Over at Bitesize Irish, our general approach since around 2008 or 2009 has been:
- Create course helping people with the Irish language
- Make available on the internet
- Answer resulting questions
That’s been quite motivational in its own right, because people always reach out and pour their hearts out, explaining the “why” behind they want to speak the language.
We can go further, though. Seth Godin in The Icarus Deception (and his other books…) calls on us to connect people, and influence people in a positive way.
At Bitesize Irish, Siobhán our language assistant agreed to make a course for singing in the Irish language. Our general plan was:
- Create course helping people to sing a song (and eventually more) in Irish
- Make available on the internet
- Answer resulting questions
But after listening more to Godin, my updated approach is something more like:
- Create course helping people to sign a song in Irish
- Call out for people who want to be able to sing this song (Transa na dTonnta to start with)
- Enroll people into a course that starts at a certain time
- In the course, provide general info about the song, a meaning of each line, and a pronunciation guide of each line
- Connecting everyone on the program by providing a private forum for them to share these recordings, to give encouragement to each other, and to discuss their love for Irish song
- Challenge the people in the program to record themselves saying the initial verse or indeed the full son
- Provide the song in slow and fast videos
- Challenge the people in the program to record themselves singing the song
What’s more scalable? Of course, it’s just giving a course as video files.
What’s more fulfilling, more human, more satisfying, more real? It’s to challenge everyone involved to share their version of the song.