Welcome to our Indigenous Language and Information Technology Blog.

This website is an off shoot from our organisation website for us to experiment with using firstly, the Internet, Blogging and off course Podcasting in relation to Aboriginal Languages and Information Technology.

Our organisation is based in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. We are an Aboriginal not for profit organisation working in the field of Indigenous Language Maintenance, we have been helping to reclaim the Awabakal language of where we live and we also have developed specific computer software to aid us in this activity. Dianna Newman and myself (Daryn McKenny) have found it extremely difficult to find user friendly computer software that is specific to language work, everything that we have come across has been aimed at the linguists and academics so this is where we decided to develop our own, its called Miromaa and you can read all about it at our main organisation website.

Over the past years we have also found that there is no specific websites, training or support networks for Indigenous Language Workers in how we can better use Technology in our endeavours, as such we are also doing what ever we can at National level to aid others in harnessing the power of technology to help. We have made Miromaa available for other Language Centres to use, we hold Language/ Technology training classes around the country, so far we have held these in Queensland and Victoria. We also recently held the first ever Puliima National Indigenous Languages and Information Communication Technology Forum in April this year (2007) in Newcastle, we feel that this was a great success and hope it provides the drive needed for others to start adapting to technology and how it can place an ever increasing part in language maintenance. From what we have gathered everyone is switching on.

So this is where we are at now, having this specific Blog site which we hope can be of benefit to all people interested in Languages and Technology, we will be uploading podcasts in both audio and video formats and you can subscribe to these in iTunes if you wish and have them available on your iPod. Just copy and paste the podcast link into the subscribe box in iTunes and away you go.

Please feel free to contact us at anytime about this site.

you can email us at: daryn at arwarbukarl dot com dot au or dianna at arwarbukarl dot com dot au

Special Thanks

We would also like to make a special thanks to Alexander Hayes from NSW Learnscope, Alex came to our centre and demonstrated to Yarnteen, ICEC and our organisation all about Podcasting, blogs and wiki’s.  He finally helped me get my head around it all, but better still they themself have some great sites setup to best exploit and demonstrate  these new Web 2.0 products.  So we just had to follow the leader, thanks Alex.