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>> Vance Stevens: We're live!
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Hello, everybody. Somehow my video disappeared.
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It's there, but that's my - it's just an avatar format.
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[missed words]
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OK, well anyway, this is Vance Stevens in Abu Dhab... sorry, in L.A.
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I'm living in L.A. now, if you want to know where I'm living.
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Today is the 8th of December.
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They move me around so much, you know.
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And, anyway, it's the 8th of December 2013.
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We're talking with a good friend of mine, Phil Hubbard,
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from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
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And he's been doing some really neat stuff in Cal.
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I've known him for a long time in the Cal intersection Tea [missed words]
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>> Phil Hubbard: Since we were kids.
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>> Stevens: We were, 20 years ago
[Hubbard laughs]
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>> Hubbard: reaching 30 [check]
[background voice]
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>> Stevens: Someone has a -- someone needs to have a headset on.
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[missed words] is muted.
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Errh not sure: it could be someone listening to the stream.
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Yeah, if you're listening to the stream -- OK.
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Their call has gone away [check]
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Someone has corrected it, that's good.
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All right, well, OK. Someone has announced in the stream chat that they're listening to it there.
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So that's good, everything seems to be working.
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We're doing a Hangout on Air, as we often do.
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We're streaming it on webheadsinaction.org/live
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At the moment we have six people in the hangout,
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there's room for four more.
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So if anyone is listening on the stream and would like to join us, they can.
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And right now we've got Claire Siskin and Jim Buckingham, Rita Zeinstejer and
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let's see, and also Rob, Rob is there, and me, Vance Stevens. Rob Permanus, is that correct?
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Correct me if I'm wrong. Permanus, Permanus - how do you pronounce your name?
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>> Hubbard: You have to unmute him chuckles
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>> Stevens: it's Perhamus -- Perhamus, OK, Good, I'll never forget that again, all right.
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Thank you very much, Rob. Rob is an occasional participant in our hangouts.
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Well Phil, take it away and anybody who wants to --
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by the way, you're all muted by default when you come into the hangout.
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You can unmute yourself.
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If you're going to unmute yourself and talk, please mute yourself again,
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so we don't get keyboard noises and things like that.
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And there's Elizabeth Anne, also shown up from Grenoble in France.
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And Halima [check] in Tashkent has also joined us, I see.
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>> Hubbard [check] I think we're great, well, hello, everybody.
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It's Good Morning for me, a little early in the morning,
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but the sun is beginning to show through the back window here.
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Thank you all for being here from all over the world.
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What I wanted to do today is talk about largely an idea and a project that I've been working on
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for the last couple of years, very sporadically.
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Unfortunately I get interrupted easily, as I'm sure all of you do,
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so what started out as a -- what I hoped was going to be a much more robust collection of materials
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has turned out to be a little more anemic
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but I still think that I have enough here that I can demonstrate the idea
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and especially share my thoughts about how to go
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about dealing with this relatively new notion of curation,
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although in some ways, maybe it's just a label for an old notion that we've had for quite some time.
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So, let me give you a little bit of the background,
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like several of the things I've worked on in the last few years,
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like learner training.
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This is something that has emerged out of my classroom experience
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with an advanced listening and vocabulary class,
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and I see Vance is showing some of the slides now.
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The class is for graduate students at Stanford
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and it's a really nice sandbox for playing with ideas,
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because these are -- well, they're all in graduate school already,
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they're, for the most part, in the high 90's onwards to the 100s in the TOEFL iBT
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so they really are advanced in that sense.
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And many of them are taking the course because we require them to do it.
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So they're kind of a captive audience
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but it's also a small course: we have a maximum 14 students in it
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and it allows me to not only play around with ideas, but get a chance to talk to the students afterward,
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not usually with formal research, but just informally as part of our normal tutorial sessions
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and find out what they thought about them and what I can do to make them work a little better.
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So, the problem that I noticed - an important part of this class
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is that students do independent projects
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and those independent projects are supposed to be for a minimum of three hours a week.
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Sounds like I am getting some echo in the background, but I will keep pushing through here..
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Uhh.. those projects are for three hours a week
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and they are responsible for doing the selection of the material
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with my help and with my guidance both before and after.
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And over the years, I have discovered that they are actually not really good at that.
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What they are good at is finding material that is interesting to them.
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But, they are not necessarily good at finding material that helps them.
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They discover that on their own a little bit down the road
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and often it doesn't become clear to both of us
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because I have a very slow learning curve and quickly forget things.
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So, I get to the end of the class and then I go
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"Oh, I should have provided them with a little more guidance.".
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So, about 2 years ago, I started doing this
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and it came as a juxtaposition of a couple of things.
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First of all, just my own general interest in the development of autonomy had been growing
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and as I have gone out and collected materials that I would just use in class,
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it was pretty clear to me that there is a huge amount of really interesting materials out there.
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And people have been collecting these for a while
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and teachers have been building lessons out of them
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-- sometimes pretty sophisiticated lessons --
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but I needed something that students could work with on their own.
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And so, I wanted to find a way to help them without just my advice
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as to how to look for materials, to actually start collecting materials
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in ways that would still give them quite a bit of freedom of choice
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but would also make it better as a language learning experience.
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As part of this course, they are also required to build vocabulary.
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They have to identify at least 35 new words and phrases every week,
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from the material they are using.
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So, this is a bit of the backdrop.
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In 2011, I came across a book, kind of independently.
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It was just recommended to me, for some reason, by Amazon:
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you know how that works.
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And the book was called 'Curation Nation'
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and there is, I think, a slide there perhaps somewhere, it's like the sixth slide.
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There's a -- if you want to pop that up.
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If not, it's just a picture of the book.
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But it's a book it's a book by Steven Rosembaum.
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>>Stevens: I will. Could I --
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I am supposed to be able to mute mikes, as the owner of the chat,
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but I am unable to mute Halima's for some reason
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and that is where the echo is coming from.
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So, Halima, could I ask if you could click on the "mute" on your mike when not speaking?
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And if you want to unmute, you can always speak to us.
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That is where our echo is coming from.
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And okay, I will do what Phil has asked me to do and pull up 'Curation Nation'.
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>> Hubbard: laughs Alright, thanks.
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Anyway, this is not a book about education by any stretch,
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but it did come up with this notion that we have so much material on-line now
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and we are having so much difficulty in sorting out
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what the good stuff is from the chaff, for any reason, for news and so on.
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Now we have all these feeds:
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You know, if you -- those of you on Twitter or any of the other networks that have lots of feeds,
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you get the -- even Google+ -- you get feeds from your friends,
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you get feeds from people that whoever runs the site thinks might be interesting to you
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and you are just overwhelmed with an enormous amount of material.
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Some of it's pretty cool.
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Much of it is stuff you wouldn't find on your own and that's great.
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But when you've got the specific target of trying to improve your language
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-- and of course, the group that I work with doesn't actually do a whole lot with social media
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because they don't have time as full-time graduate students --
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I am lucky if I can squeeze a few hours out of them to do the work
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that they need for the course that they are taking for credit from me.
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So, this notion of curation is based roughly
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on the idea of what people do in museums and in art galleries.
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You get an expert, somebody who actually knows a fair amount about a particular area
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and you have that expert create collections, add value to them in one way or another,
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and then you release those collections for the consumer - whoever it might be --
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to have a look at and to interact with.
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So, the key difference between this and what a lot of people are doing with this material
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-- you may have heard concepts like "digital curation",
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which can just mean curating digital materials
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but often means that computers are doing the job for you.
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Google news is a really good example of that:
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I find a lot of interesting stuff in there, I can even ask it to find particular categories,
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but it's still being selected without any human intervention.
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You compare that with something like Huffington Post,
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which is material that's been brought in by people who are
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-- in some cases, they're producing it, but in other cases they are aggregating it
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and trying to make sense out of it for the rest of us.
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So, a key point here is that curation isn't the same as aggregation, or listing, or tagging.
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It's okay to use that term for that but that's not the way I am using it.
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There is a really nice quote in my slide there that -- I think it's maybe --
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two more slides down, Vance. One more. There you go. Past curation.. yeah, that one.
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So this is - it's maybe a little mean, but I think it's right on point
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that when you just get collections of things, you've just got collections of things
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and its not necessarily anything other than "these are things that I liked"
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or "these are things that I think you will like".
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So, I prefer the next slide: you want to go to it, Vance?
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This is more the way I see curation,
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where you collect material, you organize it,
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there is even the potentially a path, well, there is certainly a path
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through the individual material groups,
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and then mayble even a path through the groups,
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although at the moment I haven't done that last point.
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So, this is, you know, kind of captures the idea that I want to talk about today.
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Curation, importantly, is not the same as creation or recreation
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or adaptation or sampling, or synthesizing.
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It's taking the material and adding something to it, maybe just a commentary,
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maybe just collecting it into some logical framework or logical sequence.
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So, when I took that idea, which I was getting through the Curation Nation book,
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and thought about it with respect to the material that I was using,
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I decided to experiment with that and come up
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with some collections of materials from -- as you probably know from the title here and also the PDF,
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if you've had a look at it -- comes from TED Talks.
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And in a moment I will talk about why I think TED talks is so good for that
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but at the base level, these were very popular with my students.
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What the students were doing more--
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they were having trouble coming up with good ones.
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They would always pick what was interesting
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and then often come back to me and say
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"Well, this was interesting, but I had trouble understanding it because my --
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the accent of the speaker was not easy for me to understand."
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or "I had trouble understanding it because -- it was interesting
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because I didn't know anything about it and I didn't have the background
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so there was a whole bunch of new vocabulary."
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So t could be interesting for all sorts of reasons,
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but it wasn't interesting for the right reasons,
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for what we think is good for independent language learning.
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Again, this doesn't mean that all of those collections, with the help of a teacher,
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couldn't have been very valuable in a classroom
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and especially getting to the content for connecting to discussions.
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But that's not the same thing as letting students work on their own.
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So, I do want to emphasis that.
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My perspective here, at least initially,
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is getting students to be able to do these things outside of class
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and then just come back and report on them
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rather than having something we do in class
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or that everybody does the same homework assignment on.
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Alright, so that's the set-up for what I believe curation should be,
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or at least can be, within this framework.
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So, I think what I'll do here is pause for a second and see if anybody has questions.
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and bring it up by trying to look at some of the chat pieces here
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Uh -- [he hums]
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[reading:] "What is meant by sign..."
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OK, so some of these chats are to each other about the chats.
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So I got to go to the other window
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Uh -- anybody -- anybody have any questions here?
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If not, I'll continue on.
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>> Stevens: I have to admit I have trouble following all the chats.
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There's also a back channel here, with Google: some people could be in that one.
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I never see that one until I get off of --
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>> Hubbard: Well, the last chat -- the last piece on the group chat said:
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"Yeah, we agree with you, Phil."
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So: that's great.
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I'll stop [check] there and if everybody agrees with me, I don't really need to --
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>> Stevens: you need go no further
>> Hubbard: [overlapping, inaudible]
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No [Hubbard and Stevens laugh]
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>> Hubbard: OK, well, so, again, that's kind of the background,
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this idea that I needed to start collecting things.
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So, I'm still kind of almost two years in the past, now,
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telling you the story of how I got to where I got here.
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So I picked TED talks and I started going into TED talks.
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I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to collect them
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but I knew there were some of the ones that I liked
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and I also knew some characteristics that I thought were useful for the students.
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I thought it was important to collect them into themes.
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You know, we've known for a long time that if you have related content,
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that it kind of feeds -- the materials feed one another
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and the students get probably a better and a richer experience,
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they get more natural repetition and key vocabulary
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than if you have people just kind of jumping out piecemeal
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with unconnected bits of material.
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I -- in the 1980's I was forced to teach a course with a book I don't remember the name of that.
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I do remember the author, but I'm not going to mention it on air.
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It was a reading textbook and the reading textbook had really interesting little chapters,
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at least most of them were interesting to me,
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but, you know, one chapter would be on the Olympics
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and the next chapter would be on sea-horses.
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And it's that kind of jumping around -- we typically don't do that with textbooks anymore.
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And yet when we turn students loose, a lot of times, that's what they decide to do.
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So again, even though I had been giving them guidance, saying:
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"Well, collect several bits of, you know, pieces of material, videos or podcasts
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that are related to one another in some way,"
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they wouldn't follow that advice, because it hadn't been done for them.
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They were still kind of chasing around, looking for the spots that just seemed interesting.
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OK. I think what I'll do is tell you what the
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-- at a kind of the abstract level, what I came up with
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about what the curator's role should be.
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And again, this is specifically for this target audience,
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but I think it can be tweaked and extended to other ones.
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The first thing you have to do is collect the stuff: you want digital materials,
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you want to organize them in some way:
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mine are organized systematically, but you could do
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-- you know, you could take news stories and do them chronologically.
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You need to sequence them and this is where a lot of collections fall short.
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They're just -- they're either randomly sequenced
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or they're not sequenced at all.
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And I think it is possible, as, you know, as the resident [check] expert, the teacher,
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to be able to say:
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"Here's a way to move so that the earlier ones might be a little bit easier to follow
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and the later ones are better understood if you've done the earlier ones."
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The fourth point there that
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-- on the slide that Vance has --
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is the hardest part of all of this,
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and that is trying to get this material levelled in some way.
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Wilfried Decoo in 2010 wrote a book, it's at the end
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-- the reference is at the end of the slideshow here --
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on systemization.
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And it was kind of a return to the idea that
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even if you're using authentic material,
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and especially if you're trying to create course material yourself,
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that you need to have a kind of natural development of that material
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from, you know, easier at lower levels, to harder
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and he went to the point of even talking about keeping databases
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that were very finely tuned,
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so you would be able to pull out lexical items and grammatical points and so on
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in a scope and sequence that fit
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what we thought we knew about language learning. [20:56]
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And you know his -- I think his perspective is
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what I think is a reasonable one to bring up again,
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because I think we are often not cognizant of the difference between
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accessible and barely accessible and inaccessible materials,
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especially now that students can go in and, you know,
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get their first-language subtitles and transcripts for a lot of these materials
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and then have the illusion that they are actually understanding the English, in this case,
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and that they're building their English proficiency, where they --
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-- they may be to some extent, but probably not to the extent that they think they are.
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So there is the, you know, that idea of --
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well, in Decoo's book I find two mingling materials [check]
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That doesn't work for me because at the levels I have,
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first of all, I have mixed-level classes to some degree,
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although they are all fairly advanced.
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They come from different backgrounds, I don't know what they know going in.
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So it's a little tricky to do it in the way that he likes.
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But it still gave me the impetus to try and see if I could come up with something,
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you know, I'll show you that in a bit.
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So, the last part of that, then, once you can give at least some kind of level information,
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is to go ahead and then present your pedagogical support,
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whatever it might be.
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This is fairly open-ended, I mean teachers can get -- and often do get -- into material
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and they start stripping out what they think are key vocabulary,
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they produce, you know, pre-listening activities,
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they have post-listening activities,
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they have discussion activities.
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All these are great, but they're based kind of on a classroom model
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and even more important: they take a lot of time away
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from the job of collecting this material. [23.06]
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So if you put the hours into making full lessons,
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you end up not having the time to even produce as much as I have,
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which, as I mentioned, is not as much as I'd like.
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OK, so that's the curator's role and then -- Vance, if you could go to the next slide.
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We lose you. [23:33