The Case for Open Information
When it comes to disseminating information, the US government and military generally share as little as possible. Information is often overclassified and soldiers are taught to consider even unclassified information “sensitive.” The rule of thumb is to not publicly share information unless you have a compelling reason to do so. This makes good sense when operational security is involved. Corporate America has traditionally followed the same rules; companies generally keep a close hold on information for fear of exploitation by competitors. Many business and government leaders don’t even question this principle. They take it for granted.
But in our increasingly open information society this paradigm is changing. The book Wikinomics explains that many companies are reaping profits by opening themselves and their products up to society as much as possible. As proprietary information opens up, consumers get more involved, knitting together strong communities around products. R&D work is outsourced–for free–to the crowd. Witness Firefox and Google’s Android phone, which are built around active user development. This principle of maximum openness is even extending into universities. MIT has an Opencourseware project that puts materials from 1800 of its courses online for free.
Opening Up DLI
This all got me thinking. What if the Defense Language Institute (DLI) put all of its curriculum online for free? No registration necessary. No fees. Just an elegant website that offers fast, easy access to materials for learning any of the 23 languages that DLI teaches.
Consider with me. DLI has more than 1,100 language teachers, most of whom are native speakers. It has the largest Arabic and Chinese programs in the country and is one of the only schools dedicated to teaching rarer strategic languages like Pashto and Urdu. Curriculum is largely developed in-house. DLI is a government organization, so it does not need to sell its curriculum materials for profit. In fact, its curriculum materials (at least in the Arabic schools, where I study) are not used in any organization outside DLI. The scale of DLI courses are staggering. My Arabic curriculum is eleven volumes, including hundreds of authentic material passages and high-quality MP3s. The curriculum is still in validation and has some problems, but it’s the most extensive Arabic curriculum I’ve ever seen or heard of. I can’t speak for other languages, but I imagine other language departments have equally impressive programs.
Now imagine we put all this online for free. What benefits would we reap?
First, we would put a wealth of resources in the hands of independent language learners. When a soldier wants to learn a language now, he generally can get only one resource from the military: a Rosetta Stone license. As I’ve written before, Rosetta Stone is a good supplement but it’s a terrible standalone language tool. Licenses are also expensive and the military only purchases a limited number of them. Beyond that, a student is on his own. Now imagine that any student in the world could log on to a single website and find thousands of pages of free resources. Imagine the effect this would have on independent learners.
Second, a public release of DLI curriculum would improve language education programs in other universities. It would put more resources and tools in the hands of educators developing their own language training programs–particularly for languages where resources are scarce.
Third, releasing DLI curriculum might develop a larger pool of foreign language speakers outside the military. Independent learners or university students would have more resources available to learn from. Students of strategic languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Pashto are likely to have an interest in the military or intelligence agencies anyway, so the government could expect to hire many of these students in the future. By becoming one of the world’s biggest providers of foreign language materials, DLI would also build a good relationship with internationally-minded students in a variety of communities.
Fourth, it would spread the benefits of American tax dollars across the entire country. This is a good thing for its own sake. You can’t do that with many military technologies, but when you can, the benefits can be immense. Consider the benefits the US military brought to the world with GPS.
What are the obstacles to such an ambitious project? Profit is not an issue. DLI does not sell its courseware. OPSEC is not an issue; nothing sensitive is being discussed. Yes, we study vocabulary for military topics, but I highly doubt Al-Qaeda will care that I learned the words for “division” and “tank” in chapter 5 of my curriculum. The biggest obstacle I see is a failure of vision. A public release of curriculum that took thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop will strike most people as absurd. Building the necessary bureaucratic momentum will be extremely difficult. Someone at the top of the chain will have to embrace the vision and fight to sell it.
Publicly releasing the DLI’s foreign language materials would be an extraordinary investment in American language education. Our civil and military leaders have been talking for years about creative ways to increase the linguistic competency of our force. This would be one easy, actionable way to do that.
Not to mention that hundreds of eyes viewing the course material, including (most likely) native speakers, would act as a gigantic editing pool to fix simple errors that do not get noticed in-house.
As far as learning another language, is concerned, can I put in a word for the international language, Esperanto?
Although Esperanto is a living language, it helps language learning as well.
Five British schools have introduced Esperanto in order to test its propaedeutic values. The pilot project is being monitored by the University of Manchester and the initial encouraging results can be seen at http://www.springboard2languages.org/Summary%20of%20evaluation,%20S2L%20Phase%201.pdf
You might also like to see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
Confirmation can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Great idea. Lack of language skills and the knowledge of cultures is one of our greatest security weaknesses, not to mention the impact on our ability to compete economically in the world. DLI would be adding more to our national security than many new weapon systems by offering this kind of language resource.
I have a student in one of my college classes right now who is teaching himself Arabic. He cannot afford expensive courses
To respond to Brian Barker; While it would be admirable to include Esperanto in the DLI program, the simple fact is that there is no real point to it. Firstly, as you say it is an international language, meaning that it’s a second language to everybody. While this sounds like a strong selling point at first, the fact is that very few people even know about the existence of Esperanto, with even fewer knowing how to speak it. With no native speakers, and little pressure to learn the language, one could more accurately describe it as the world’s youngest, most dynamic, dead language.
Secondly, the purpose of the Defense Language Institute is to train soldiers up to fluency in languages that are frequently used in areas around the world where the U.S. Military operates. Again, since there are no native Esperanto speakers, very few people speak it, and those who do learn it typically do so out of hobbyist curiosity more so than a desire to communicate across language barriers with it. Additionally, anyone who speaks Esperanto is as a nearly uniform rule more fluent in another language typically dependent on the region they grew up in. Thus, there is almost no strategic merit to learn Esperanto for the U.S. Military, or any other military for that matter.
Esperanto does have it’s merits, don’t get me wrong. The fact that Esperanto doesn’t have any innate ties to any region or race can help it get past certain judgements that would hinder others, but this is at the extreme detriment of practical usability. Also, it is true that learning languages helps one to learn other languages. However, this is true of any language, not just Esperanto. Even if Esperanto is more effective at facilitating the absorption of another language than all others, it’s extreme niche adoption more than negates this benefit several times over, especially when one considers that DLI operates on highly accelerated time frames that barely leave students with time to rest, let alone learn multiple languages simultaneously.
Maybe if Esperanto sees a sudden massive surge of active speakers and real world application over the next decade this could be a possibility, but it’s just not there yet.
This is a good idea. DLI could stand a bit of an outside review and, Lord knows the US military would enjoy the good press.
The cost of administering the website would be the only drawback -the FYDP would have to be adjusted for the cost.
When I was at DLI we wer lucky to get godo cassetes. Now it’s great they have flash drives and MP3s. As far as puting the materials on the web–you know you’re going to have to get that cleared all the way to the Commandant. I have heard that the Army is still making it the hardest on learners there (same time constant skills training BS, and now live in DI’s–this is AT).
So what are the percentage of people in Arabic? CHinese and Korean these days? (Those were the largest when I was there)
I mentioned this idea to the Superintendent of the USMA on Monday night. I gave his aid a link to your blog, and he indicated that he would talk to his General peers about making it happen.
All the Best,
JD Kristenson
Olmsted, 2009
Beijing, China
JD, many thanks. I’ve been hoping the idea would find traction somewhere. It tried elevating it up my chain at DLI but ran into roadblocks.
If you send me your e-mail address, I wrote a paper about the idea, which I can gladly send for the USMA sup and his colleagues to read.
This would be such a dream come true! Do you know if this is something being considered?
Richard, I wish it was. I turned the idea into a paper and sent it up the chain a couple different ways, and it even got interest from a general officer, but it never went anywhere.