in Whitehorse last week to work with new members of the ongoing SSHRC-funded project, First Nations Languages in the 21st Century: Looking Back, Looking Forward. This new organizations in the Yukon include Hän Hwëch’in, Carcross & Tagish First Nation, Champagne & Aishihik First Nation, Liard First Nation, Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation, Selkirk First Nation, Taa’an Kwach’an Council, Teslin Tlingit Council, and Tr’ondek Hwech’in.

This seven-year project is a collaboration between the First Nations Language Centre at Simon Fraser University and 22 community partners to preserve 13 critically endangered First Nations languages in Western Canada. The SNF New Media Lab is pleased to be supplying the anchor technology to this project to power innovative online tools to teach First Nations languages.

Members of the Lab were on hand to demonstrate the technology and share their experiences developing online learning resources for the Greek language. Dionysios Arkadianos, a Greek language expert on secondment from the Greek Ministry of Education and a PhD Candidate in SFU’s Faculty of Education studying computational linguistics shared some of the new, revolutionary pedagogical techniques that the project team has been working on for the Rebooting the Greek Language project, where he is working as the academic coordinator.

For more information on the First Nations Languages project, please visit the project website.

For more information on the Rebooting the Greek Language - which is funded by a generous grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, please visit the project website.