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Rocio Raña
Co-founder & CEO at LangInnov
Dr. Rocío Raña boasts a wealth of experience in linguistic project management and educational research spanning over 15 years.
She is the co-founder of LangInnov, an ed-tech firm offering educational solutions for bilingual communities in the U.S. with backing from the National Science Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund.
Additionally, she serves as the president of Langalo Inc., a language service provider based in New York City established in 2007.
Her academic journey includes earning a PhD in Linguistics from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she also completed her MPhil in Linguistics, an MA in Liberal Studies with a focus on Translation, and a Translation degree from Universidad de la República.
Dr. Raña's expertise extends to translation, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, bilingual literacy, and assessments, reflected in her substantial contributions to various publications in these domains.
Her research pursuits currently focus on bilingual literacy assessment and development, alongside exploring word order and subject pronoun variation in the Spanish language as spoken in the United States.
Highlights
It was great running into Shaan Akbar and Rahul Kalita from Tutored by Teachers this morning! Big smiles and energy as always, and non-stop impactful work!
So Siri went from completely butchering my incoming Spanish text messages in the funniest of ways to: So and so "sent a message that is not in English." In the times of OpenAI's ChatGPT, it's unacceptable that Apple's Siri can't figure out what language a whole text message is written in, and read it accordingly. And we're talking about a top 5 world language... Linguistic discrimination and linguistic barriers remain one of technology's biggest failures. As a new era dawns on us, we have a unique opportunity to truly center diversity, equity, and inclusion into upcoming innovations. Just yesterday, I watched the presentation below given by Wendy Castillo, PhD and it dawned on me that positionality statements should be a requirement in my own field of language and literacy assessments, and they should also be a requirement in all types of edtech endeavors and tech development in general. We need to reflect on our own biases and consider the voices that we are excluding as we develop software (and educational materials) "for all" to use.
