First, I've been neglecting this blog for far too long. Part of this is because I have been busy working on Teachscape's Reflect product, which released just last week. While not directly related to languages, at least I'm getting some experience with supporting classroom software.
Next, most of my entries here have been my discussions of software to support language instruction from the naive perspective of a software geek. This is going to be more along the lines of a software geek talking about software.
This week, I'm at the SPLASH 2010 conference in Reno, Nevada (well, Sparks, actually). SPLASH (Systems, Programming Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity) is the successor to OOPSLA (Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications). And yes, as goofy as "OOPSLA" was as a name, I think that SPLASH is much worse. There's a whole debate about the appropriateness of the "Object Oriented" piece there, none of which justifies a name that sounds like a water park.
That aside, here are the highlights:
Monday's workshop on Architecture in an Agile World: A full day with a diverse and very intelligent group of software architecture and agile processes experts (neither of which I consider myself a member). For those who haven't had to work with an agile software project, architecture is usually deemed to be something that will emerge over time. However, too may of us had seen projects that ultimately failed at achieving that goal.
Discussions included the architect's place in agile computing, scheduling architectural design in an agile project, how different agile teams affect the architect's role, and "architecture smells". The workshop organizer, Dennis Mancl, and man of infinite energy, facilitated the all-day workshop, presented the results to the larger SPLASH audience that evening, and then found time to post this summary of the results. One of the participants, Kenji Hiranabe, also spent the wee hours of the morning recording this video presentation of the workshop's findings, in Japanese.
Tuesday's sessions have been informative. Most memorable for me was walking into the "Software for a Sustainable World" panel discussion on green technology, to see Ron Gremban's Giant Head on the video display. Ron and I worked together at TIBCO twenty years ago. Ron was sharing his experience as an expert on developing plug-in electric cars at the CalCars initiative, which involved converting a Prius to a completely electronic car. It always struck me as appropriate that Ron has made his mark on the world by taking some technology and then fiddling with it until it did something far beyond what anyone else expected it could.
Though it has not been stated as a theme, the subject that seems to come up regularly so far is software testing. In the Agile Workshop, we agreed that designing tests to reflect the software's business requirements was essential. However, there was something of a glossing over questions about how you can test complex (and often vague) requirements like scalability and performance.
In the first keynote on Tuesday morning, Stephanie Forrest made a case for extending Genetic Algorithms as a means of fixing bugs or even improving larger programs. I have rarely heard of genetic algorithms extending into real-world applications. (There are a few exceptions.) I believe the major stumbling-block is in creating sufficient fitness tests. At the presentation this morning, it was argued that even minimal fitness tests could result in better code, but I can't help feeling as though there are potentially serious problems to ignoring some aspects of them.
More later on tomorrow's sessions, including Art, Science, and Fear, and Rubber Ducks, Nightmares, and Unsaturated Predicates.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
TESOL 2010 - Day 1
Still trying to find time to post. I don't have time to do justice to everything I've seen, so a quick set of vaguely related observations:
- Compared to high-tech conferences, it's intimidating to discover all the subjects I haven't even begun to understand. I feel like a tourist here.
- This is an enormous conference. It's pretty easy to fill ten to twelve hours each day just with conference activities.
- As with technical conferences, there's an interesting dichotomy between the practical (teachers) and a academic.
- The one subject I've seen covered identically in both technical conferences and TESOL is plagiarism in the digital age.
- There is a fairly extensive linguistic study of electronic texts (text corpora) with regards to language acquisition, but there is little commercial application so far.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
TESOL 2010 - Day 0
The official conference begins tomorrow, but the Pre-Conference Institute and the opening Luminary Speaker were held. I decided to walk over to the conference center early. The registration line was longer than I've seen at any conference before, but moved reasonably quickly. Compared to the technology conferences I've attended, this is large.
I signed up for one Pre-Conference Institute (PCI) session on Vocabulary and Authentic Texts. The original work was done with English students who were attending college and needed to deal with a large amount of new vocabulary in academic and other texts, though the concepts have been applied to other situations. We went through a number of vocabulary exercises and concepts that I found quite helpful, and could certainly be used in a computer setting. Most importantly, though, I had an opportunity to learn about many different settings in which English language teachers work.
The Luminary Speaker was Howard Gardner, discussing his ideas from his latest book, 5 Minds for the Future. I took lots of notes, but I'm already late to get to the opening session this morning.
I signed up for one Pre-Conference Institute (PCI) session on Vocabulary and Authentic Texts. The original work was done with English students who were attending college and needed to deal with a large amount of new vocabulary in academic and other texts, though the concepts have been applied to other situations. We went through a number of vocabulary exercises and concepts that I found quite helpful, and could certainly be used in a computer setting. Most importantly, though, I had an opportunity to learn about many different settings in which English language teachers work.
The Luminary Speaker was Howard Gardner, discussing his ideas from his latest book, 5 Minds for the Future. I took lots of notes, but I'm already late to get to the opening session this morning.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
TESOL 2010 - Day -1
The TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) conference starts tomorrow, and I just got into Boston. While I have flown, and even ridden the bus through the city now and again, it has been twenty years since I've walked the streets. That means that I haven't seen the place close up since the Big Dig. Let me rephrase that. I haven't seen the place close up since before the Big Dig started, so we're talking a really long time ago.
I got into the Park Plaza and asked the concierge whether there was a Legal Seafood or something similar nearby. "Out the door. To the right. Down to the end of the block." was his answer. There's a Legal Seafood there. After a meal of the Boston Scrod (something I don't get much of in California), I stopped at a Ben and Jerry's and took advantage of the remaining fifteen minutes of Free Cone Day. I walked back to the hotel, eating my ice cream in the cold and rain.
I love Boston!
Real language and technology-related postings later.
I got into the Park Plaza and asked the concierge whether there was a Legal Seafood or something similar nearby. "Out the door. To the right. Down to the end of the block." was his answer. There's a Legal Seafood there. After a meal of the Boston Scrod (something I don't get much of in California), I stopped at a Ben and Jerry's and took advantage of the remaining fifteen minutes of Free Cone Day. I walked back to the hotel, eating my ice cream in the cold and rain.
I love Boston!
Real language and technology-related postings later.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Setting goals
I have two reasons for being late in getting this out this week.
1.) I just started a full-time position at the company I've been consulting for over the last few months. (Teachscape)
2.) While getting acquainted with my new company, I came upon a learning module covering the exact topic I was going to post a few lines on.
Teachscape has just come out with a "Module of the Month" feature to show off their professional development tool. This month's module is "Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback." I was struck by the first exercise.
That should be an easy first exercise for me, since it was what I was planning to write about, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt sure I could answer well. In general, I have seen few language courses of any kind, whether online, independent, or in a class, that ask the student to consider the ultimate goal of learning a language.
Initially, this isn't a huge problem. The student needs to learn some basic vocabulary, the fundamentals of sentence structure, writing rules, and pronunciation. After getting past the basic skills, though, different students may have very different goals.
I'm not sure whether the writer of the exercise above was aware of it, but the examples of simple conversational skills compared to fluency in reading and writing high-level, academic text are not on a simple linear continuum.
While it is easy to imagine someone with strong conversational skills finding it difficult to read and write academic text, it is just as possible that someone with a strong knowledge of the academic language would be hopeless speaking a modern idiom. I have experienced both problems, from being asked to translate a few paragraphs of Chinese, only to discover that it was Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese prose, to being asked at the last minute to give a business presentation in French, on the strength of a knowledge of Flaubert and Victor Hugo.
I tend to think that technology could be used to address this problem. As usual, I'm hung up on the idea that it should be possible to find authentic content appropriate to the student's goals and abilities. The hard part is not so much searching for the content. There's plenty of it available on the web. The problem is properly modeling the current abilities of the student and the preferred content the student wants to be able to understand.
What I'm unsure of is whether it's worth creating a tool that would search for appropriate authentic content, or just providing as much content as possible, and let the student decide which is appropriate.
1.) I just started a full-time position at the company I've been consulting for over the last few months. (Teachscape)
2.) While getting acquainted with my new company, I came upon a learning module covering the exact topic I was going to post a few lines on.
Teachscape has just come out with a "Module of the Month" feature to show off their professional development tool. This month's module is "Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback." I was struck by the first exercise.
- Think of a skill or concept you are learning or are trying to learn. . . . For example, you may decide that you want to learn another language.
- What is your learning objective? In the language example, your objectives could range from simple conversational skills to fluency in reading and writing high-level, academic text.
. . .
How will you get feedback on your progress? Do you have access to external measures (other people or measurement instruments) as well as self-assessment?
That should be an easy first exercise for me, since it was what I was planning to write about, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt sure I could answer well. In general, I have seen few language courses of any kind, whether online, independent, or in a class, that ask the student to consider the ultimate goal of learning a language.
Initially, this isn't a huge problem. The student needs to learn some basic vocabulary, the fundamentals of sentence structure, writing rules, and pronunciation. After getting past the basic skills, though, different students may have very different goals.
I'm not sure whether the writer of the exercise above was aware of it, but the examples of simple conversational skills compared to fluency in reading and writing high-level, academic text are not on a simple linear continuum.
While it is easy to imagine someone with strong conversational skills finding it difficult to read and write academic text, it is just as possible that someone with a strong knowledge of the academic language would be hopeless speaking a modern idiom. I have experienced both problems, from being asked to translate a few paragraphs of Chinese, only to discover that it was Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese prose, to being asked at the last minute to give a business presentation in French, on the strength of a knowledge of Flaubert and Victor Hugo.
I tend to think that technology could be used to address this problem. As usual, I'm hung up on the idea that it should be possible to find authentic content appropriate to the student's goals and abilities. The hard part is not so much searching for the content. There's plenty of it available on the web. The problem is properly modeling the current abilities of the student and the preferred content the student wants to be able to understand.
What I'm unsure of is whether it's worth creating a tool that would search for appropriate authentic content, or just providing as much content as possible, and let the student decide which is appropriate.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Can LiveMocha Do This?
OK, so I'm picking on LiveMocha in this post, but it might as well be any of the companies providing language training software. Why does nobody provide us with even some basic raw data on language learning? I'm sure they've got some.
As someone with a statistics background, I'm a huge fan of just about any statistics site. I follow Nate Silver's political postings just to wade through the numbers. More recently, I followed a link to OkTrends, the statistics blog for OK Cupid. On the one hand, I'm impressed by the level of online interaction OK Cupid creates. On the other, like most dating sites, it just strikes me as terribly shallow. (I'm sure people can point to much shallower out there.) Despite all this, the people who run it include a bunch of statistics geeks who just enjoy figuring out how they can run the numbers on postings and messages on their site.
It should be fascinating, either for anyone who enjoys statistics, or for someone who has a strange voyeuristic interest in young people checking each other out. Among the subjects discussed are The Correlation of Race and Messages Received and 4 Myths of Profile Pictures. The latter taught me that the intensely twee overhead photo is typically called the "MySpace Shot", something I guess everyone else already knew.
And if that isn't sufficiently devoid of applicability, there's always floatingsheep, which engages in odd but entertaining map mashups. While I'm not sure that any of this is particularly scientific or provides surprising insights, it does show what you can do if you happen to be sitting on top of a large collection of datasets and have a reasonable amount of free time and imagination.
And this brings me back to the question about LiveMocha. One of the big promises of computer-aided language learning (small letters - as opposed to formal CALL) was that we would finally have large amounts of data regarding second language acquisition. And we're still waiting. Up to now, so much analysis of language instruction has been based on ad hoc case studies with inconsistent and small datasets. I admit, nobody is going to be able to put together a PhD thesis on what's available from online language learning now, but there ought to be something measurable, and at least of general interest..
How many people start an online language learning course and finish it? How quickly do people usually finish a lesson? What is the correlation of course completion and number of online social connections, or frequency of online messaging? If course completion isn't a good measure of language learning, then how quickly do users upgrade their language knowledge from "beginner" to "intermediate"? How many people intentionally start a course in a language just to see what it's like, but didn't pursue it? (I know I did.)
The point is that the folks who manage the LiveMocha website should be able to answer these questions. Possibly I'm the only person who really cares, but I'd be willing to bet that others out there would like to know what learning strategies are showing more success than others, what patterns there are in ways to learn a language, and just simply how other people user online language learning tools.
As someone with a statistics background, I'm a huge fan of just about any statistics site. I follow Nate Silver's political postings just to wade through the numbers. More recently, I followed a link to OkTrends, the statistics blog for OK Cupid. On the one hand, I'm impressed by the level of online interaction OK Cupid creates. On the other, like most dating sites, it just strikes me as terribly shallow. (I'm sure people can point to much shallower out there.) Despite all this, the people who run it include a bunch of statistics geeks who just enjoy figuring out how they can run the numbers on postings and messages on their site.
It should be fascinating, either for anyone who enjoys statistics, or for someone who has a strange voyeuristic interest in young people checking each other out. Among the subjects discussed are The Correlation of Race and Messages Received and 4 Myths of Profile Pictures. The latter taught me that the intensely twee overhead photo is typically called the "MySpace Shot", something I guess everyone else already knew.
And if that isn't sufficiently devoid of applicability, there's always floatingsheep, which engages in odd but entertaining map mashups. While I'm not sure that any of this is particularly scientific or provides surprising insights, it does show what you can do if you happen to be sitting on top of a large collection of datasets and have a reasonable amount of free time and imagination.
And this brings me back to the question about LiveMocha. One of the big promises of computer-aided language learning (small letters - as opposed to formal CALL) was that we would finally have large amounts of data regarding second language acquisition. And we're still waiting. Up to now, so much analysis of language instruction has been based on ad hoc case studies with inconsistent and small datasets. I admit, nobody is going to be able to put together a PhD thesis on what's available from online language learning now, but there ought to be something measurable, and at least of general interest..
How many people start an online language learning course and finish it? How quickly do people usually finish a lesson? What is the correlation of course completion and number of online social connections, or frequency of online messaging? If course completion isn't a good measure of language learning, then how quickly do users upgrade their language knowledge from "beginner" to "intermediate"? How many people intentionally start a course in a language just to see what it's like, but didn't pursue it? (I know I did.)
The point is that the folks who manage the LiveMocha website should be able to answer these questions. Possibly I'm the only person who really cares, but I'd be willing to bet that others out there would like to know what learning strategies are showing more success than others, what patterns there are in ways to learn a language, and just simply how other people user online language learning tools.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Things I've been saving
I'm finally done with this last two-month project, and have several things I've been saving that I thought I'd write about at some point.
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SmartFM - This is a study website, mostly focusing on language. It started as iKnow!, put out by the Japanese education company, Cerego. It was exposed to a worldwide audience late last year, so much of the content is still in Japanese.
On one level, it's just another flashcard system, but there are some aspects I really like. As with several other sites, it has a social networking component. Most importantly, it includes a development API which lets developers expand its behavior. This is still pretty simple, but a good start.
-----
This article on texting skills doesn't surprise me much. It's very interesting to see that people tend to change their texting habits depending on their audience. What the article doesn't say, but implies, is that texting has given rise to a new dialect, which is changing rapidly and in which younger people can code switch to more standard English without much difficulty.
It is also nice to see a refutation of the old canard that changes in language are a product of some horrible degeneration. (If so, I dread to think what Geoffrey Chaucer would think of the way we speak today.) I remember my college Russian language professor getting indignant over the fact that students of my generation did not know what a cold frame was. Of course, most students of my generation had never been exposed to a cold frame. (Growing up in New England, I had, which is why I was a little chagrined to have forgotten it at the time.)
-----
Before my recent project, I hadn't really been giving much thought to classroom environments, but I like this description of an open learning environment. The idea that students can engage in different projects at their own level, and can even share very different insights into the same subject, as these kids did with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, is something that I think the web is well-designed to support in both a classroom and in continuing adult education.
-----
I neglected to acknowledge one obvious source of up-to-date authentic content in language learning. There are now many podcasts available for a wide variety of languages. Since my recent project involved a great deal of commuting, I had an opportunity to sample several different Mandarin Chinese podcasts out there. I particularly liked the CLO courses. The Serge Melnyk podcasts include some very nice esoteric vocabulary (like Chinese baby-talk), though it relies on more translation than I like. While most of these are associated with commercial courses, the podcasts are free. I highly recommend these for anyone who is finding their language tapes and software to be a little stale.
-----
SmartFM - This is a study website, mostly focusing on language. It started as iKnow!, put out by the Japanese education company, Cerego. It was exposed to a worldwide audience late last year, so much of the content is still in Japanese.
On one level, it's just another flashcard system, but there are some aspects I really like. As with several other sites, it has a social networking component. Most importantly, it includes a development API which lets developers expand its behavior. This is still pretty simple, but a good start.
-----
This article on texting skills doesn't surprise me much. It's very interesting to see that people tend to change their texting habits depending on their audience. What the article doesn't say, but implies, is that texting has given rise to a new dialect, which is changing rapidly and in which younger people can code switch to more standard English without much difficulty.
It is also nice to see a refutation of the old canard that changes in language are a product of some horrible degeneration. (If so, I dread to think what Geoffrey Chaucer would think of the way we speak today.) I remember my college Russian language professor getting indignant over the fact that students of my generation did not know what a cold frame was. Of course, most students of my generation had never been exposed to a cold frame. (Growing up in New England, I had, which is why I was a little chagrined to have forgotten it at the time.)
-----
Before my recent project, I hadn't really been giving much thought to classroom environments, but I like this description of an open learning environment. The idea that students can engage in different projects at their own level, and can even share very different insights into the same subject, as these kids did with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, is something that I think the web is well-designed to support in both a classroom and in continuing adult education.
-----
I neglected to acknowledge one obvious source of up-to-date authentic content in language learning. There are now many podcasts available for a wide variety of languages. Since my recent project involved a great deal of commuting, I had an opportunity to sample several different Mandarin Chinese podcasts out there. I particularly liked the CLO courses. The Serge Melnyk podcasts include some very nice esoteric vocabulary (like Chinese baby-talk), though it relies on more translation than I like. While most of these are associated with commercial courses, the podcasts are free. I highly recommend these for anyone who is finding their language tapes and software to be a little stale.
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