English & The Digital Gap

Jeff Atwood at “Coding Horrors” writes that it is reasonable to require programmers to speak English; most of his commentators agree.

Jeff writes that:

Consciously choosing to switch from Polish to English reminds me why I gave up Visual Basic for C#, as painful as that was. These languages do exactly the same things — and the friction of choosing the minority language was severe.

So here there is a little of that ugly American, someone who never needed to learn another language. People may be keen on their first programming language, but it is nowhere comparable to a native (human) language. Nowhere. Learning foreign language to a point were you can read technical writing takes years. Writing in a foreign language would always cripple you, unless you’re super-talented, or you got to live in an English speaking environment on a young age.

Learning a new language is not like learning a new programming language. If anything, it is comparable to mastering how to program.

And so English becomes a – or maybe the – major obstacle in closing the Digital Gap.

A couple of years ago I taught at Tech-Careers. It’s an IT training center for Ethiopian-Israelis, a group that experiences immense hardship in integrating into the Israeli society. While my students were all high-school graduates, they had but rudimental  English. Basic material was available for them in Hebrew (you can find HTML, JavaScript, C# or ASP books in Hebrew), and we encouraged them to use Hebrew programming Q&A forums. But only as much is available. It was frustrating to see them struggle with English online material, and it was discouraging to imagine how English would ultimately hamper their employment opportunities.

We offered them help in improving their language skills, but in an already overloaded program, we could hardly make it a priority.

Yes, it is certainly a very difficult, almost impossible, to be work in software in Israel without a working knowledge of written English. It’s not just the learning material that’s missing. Almost all high-tech companies are geared towards export, so unless you work in-house for a traditional company (I am thinking a bank), you will have to write documents and very possibly interact with people in English.

But do realize that it comes with a price.

Wordcamp IL 2008: Your Next Web Site Will Be a Blog

Ultimately, the reason I went to Wordcamp was Hanan Cohen’s talk “Your Next Web Site Will Be a Blog”. It was insightful, which is not surprising as Hanan strikes me as one of people who know that most about the place where NGOs meet the web.

The message was that blogging platforms (specifically, WordPress) can be used to build a pretty web site quickly and cheaply by non-techies (anyone who can open a Gmail account and send an email with an attachment, to use Hanan’s words).

I have a little experience with NGOs web presence. It’s complicated, expensive and frustrating for everyone involved. Starting a blog on a web site like Blogli or WordPress.com is cheap (free, in fact), but more importantly, you work gradually. You start with one page (that is, one post) and see how things evolve. You don’t have to make complex decisions or come up with a lot of content up-front.

A blog can actually predate the organization. 3 people with an idea and no money can start a blog as one of the first steps to create and organization.

Or even if the NGO already has a web site, a blog may be used for one event or project.

I think the core of the message was that the NGO people can and should do that themselves. This way they can control, update, fix their blog themselves, or even get rid of it if it doesn’t work. Crucially, this way they learn to understand the medium better, to the profit of their organizations and to their personal profit. They will come better equipped to their next “full” web site construction project.

I am pretty convinced myself. Maybe less so for an organization with an existing site, unless it’s totally crappy: there’s a value in keeping all the organization’s information in one place, rather than starting confusing people (and Google) with multiple addresses. Certainly as a first step towards web presence.