From Pools to Tools: Sabhal Mòr Ostaig leads the multilingual way

From Pools to Tools:  Sabhal Mòr Ostaig leads the multilingual way

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig’s record of collaboration with colleges and universities around Europe has taken another step forward with news of the approval of a new “TOOLS” project, due to start in January 2012.

The college will work with partners in Denmark, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, and Ulster to develop further its groundbreaking Wordlink and Multidict software programs which enable instant word-by-word access from any webpage to dictionaries in over 100 different languages, including both Scottish and Irish Gaelic.

Dr Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle, Senior Lecturer in Computing at SMO, will take the lead role in software development in the partnership, which covers the Higher, Further, and Adult Education sectors. He said, ‘Experience on the previous POOLS-T project, in which we first started developing this idea, has shown the value of transnational work like this. Testing the program with a range of languages gives you a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. We have over 100 languages in the system now, and we will be testing the new program against some new challenges, including Arabic this time.  We will develop a new tool to make it easy for teachers to create blended learning teaching materials and place them online, with each word linked to dictionary.’

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig  will have a special responsibility for trialling the project with adult learners not necessarily enrolled on full-time academic or vocational courses. Projects Officer, Gordon Wells, who has been working with community groups in the Western Isles for the past five years on various projects under the Guthan nan Eilean/Island Voices title, will be looking to add the new dictionary access function to this ongoing community-based development work. He said, ‘The Guthan nan Eilean project was itself born out of the earlier European POOLS project. It’s good still to be working with the same Danish college six years on, but also encouraging to be working with new partners. We are particularly looking forward to collaborating with the University of Ulster, who have done a lot of work with Irish and computer-assisted language learning.’

Professor Boyd Robertson, Principal of the College, welcomed the news, saying, ‘Our work at European level  has been recognised by various awards and commendations already – A European Award for Languages in 2007, A European Award for Creativity and Innovation in Lifelong Learning in 2009, and a listing by HMIE for Sector Leading and Innovative Practice in 2010. Not only has Sabhal Mòr benefited from exchanging ideas with European partners, it has also shown that the developments it has pioneered with Gaelic can be replicated with other language communities .’

The TOOLS project will run for two and a half years. The other project partners are The SDE Technical College in Denmark, The University of Southern Denmark, The Valencia Technical University in Spain, The Marijampole Vocational Education and Training Centre in Lithuania, The University of Ulster, and The University of Evora in Portugal.

Further information will be published as it becomes available on the project website at www.languages.dk.  Wordlink and Multidict are openly accessible via www.multidict.net.