WEBVTT
00:00:02.250 --> 00:00:04.833
>> Vance Stevens: We're live!
00:00:04.833 --> 00:00:08.256
Hello, everybody. Somehow my video disappeared.
00:00:08.256 --> 00:00:12.643
It's there, but that's my - it's just an avatar format.
00:00:12.643 --> 00:00:13.201
[missed words]
00:00:13.201 --> 00:00:17.335
OK, well anyway, this is Vance Stevens in Abu Dhab... sorry, in L.A.
00:00:17.335 --> 00:00:20.140
I'm living in L.A. now, if you want to know where I'm living.
00:00:20.140 --> 00:00:21.533
Today is the 8th of December.
00:00:21.533 --> 00:00:25.155
They move me around so much, you know.
00:00:25.155 --> 00:00:30.064
And, anyway, it's the 8th of December 2013.
00:00:30.064 --> 00:00:33.420
We're talking with a good friend of mine, Phil Hubbard,
00:00:33.420 --> 00:00:38.039
from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
00:00:38.039 --> 00:00:44.940
And he's been doing some really neat stuff in Cal.
00:00:44.940 --> 00:00:48.606
I've known him for a long time in the Cal intersection Tea [missed words]
00:00:48.606 --> 00:00:50.243
>> Phil Hubbard: Since we were kids.
00:00:50.243 --> 00:00:53.546
>> Stevens: We were, 20 years ago
[Hubbard laughs]
00:00:53.546 --> 00:00:57.998
>> Hubbard: reaching 30 [check]
[background voice]
00:00:57.998 --> 00:01:03.036
>> Stevens: Someone has a -- someone needs to have a headset on.
00:01:03.036 --> 00:01:04.814
[missed words] is muted.
00:01:04.814 --> 00:01:10.499
Errh not sure: it could be someone listening to the stream.
00:01:10.499 --> 00:01:11.918
Yeah, if you're listening to the stream -- OK.
00:01:11.918 --> 00:01:13.499
Their call has gone away [check]
00:01:13.499 --> 00:01:15.047
Someone has corrected it, that's good.
00:01:15.047 --> 00:01:23.371
All right, well, OK. Someone has announced in the stream chat that they're listening to it there.
00:01:23.371 --> 00:01:25.999
So that's good, everything seems to be working.
00:01:25.999 --> 00:01:28.499
We're doing a Hangout on Air, as we often do.
00:01:28.499 --> 00:01:32.271
We're streaming it on webheadsinaction.org/live
00:01:32.271 --> 00:01:36.495
At the moment we have six people in the hangout,
00:01:36.495 --> 00:01:37.752
there's room for four more.
00:01:37.752 --> 00:01:41.914
So if anyone is listening on the stream and would like to join us, they can.
00:01:41.914 --> 00:01:47.998
And right now we've got Claire Siskin and Jim Buckingham, Rita Zeinstejer and
00:01:47.998 --> 00:01:59.105
let's see, and also Rob, Rob is there, and me, Vance Stevens. Rob Permanus, is that correct?
00:01:59.105 --> 00:02:05.665
Correct me if I'm wrong. Permanus, Permanus - how do you pronounce your name?
00:02:05.665 --> 00:02:09.245
>> Hubbard: You have to unmute him chuckles
00:02:09.245 --> 00:02:17.438
>> Stevens: it's Perhamus -- Perhamus, OK, Good, I'll never forget that again, all right.
00:02:17.438 --> 00:02:23.162
Thank you very much, Rob. Rob is an occasional participant in our hangouts.
00:02:23.162 --> 00:02:28.379
Well Phil, take it away and anybody who wants to --
00:02:28.379 --> 00:02:31.826
by the way, you're all muted by default when you come into the hangout.
00:02:31.826 --> 00:02:33.777
You can unmute yourself.
00:02:33.777 --> 00:02:39.071
If you're going to unmute yourself and talk, please mute yourself again,
00:02:39.071 --> 00:02:43.199
so we don't get keyboard noises and things like that.
00:02:43.199 --> 00:02:48.005
And there's Elizabeth Anne, also shown up from Grenoble in France.
00:02:48.005 --> 00:02:53.204
And Halima [check] in Tashkent has also joined us, I see.
00:02:53.204 --> 00:02:55.367
>> Hubbard [check] I think we're great, well, hello, everybody.
00:02:55.367 --> 00:02:59.136
It's Good Morning for me, a little early in the morning,
00:02:59.136 --> 00:03:04.035
but the sun is beginning to show through the back window here.
00:03:04.035 --> 00:03:08.669
Thank you all for being here from all over the world.
00:03:08.669 --> 00:03:18.079
What I wanted to do today is talk about largely an idea and a project that I've been working on
00:03:18.079 --> 00:03:21.585
for the last couple of years, very sporadically.
00:03:21.585 --> 00:03:25.410
Unfortunately I get interrupted easily, as I'm sure all of you do,
00:03:25.410 --> 00:03:35.897
so what started out as a -- what I hoped was going to be a much more robust collection of materials
00:03:35.897 --> 00:03:39.579
has turned out to be a little more anemic
00:03:39.579 --> 00:03:44.415
but I still think that I have enough here that I can demonstrate the idea
00:03:44.415 --> 00:03:48.710
and especially share my thoughts about how to go
00:03:48.710 --> 00:03:55.746
about dealing with this relatively new notion of curation,
00:03:55.746 --> 00:04:01.083
although in some ways, maybe it's just a label for an old notion that we've had for quite some time.
00:04:01.083 --> 00:04:06.463
So, let me give you a little bit of the background,
00:04:06.463 --> 00:04:10.592
like several of the things I've worked on in the last few years,
00:04:10.592 --> 00:04:12.663
like learner training.
00:04:12.663 --> 00:04:17.979
This is something that has emerged out of my classroom experience
00:04:17.979 --> 00:04:21.939
with an advanced listening and vocabulary class,
00:04:21.939 --> 00:04:27.321
and I see Vance is showing some of the slides now.
00:04:27.321 --> 00:04:36.856
The class is for graduate students at Stanford
00:04:36.856 --> 00:04:42.469
and it's a really nice sandbox for playing with ideas,
00:04:42.469 --> 00:04:48.099
because these are -- well, they're all in graduate school already,
00:04:48.099 --> 00:04:57.270
they're, for the most part, in the high 90's onwards to the 100s in the TOEFL iBT
00:04:57.270 --> 00:04:59.100
so they really are advanced in that sense.
00:04:59.100 --> 00:05:06.054
And many of them are taking the course because we require them to do it.
00:05:06.054 --> 00:05:08.050
So they're kind of a captive audience
00:05:08.050 --> 00:05:12.065
but it's also a small course: we have a maximum 14 students in it
00:05:12.065 --> 00:05:22.370
and it allows me to not only play around with ideas, but get a chance to talk to the students afterward,
00:05:22.370 --> 00:05:29.890
not usually with formal research, but just informally as part of our normal tutorial sessions
00:05:29.890 --> 00:05:35.036
and find out what they thought about them and what I can do to make them work a little better.
00:05:37.512 --> 00:05:42.645
So, the problem that I noticed - an important part of this class
00:05:42.645 --> 00:05:45.288
is that students do independent projects
00:05:45.795 --> 00:05:52.906
and those independent projects are supposed to be for a minimum of three hours a week.
00:05:54.443 --> 00:05:59.941
Sounds like I am getting some echo in the background, but I will keep pushing through here..
00:06:00.510 --> 00:06:03.404
Uhh.. those projects are for three hours a week
00:06:03.404 --> 00:06:09.411
and they are responsible for doing the selection of the material
00:06:09.411 --> 00:06:14.913
with my help and with my guidance both before and after.
00:06:16.528 --> 00:06:23.328
And over the years, I have discovered that they are actually not really good at that.
00:06:23.328 --> 00:06:27.032
What they are good at is finding material that is interesting to them.
00:06:27.385 --> 00:06:31.478
But, they are not necessarily good at finding material that helps them.
00:06:32.585 --> 00:06:38.933
They discover that on their own a little bit down the road
00:06:38.933 --> 00:06:41.643
and often it doesn't become clear to both of us
00:06:41.643 --> 00:06:46.655
because I have a very slow learning curve and quickly forget things.
00:06:46.655 --> 00:06:50.816
So, I get to the end of the class and then I go
00:06:50.816 --> 00:06:53.945
"Oh, I should have provided them with a little more guidance.".
00:06:53.945 --> 00:06:56.410
So, about 2 years ago, I started doing this
00:06:56.410 --> 00:06:59.926
and it came as a juxtaposition of a couple of things.
00:06:59.926 --> 00:07:05.399
First of all, just my own general interest in the development of autonomy had been growing
00:07:06.275 --> 00:07:11.533
and as I have gone out and collected materials that I would just use in class,
00:07:12.086 --> 00:07:16.977
it was pretty clear to me that there is a huge amount of really interesting materials out there.
00:07:17.899 --> 00:07:20.553
And people have been collecting these for a while
00:07:20.585 --> 00:07:24.330
and teachers have been building lessons out of them
00:07:24.899 --> 00:07:27.055
-- sometimes pretty sophisiticated lessons --
00:07:27.516 --> 00:07:31.749
but I needed something that students could work with on their own.
00:07:32.241 --> 00:07:37.784
And so, I wanted to find a way to help them without just my advice
00:07:37.784 --> 00:07:41.513
as to how to look for materials, to actually start collecting materials
00:07:41.513 --> 00:07:44.729
in ways that would still give them quite a bit of freedom of choice
00:07:44.729 --> 00:07:52.101
but would also make it better as a language learning experience.
00:07:53.008 --> 00:07:58.163
As part of this course, they are also required to build vocabulary.
00:07:58.179 --> 00:08:02.794
They have to identify at least 35 new words and phrases every week,
00:08:02.794 --> 00:08:04.447
from the material they are using.
00:08:04.447 --> 00:08:07.488
So, this is a bit of the backdrop.
00:08:08.714 --> 00:08:14.115
In 2011, I came across a book, kind of independently.
00:08:14.115 --> 00:08:17.200
It was just recommended to me, for some reason, by Amazon:
00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:18.730
you know how that works.
00:08:19.360 --> 00:08:22.147
And the book was called 'Curation Nation'
00:08:22.147 --> 00:08:27.468
and there is, I think, a slide there perhaps somewhere, it's like the sixth slide.
00:08:29.268 --> 00:08:32.835
There's a -- if you want to pop that up.
00:08:32.835 --> 00:08:34.596
If not, it's just a picture of the book.
00:08:34.596 --> 00:08:36.537
But it's a book it's a book by Steven Rosembaum.
00:08:36.537 --> 00:08:38.163
>>Stevens: I will. Could I --
00:08:38.163 --> 00:08:42.805
I am supposed to be able to mute mikes, as the owner of the chat,
00:08:42.805 --> 00:08:45.385
but I am unable to mute Halima's for some reason
00:08:45.385 --> 00:08:47.854
and that is where the echo is coming from.
00:08:47.854 --> 00:08:53.118
So, Halima, could I ask if you could click on the "mute" on your mike when not speaking?
00:08:53.118 --> 00:08:56.133
And if you want to unmute, you can always speak to us.
00:08:56.133 --> 00:08:58.294
That is where our echo is coming from.
00:08:58.709 --> 00:09:03.525
And okay, I will do what Phil has asked me to do and pull up 'Curation Nation'.
00:09:04.801 --> 00:09:06.185
>> Hubbard: laughs Alright, thanks.
00:09:06.741 --> 00:09:10.701
Anyway, this is not a book about education by any stretch,
00:09:10.701 --> 00:09:17.721
but it did come up with this notion that we have so much material on-line now
00:09:17.721 --> 00:09:21.692
and we are having so much difficulty in sorting out
00:09:21.692 --> 00:09:26.891
what the good stuff is from the chaff, for any reason, for news and so on.
00:09:26.891 --> 00:09:29.052
Now we have all these feeds:
00:09:29.990 --> 00:09:37.173
You know, if you -- those of you on Twitter or any of the other networks that have lots of feeds,
00:09:37.173 --> 00:09:41.142
you get the -- even Google+ -- you get feeds from your friends,
00:09:41.142 --> 00:09:47.974
you get feeds from people that whoever runs the site thinks might be interesting to you
00:09:47.974 --> 00:09:51.139
and you are just overwhelmed with an enormous amount of material.
00:09:51.139 --> 00:09:53.054
Some of it's pretty cool.
00:09:53.715 --> 00:09:59.156
Much of it is stuff you wouldn't find on your own and that's great.
00:09:59.586 --> 00:10:03.788
But when you've got the specific target of trying to improve your language
00:10:03.788 --> 00:10:09.074
-- and of course, the group that I work with doesn't actually do a whole lot with social media
00:10:09.074 --> 00:10:13.669
because they don't have time as full-time graduate students --
00:10:13.669 --> 00:10:17.406
I am lucky if I can squeeze a few hours out of them to do the work
00:10:17.406 --> 00:10:20.241
that they need for the course that they are taking for credit from me.
00:10:20.241 --> 00:10:28.026
So, this notion of curation is based roughly
00:10:28.026 --> 00:10:35.591
on the idea of what people do in museums and in art galleries.
00:10:36.683 --> 00:10:42.346
You get an expert, somebody who actually knows a fair amount about a particular area
00:10:42.346 --> 00:10:50.067
and you have that expert create collections, add value to them in one way or another,
00:10:50.759 --> 00:10:56.363
and then you release those collections for the consumer - whoever it might be --
00:10:56.363 --> 00:10:59.565
to have a look at and to interact with.
00:11:00.964 --> 00:11:06.434
So, the key difference between this and what a lot of people are doing with this material
00:11:06.434 --> 00:11:11.308
-- you may have heard concepts like "digital curation",
00:11:11.308 --> 00:11:14.558
which can just mean curating digital materials
00:11:14.558 --> 00:11:18.503
but often means that computers are doing the job for you.
00:11:19.994 --> 00:11:22.444
Google news is a really good example of that:
00:11:22.444 --> 00:11:28.187
I find a lot of interesting stuff in there, I can even ask it to find particular categories,
00:11:28.863 --> 00:11:32.475
but it's still being selected without any human intervention.
00:11:33.198 --> 00:11:35.557
You compare that with something like Huffington Post,
00:11:35.557 --> 00:11:40.208
which is material that's been brought in by people who are
00:11:40.700 --> 00:11:45.423
-- in some cases, they're producing it, but in other cases they are aggregating it
00:11:45.423 --> 00:11:48.129
and trying to make sense out of it for the rest of us.
00:11:49.313 --> 00:11:57.321
So, a key point here is that curation isn't the same as aggregation, or listing, or tagging.
00:11:57.321 --> 00:12:01.378
It's okay to use that term for that but that's not the way I am using it.
00:12:02.378 --> 00:12:09.164
There is a really nice quote in my slide there that -- I think it's maybe --
00:12:09.164 --> 00:12:17.368
two more slides down, Vance. One more. There you go. Past curation.. yeah, that one.
00:12:17.368 --> 00:12:23.741
So this is - it's maybe a little mean, but I think it's right on point
00:12:23.741 --> 00:12:28.623
that when you just get collections of things, you've just got collections of things
00:12:28.623 --> 00:12:34.513
and its not necessarily anything other than "these are things that I liked"
00:12:34.513 --> 00:12:36.666
or "these are things that I think you will like".
00:12:37.342 --> 00:12:42.645
So, I prefer the next slide: you want to go to it, Vance?
00:12:44.566 --> 00:12:46.877
This is more the way I see curation,
00:12:46.908 --> 00:12:50.737
where you collect material, you organize it,
00:12:50.737 --> 00:12:53.748
there is even the potentially a path, well, there is certainly a path
00:12:53.748 --> 00:12:56.101
through the individual material groups,
00:12:56.101 --> 00:12:57.985
and then mayble even a path through the groups,
00:12:57.985 --> 00:13:00.631
although at the moment I haven't done that last point.
00:13:01.061 --> 00:13:05.415
So, this is, you know, kind of captures the idea that I want to talk about today.
00:13:07.291 --> 00:13:13.432
Curation, importantly, is not the same as creation or recreation
00:13:13.432 --> 00:13:18.596
or adaptation or sampling, or synthesizing.
00:13:19.257 --> 00:13:24.761
It's taking the material and adding something to it, maybe just a commentary,
00:13:24.761 --> 00:13:31.052
maybe just collecting it into some logical framework or logical sequence.
00:13:32.175 --> 00:13:40.250
So, when I took that idea, which I was getting through the Curation Nation book,
00:13:40.250 --> 00:13:44.483
and thought about it with respect to the material that I was using,
00:13:45.159 --> 00:13:49.541
I decided to experiment with that and come up
00:13:49.541 --> 00:13:57.217
with some collections of materials from -- as you probably know from the title here and also the PDF,
00:13:57.217 --> 00:13:59.723
if you've had a look at it -- comes from TED Talks.
00:14:00.476 --> 00:14:04.232
And in a moment I will talk about why I think TED talks is so good for that
00:14:04.232 --> 00:14:07.827
but at the base level, these were very popular with my students.
00:14:08.242 --> 00:14:10.465
What the students were doing more--
00:14:10.465 --> 00:14:14.168
they were having trouble coming up with good ones.
00:14:14.168 --> 00:14:16.931
They would always pick what was interesting
00:14:16.931 --> 00:14:19.268
and then often come back to me and say
00:14:19.268 --> 00:14:24.707
"Well, this was interesting, but I had trouble understanding it because my --
00:14:24.707 --> 00:14:29.656
the accent of the speaker was not easy for me to understand."
00:14:29.656 --> 00:14:33.436
or "I had trouble understanding it because -- it was interesting
00:14:33.436 --> 00:14:36.837
because I didn't know anything about it and I didn't have the background
00:14:36.837 --> 00:14:39.431
so there was a whole bunch of new vocabulary."
00:14:40.176 --> 00:14:42.461
So t could be interesting for all sorts of reasons,
00:14:43.061 --> 00:14:45.206
but it wasn't interesting for the right reasons,
00:14:45.206 --> 00:14:48.763
for what we think is good for independent language learning.
00:14:48.763 --> 00:14:54.022
Again, this doesn't mean that all of those collections, with the help of a teacher,
00:14:54.022 --> 00:14:57.007
couldn't have been very valuable in a classroom
00:14:57.007 --> 00:15:01.677
and especially getting to the content for connecting to discussions.
00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:05.423
But that's not the same thing as letting students work on their own.
00:15:05.423 --> 00:15:07.880
So, I do want to emphasis that.
00:15:07.880 --> 00:15:10.543
My perspective here, at least initially,
00:15:10.543 --> 00:15:14.879
is getting students to be able to do these things outside of class
00:15:14.879 --> 00:15:16.921
and then just come back and report on them
00:15:16.921 --> 00:15:21.143
rather than having something we do in class
00:15:21.143 --> 00:15:24.026
or that everybody does the same homework assignment on.
00:15:25.887 --> 00:15:33.516
Alright, so that's the set-up for what I believe curation should be,
00:15:33.516 --> 00:15:35.935
or at least can be, within this framework.
00:15:35.935 --> 00:15:40.968
So, I think what I'll do here is pause for a second and see if anybody has questions.
00:15:40.968 --> 00:15:46.983
and bring it up by trying to look at some of the chat pieces here
00:15:48.106 --> 00:15:51.352
Uh -- [he hums]
00:15:51.994 --> 00:15:53.539
[reading:] "What is meant by sign..."
00:15:53.539 --> 00:15:56.667
OK, so some of these chats are to each other about the chats.
00:15:56.823 --> 00:15:58.219
So I got to go to the other window
00:15:59.488 --> 00:16:06.801
Uh -- anybody -- anybody have any questions here?
00:16:06.801 --> 00:16:08.187
If not, I'll continue on.
00:16:09.446 --> 00:16:12.809
>> Stevens: I have to admit I have trouble following all the chats.
00:16:12.809 --> 00:16:17.614
There's also a back channel here, with Google: some people could be in that one.
00:16:17.614 --> 00:16:20.877
I never see that one until I get off of --
00:16:20.880 --> 00:16:26.476
>> Hubbard: Well, the last chat -- the last piece on the group chat said:
00:16:26.686 --> 00:16:28.646
"Yeah, we agree with you, Phil."
00:16:28.621 --> 00:16:29.849
So: that's great.
00:16:29.849 --> 00:16:33.861
I'll stop [check] there and if everybody agrees with me, I don't really need to --
00:16:34.495 --> 00:16:37.118
>> Stevens: you need go no further
>> Hubbard: [overlapping, inaudible]
00:16:37.200 --> 00:16:38.715
No [Hubbard and Stevens laugh]
00:16:38.976 --> 00:16:41.808
>> Hubbard: OK, well, so, again, that's kind of the background,
00:16:43.113 --> 00:16:46.913
this idea that I needed to start collecting things.
00:16:46.913 --> 00:16:50.611
So, I'm still kind of almost two years in the past, now,
00:16:51.241 --> 00:16:54.997
telling you the story of how I got to where I got here.
00:16:55.064 --> 00:16:59.014
So I picked TED talks and I started going into TED talks.
00:17:00.594 --> 00:17:03.696
I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to collect them
00:17:03.696 --> 00:17:06.494
but I knew there were some of the ones that I liked
00:17:06.494 --> 00:17:11.218
and I also knew some characteristics that I thought were useful for the students.
00:17:12.709 --> 00:17:15.601
I thought it was important to collect them into themes.
00:17:16.270 --> 00:17:21.069
You know, we've known for a long time that if you have related content,
00:17:21.069 --> 00:17:25.790
that it kind of feeds -- the materials feed one another
00:17:25.790 --> 00:17:29.920
and the students get probably a better and a richer experience,
00:17:29.956 --> 00:17:32.986
they get more natural repetition and key vocabulary
00:17:32.996 --> 00:17:36.425
than if you have people just kind of jumping out piecemeal
00:17:36.855 --> 00:17:40.002
with unconnected bits of material.
00:17:40.944 --> 00:17:48.436
I -- in the 1980's I was forced to teach a course with a book I don't remember the name of that.
00:17:48.436 --> 00:17:48.686
I do remember the author, but I'm not going to mention it on air.
00:17:51.517 --> 00:17:59.717
It was a reading textbook and the reading textbook had really interesting little chapters,
00:17:59.717 --> 00:18:02.103
at least most of them were interesting to me,
00:18:02.634 --> 00:18:05.397
but, you know, one chapter would be on the Olympics
00:18:05.397 --> 00:18:07.681
and the next chapter would be on sea-horses.
00:18:08.707 --> 00:18:14.054
And it's that kind of jumping around -- we typically don't do that with textbooks anymore.
00:18:14.189 --> 00:18:18.099
And yet when we turn students loose, a lot of times, that's what they decide to do.
00:18:19.584 --> 00:18:22.829
So again, even though I had been giving them guidance, saying:
00:18:22.839 --> 00:18:28.462
"Well, collect several bits of, you know, pieces of material, videos or podcasts
00:18:28.462 --> 00:18:31.050
that are related to one another in some way,"
00:18:31.806 --> 00:18:35.553
they wouldn't follow that advice, because it hadn't been done for them.
00:18:35.553 --> 00:18:42.310
They were still kind of chasing around, looking for the spots that just seemed interesting.
00:18:44.428 --> 00:18:49.208
OK. I think what I'll do is tell you what the
00:18:50.112 --> 00:18:53.592
-- at a kind of the abstract level, what I came up with
00:18:53.592 --> 00:18:56.469
about what the curator's role should be.
00:18:57.255 --> 00:19:02.039
And again, this is specifically for this target audience,
00:19:02.039 --> 00:19:05.950
but I think it can be tweaked and extended to other ones.
00:19:06.548 --> 00:19:10.976
The first thing you have to do is collect the stuff: you want digital materials,
00:19:11.206 --> 00:19:14.342
you want to organize them in some way:
00:19:15.278 --> 00:19:18.059
mine are organized systematically, but you could do
00:19:18.250 --> 00:19:21.119
-- you know, you could take news stories and do them chronologically.
00:19:22.972 --> 00:19:28.712
You need to sequence them and this is where a lot of collections fall short.
00:19:28.732 --> 00:19:32.150
They're just -- they're either randomly sequenced
00:19:32.470 --> 00:19:34.180
or they're not sequenced at all.
00:19:34.751 --> 00:19:40.448
And I think it is possible, as, you know, as the resident [check] expert, the teacher,
00:19:40.921 --> 00:19:41.923
to be able to say:
00:19:41.923 --> 00:19:48.039
"Here's a way to move so that the earlier ones might be a little bit easier to follow
00:19:48.549 --> 00:19:53.496
and the later ones are better understood if you've done the earlier ones."
00:19:54.765 --> 00:19:56.653
The fourth point there that
00:19:56.653 --> 00:19:58.350
-- on the slide that Vance has --
00:19:58.350 --> 00:20:01.791
is the hardest part of all of this,
00:20:02.563 --> 00:20:07.479
and that is trying to get this material levelled in some way.
00:20:08.465 --> 00:20:12.049
Wilfried Decoo in 2010 wrote a book, it's at the end
00:20:12.049 --> 00:20:15.115
-- the reference is at the end of the slideshow here --
00:20:15.840 --> 00:20:17.528
on systemization.
00:20:17.540 --> 00:20:20.248
And it was kind of a return to the idea that
00:20:20.618 --> 00:20:24.057
even if you're using authentic material,
00:20:24.057 --> 00:20:27.410
and especially if you're trying to create course material yourself,
00:20:27.940 --> 00:20:35.059
that you need to have a kind of natural development of that material
00:20:35.059 --> 00:20:38.564
from, you know, easier at lower levels, to harder
00:20:38.949 --> 00:20:43.671
and he went to the point of even talking about keeping databases
00:20:43.681 --> 00:20:45.156
that were very finely tuned,
00:20:45.156 --> 00:20:50.289
so you would be able to pull out lexical items and grammatical points and so on
00:20:50.289 --> 00:20:54.224
in a scope and sequence that fit
00:20:54.224 --> 00:20:56.640
what we thought we knew about language learning.
00:20:57.776 --> 00:21:01.588
And you know his -- I think his perspective is
00:21:01.588 --> 00:21:05.546
what I think is a reasonable one to bring up again,
00:21:05.592 --> 00:21:11.317
because I think we are often not cognizant of the difference between
00:21:11.317 --> 00:21:16.572
accessible and barely accessible and inaccessible materials,
00:21:16.572 --> 00:21:19.549
especially now that students can go in and, you know,
00:21:19.549 --> 00:21:27.174
get their first-language subtitles and transcripts for a lot of these materials
00:21:27.174 --> 00:21:32.854
and then have the illusion that they are actually understanding the English, in this case,
00:21:34.115 --> 00:21:38.173
and that they're building their English proficiency, where they --
00:21:38.173 --> 00:21:44.132
-- they may be to some extent, but probably not to the extent that they think they are.
00:21:44.148 --> 00:21:49.700
So there is the, you know, that idea of --
00:21:51.270 --> 00:21:54.711
well, in Decoo's book of fine tuning material.
00:21:54.711 --> 00:21:58.265
That doesn't work for me because at the levels I have,
00:21:58.265 --> 00:22:01.301
first of all, I have mixed-level classes to some degree,
00:22:01.301 --> 00:22:03.437
although they are all fairly advanced.
00:22:03.437 --> 00:22:07.878
They come from different backgrounds, I don't know what they know going in.
00:22:08.570 --> 00:22:13.225
So it's a little tricky to do it in the way that he likes.
00:22:13.640 --> 00:22:19.266
But it still gave me the impetus to try and see if I could come up with something,
00:22:19.266 --> 00:22:21.970
you know, I'll show you that in a bit.
00:22:22.555 --> 00:22:27.901
So, the last part of that, then, once you can give at least some kind of level information,
00:22:27.901 --> 00:22:34.435
is to go ahead and then present your pedagogical support,
00:22:34.435 --> 00:22:36.066
whatever it might be.
00:22:36.850 --> 00:22:44.765
This is fairly open-ended, I mean teachers can get -- and often do get -- into material
00:22:44.765 --> 00:22:48.065
and they start stripping out what they think are key vocabulary,
00:22:48.065 --> 00:22:52.777
they produce, you know, pre-listening activities,
00:22:52.777 --> 00:22:56.745
they have post-listening activities,
00:22:56.745 --> 00:22:58.151
they have discussion activities.
00:22:58.151 --> 00:23:02.223
All these are great, but they're based kind of on a classroom model
00:23:02.223 --> 00:23:06.587
and even more important: they take a lot of time away
00:23:06.587 --> 00:23:11.287
from the job of collecting this material.
00:23:11.287 --> 00:23:15.325
So if you put the hours into making full lessons,
00:23:15.535 --> 00:23:20.659
you end up not having the time to even produce as much as I have,
00:23:20.679 --> 00:23:23.019
which, as I mentioned, is not as much as I'd like.
00:23:23.984 --> 00:23:30.364
OK, so that's the curator's role and then -- Vance, if you could go to the next slide.
00:23:32.632 --> 00:23:33.708
Did we lose you?
00:23:33.990 --> 00:23:36.493
>> Museum curator MC [check]: Hi Phil, I just wanted to add to something you--
00:23:36.493 --> 00:23:37.298
>> Hubbard: Yes, go ahead
00:23:37.468 --> 00:23:38.835
>> MC: Just because of my background:
00:23:38.835 --> 00:23:42.315
I used to work in museums
>> Hubbard: Oh, fantastic
00:23:42.344 --> 00:23:44.974
>> MC: in education and curation
>> Hubbard: A real curator!
00:23:44.992 --> 00:23:49.311
>> MC: Yeah. Just one other item I would add to the list
00:23:49.311 --> 00:23:53.027
and I made a note of it in the chat section
00:23:53.027 --> 00:23:57.493
and that's the -- often without knowing it we're making assumptions about our audience.
00:23:58.108 --> 00:24:01.898
>> Hubbard: Ah!
>> MC: When we're selecting things,
00:24:02.271 --> 00:24:08.871
whether they be objects for display or -- like in the museums -- or
00:24:08.871 --> 00:24:12.502
objects for presentations to students, we're often unknowingly making assumptions
00:24:14.807 --> 00:24:19.404
and I think it's a really important thing to know, to challenge ourselves
00:24:19.404 --> 00:24:24.169
about the assumptions we're making in making those selections, those choices, as experts.
00:24:25.059 --> 00:24:27.409
>> Hubbard: Yeah, I mean that's a very good point
00:24:27.422 --> 00:24:34.204
and I have to -- as individuals, the students always change in my classes.
00:24:34.706 --> 00:24:38.776
As a group, you know, I get to know the group better.
00:24:38.776 --> 00:24:41.911
So I think, in this very targeted group, I can --
00:24:42.215 --> 00:24:47.501
I can come up with at least, initially, some likely ones,
00:24:47.721 --> 00:24:51.349
but I do in fact ask them for feedback on --
00:24:52.248 --> 00:24:56.428
Well, first of all, I give them choices and then I ask them for feedback
00:24:56.450 --> 00:25:01.795
both on, you know, what they chose and why, of the ones I selected for them,
00:25:01.795 --> 00:25:05.816
and also what else they might like to see.
00:25:06.712 --> 00:25:09.048
So it becomes a little bit od a dialog,
00:25:09.063 --> 00:25:13.252
and that could be even more of a dialog, you know, if you have --
00:25:13.559 --> 00:25:17.375
the way my class is structured, again, because it's so small,
00:25:17.388 --> 00:25:23.568
we do a lot both within class discussion and with the individual tutorials.
00:25:23.568 --> 00:25:28.335
But if you got a larger class and you got a discussion board or a wiki or something like that
00:25:28.335 --> 00:25:32.402
where, you know, students can -- can chime in more regularly,
00:25:32.402 --> 00:25:35.071
then you could get some information.
00:25:35.071 --> 00:25:42.596
I also haven't formally surveyed them, so that would be useful too. I --
00:25:42.596 --> 00:25:46.832
>> MC: You're inviting their feedback to inform --
>> Hubbard: Very much so. Yeah.
00:25:46.832 --> 00:25:49.637
>> MC: Yeah --
>> Hubbard: But not as richly as I could.
00:25:49.637 --> 00:25:54.600
So one idea I had was that, you know, like you've seen probably in museums,
00:25:56.450 --> 00:26:02.146
sometimes they have the displays but they'll also have, you know,
00:26:02.155 --> 00:26:04.710
places where people can, you know, write cards
00:26:04.710 --> 00:26:08.744
and make suggestions and say things and drop those off
00:26:08.744 --> 00:26:15.303
and I think, probably increasingly, we'll see museum displays
00:26:15.303 --> 00:26:24.598
where the, you know, the viewers' thoughts are right up there and accessible to other viewers
00:26:24.598 --> 00:26:26.875
when they go to look at the material.
00:26:27.765 --> 00:26:36.956
So I think you're making a really good point and, you know, this is the --
00:26:37.755 --> 00:26:42.788
figuring out exactly the role of the students who are still kind of developing,
00:26:42.788 --> 00:26:48.598
you want to meet them half way but you also, in the curation model, I think,
00:26:48.598 --> 00:26:52.490
want to be careful about the difference between curation and crowdsourcing,
00:26:53.520 --> 00:26:56.068
because I've had students come up with some materials
00:26:56.068 --> 00:26:57.755
that they thought were really exciting,
00:26:58.109 --> 00:26:58.359
but when I looked at it, I could see what the problems were in terms of the --
00:27:04.248 --> 00:27:07.042
the use of it by other students.
00:27:08.155 --> 00:27:10.749
>> MC: Now I take your point: it's you acting as the filter.
00:27:10.959 --> 00:27:12.484
>> MC: and finding --
>> Hubbard: Yeah, and that's --
00:27:12.511 --> 00:27:16.946
and again that's -- and again that's the -- this is the kind of, to me, this the curation model.
00:27:17.354 --> 00:27:19.426
>> MC: Yeah
>> Hubbard: The crowdsourcing model
00:27:19.426 --> 00:27:21.852
is a great model too, it's just a different model
00:27:21.852 --> 00:27:24.981
and it may work better in some cases.
00:27:24.981 --> 00:27:28.426
Of course it also depends on, you know,
00:27:28.426 --> 00:27:32.788
I've been to museums that I didn't think were very well run, were very well organized
00:27:32.791 --> 00:27:34.046
or were confusing.
00:27:34.046 --> 00:27:34.851
So --
>> MC: Yeah.
00:27:34.851 --> 00:27:37.056
>> Hubbard: as soon as you have the human expert coming in,
00:27:37.405 --> 00:27:40.693
they may not be as much of an expert as they think they are.
00:27:41.178 --> 00:27:44.180
That's probably true of me, in fact.
>> MC: Yeah, and there are lots of people [check]
00:27:44.180 --> 00:27:47.537
a lot of examples of museums, because I'm into curating things
00:27:48.783 --> 00:27:54.622
and then I'm finding out that the interpretations that they were expecting audiences to have
00:27:54.622 --> 00:27:56.452
were completely off-base.
00:27:56.721 --> 00:27:58.624
>> Hubbard: Yeah.
>> MC: I think that's a good example
00:27:58.624 --> 00:28:05.901
of big money going into these exhibitions and then being interpreted in a completely unexpected --
00:28:05.901 --> 00:28:09.318
>> Hubbard: Yeah, well, the good news here is, I have no big money.
00:28:09.318 --> 00:28:13.184
I mostly have no money at all for this. So -- [he laughs]
00:28:13.660 --> 00:28:18.035
It's also, the nice thing is, you know, compared to the museum,
00:28:18.035 --> 00:28:23.779
where you have all of these Unkosten [? check] to putting the material in,
00:28:24.025 --> 00:28:26.063
once you have something, you start a web page:
00:28:26.063 --> 00:28:34.435
if it is a disaster, or if it needs to be tweaked or significantly changed,
00:28:34.435 --> 00:28:38.265
it's possible to do that just by finding a little bit of time.
00:28:40.726 --> 00:28:44.331
[MC and Hubbard overlap]
>> MC It's just [missed words check]
00:28:44.331 --> 00:28:48.094
There's even an opportunity, actually, in, as an expert,
00:28:48.094 --> 00:28:52.110
putting together a series of well-chosen articles
00:28:52.110 --> 00:28:57.165
and then inviting students to assemble them and put them into a -- into an order or sequence,
00:28:57.165 --> 00:29:01.309
and to try and explain the rationale that they've used,
00:29:01.309 --> 00:29:03.255
what connections they've seen in the works.
00:29:03.255 --> 00:29:05.960
It's just another angle to it I sure would --
00:29:05.960 --> 00:29:08.911
>> Hubbard: No, it's a very good angle and in fact, you know,
00:29:08.911 --> 00:29:16.363
as I've moved through stages in probably about 15 years of teaching this course,
00:29:16.363 --> 00:29:23.279
I've tried to give students more independence but also to give them guidance in that independence
00:29:23.279 --> 00:29:28.371
and one of the -- what I hope I'm doing with the material I have,
00:29:28.371 --> 00:29:30.667
I do show them how I put it together.
00:29:30.667 --> 00:29:34.766
And I hope I'm, you know, kind of modeling curation for them as well.
00:29:35.627 --> 00:29:41.664
The idea of getting them to maybe do a little curated piece of their own,
00:29:42.771 --> 00:29:45.914
that could be an interesting final project for the course.
00:29:45.914 --> 00:29:48.982
I will be revisiting it again in Spring.
00:29:49.658 --> 00:29:52.731
I'll be away from it in Winter quarter here
00:29:52.731 --> 00:29:54.677
because we have -- we teach 10-week quarters.
00:29:55.677 --> 00:29:59.355
But that's a possibility for Spring, actually.
00:29:59.355 --> 00:30:04.231
It could also greatly enrich the collection of material that's available to other students.
00:30:04.231 --> 00:30:08.111
Again, as long as I'm there to be a kind of a filter,
00:30:08.111 --> 00:30:10.566
rather than just releasing these into the wild.
00:30:11.504 --> 00:30:14.813
Or if I do release them, you know, making sure that students know the difference
00:30:14.813 --> 00:30:18.486
between ones that are student-produced and the once that I produced
00:30:18.486 --> 00:30:21.756
and why, you know, I did mine one way.
00:30:21.756 --> 00:30:26.381
Then they can -- they can judge to some extent, you know,
00:30:26.381 --> 00:30:32.144
whether they think the rationale used by their peers, you know, was useful for them.
00:30:32.144 --> 00:30:35.683
So, that's a nice idea, I'm making a note of that.
00:30:40.174 --> 00:30:42.468
OK, shall I move on?
00:30:42.468 --> 00:30:48.754
>> [Stevens? check] Yeah. I'm aware of a podcast - there's the slide on I'm talking --
00:30:48.754 --> 00:30:50.669
>> Hubbard: Yeah, thanks
[they laugh]
00:30:50.669 --> 00:30:56.384
>> Stevens (?): I listened to a podcast where some educators had gone to Europe,
00:30:56.384 --> 00:30:59.005
probably on a junket but ostensibly
[Hubbard laughs]
00:30:59.005 --> 00:31:01.594
>> Stevens: to visit museums and find out, you know,
00:31:01.594 --> 00:31:05.349
especially ones that had audience attract--
00:31:05.349 --> 00:31:09.204
you know, the idea was that museums, people didn't have to go there,
00:31:09.204 --> 00:31:10.380
they have to attract people.
00:31:10.380 --> 00:31:13.986
So what do they do to attract the people, as opposed to schools?
00:31:13.986 --> 00:31:17.841
And then, how can we design our classroom environment
00:31:17.841 --> 00:31:19.294
so it's more like a museum?
00:31:19.294 --> 00:31:23.631
So that was actually a serious project and I'll never remember --
00:31:23.631 --> 00:31:30.044
I'll never forget how to get it back, but maybe I will tell you in Portmont [check].
00:31:30.044 --> 00:31:32.599
>> Hubbard: Ah OK? So that was good.
00:31:33.080 --> 00:31:38.012
Yeah, so Vance has put up the slide that I wanted to make a point of here,
00:31:38.012 --> 00:31:41.871
because there are a couple of things that are important about this slide, I think.
00:31:42.563 --> 00:31:45.804
The first is, even though these are just little bullet points,
00:31:45.804 --> 00:31:51.668
that actually took me a while to kind of figure this out, maybe because I'm slow, but --
00:31:52.298 --> 00:31:54.842
Oop, Vance, I lost the slide.
>> Stevens: it is here again? >> Hubbard: thanks.
00:31:58.025 --> 00:32:01.920
Because of all the other distractions I have
00:32:03.381 --> 99:59:59.999
and because of other elements of where I am and what the -- sort of the visibility,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the first thing I have to make sure is that anything that I curate is actually legally available.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And a certain amount of stuff that I had used years before, even in my own class,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I wasn't quite so sure about what the legality was, I think, in the early days of the internet.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Even now with YouTube I try to be careful about making sure that
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
what I found is something that whoever put it up either has the right to
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or they're reposting something that is --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that's already got a Creative Commons license or something like that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So, especially for something I'm going to put some time into here,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I want to make sure that what I've got is something I can use.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I also always want to make it freely available
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because my students have friends back in their home countries
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and they have even colleagues here who don't end up taking my class
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I have colleagues that are interested in using some of the material I do,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so everything I do in this kind of a project, I try to make sure it's freely available on the Web.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Vance, we lost the slide again, or at least I did.
[incomprehensible metallic voice - check]
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: Oh wait, is this Halima saying something?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Stevens: No, Halima is unmuting herself as soon as she comes into the chat.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I'm going to have to -- Halima, can you mute your microphone?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Because it's causing feedback.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I hope you can figure that out, and meanwhile we put this back.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Is it back yet [missed words check] Phil?
>>Hubbard: Yeah, that's great.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Yeah, so the "freely and legally available" is an important quality
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and you know, TED talks obviously are ideal for that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They're likely to be interesting.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Again that's something -- oops, lost the slide again,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I'll just go ahead and walk through these.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"Likely to be interesting", I guess that connects to a previous commentary [laughs]
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that we don't always know what students think are interesting,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I try to pick things that I think,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you know, have a good chance of being interesting for the students.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The good technical quality: there is a lot of stuff, obviously,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
available on the Web that's not, that's interesting and freely and legally available,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but the technical quality is such that it may be less ideal for language learning.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We're getting better at that now, certainly, than in the old days,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but when - when you're looking for material, if it's been overly compressed,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or it was done with devices that weren't that good in the first place,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it doesn't necessarily lend itself as well for language learning.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Stability is a really important point, because I don't want to do this
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then find out what I did is not available the next time I teach the class,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or even the next week.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So again, finding material that has -- either has been up for a while
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or that you know is going to continue being up for a while.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The 5th one is a -- you know, people have different views of this,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but because I'm so tied in with vocabulary development along with comprehension,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to me it's critical to have captions at least -- [coughs] excuse me, losing my voice here --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to have captions at least and ideally, to have transcripts.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And one of the reasons for transcripts is to be able to try to use the material
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which I'll show you in a moment here some of you are probably familiar with:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the vocabulary profile from lextutor.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
By using -- by dumping the transcript into that, you can get an idea of levelling.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And if you don't have a transcript,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
then you have to kind of use just intuitive feels for what's the level.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Then I've personally seen some pretty significant problems with that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I may mention one towards the end here
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when I get to some of the alternative sites I know that already exist for this.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And then ideally, if you can find complem --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
something that has complementary materials.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Again, in the case of TED talks, you've got materials that are --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you have a brief summary of whatever the talk is, right there available,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you don't have to create it as the curator,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you've got the bio of the speaker, which is good background information,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and in some cases you even have -- I think, what do the call it, TED Ed or something --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
there are some TED talks that even have some additional material that --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that people have added to them, in the way of discussion questions and things like that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
TED's not as rich as, say, you know, if you're doing a newscast for example,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and you might have several written forms of the same news story
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that you can use for back up:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's not quite as rich as that,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but it's still pretty good with giving you some of these complementary materials, besides the video itself.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
OK. You want to move on to the next --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: Actually, that's a couple of slides
>> Stevens: Yeah.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: does someone have a question?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Stevens [check]: Yes, Peggy George has asked questions in the text chat, the Etherpad one.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Let's see, I can -- she asks:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
"Are your students able to share your curated content with others outside the course?"
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: Yes. Yes: you'll see the --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in fact I think it comes up here on the next slide or couple of slides.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Actually the next slide, if you go to the next slide, let me talk briefly about that,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it does have to do with the sharing.
>> Stevens: OK
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: So that the link there is to the advanced listening website
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and you'll see, you know, quite a bit of material there,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
not just the TED talks.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The specific link to the curated TED talks is a couple of slides from here
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but those are -- those themselves are legally and freely available.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They're my websites, they are on the Stanford server:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Stanford is not going away any time soon, as far as I know I'm not going away any time soon.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So those are not only, you know, available on the World Wide Web,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
unless you happen to be from a country that's for some reason blocking access to Stanford:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that has happened a few times in the past.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But if not, then you can get to that material
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and all it does is jump out to the TED talks themselves
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the TED talks again are, you know, freely available.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I noticed in one of the preliminary discussions
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that somebody had put in some comments, before this began, on the learning2gether site,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and mentioned YouTube videos, and YouTube videos are certainly a great resource,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
most of my students are from China and most of them, then, unless things have changed,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
can't freely and legally get the YouTube videos there.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And so for that reason I try to -- I don't avoid YouTube
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I try to limit it and I like to make the curated collections
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
something that my students will be able to use and their friends will be able to use.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
OK. Any other questions?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Uh, so, yeah, so they are available and when I -- just so you know --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when I redo the course every quarter, that URL there stays the same, the material is new.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, most of it is old actually, but I do update it,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
sometimes because I come up with other ideas
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and sometimes because some of my other class material disappears.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But the home page of that each quarter has the link to the previous quarter's materials,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so you can actually step back from quarter to quarter and go back.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I never throw anything away on the Web, so it's probably got stuff from 5 years ago
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if you keep clicking back through the previous quarters' material.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So you can see what it was like in the past ["without"? check] sort of my Internet Archive.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
OK. The way that I did this material, let me move on to the --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I guess on this slide.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The problems that my students have, typically, fall into issues with speech rate:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
some of the TED talks are too fast.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It doesn't mean they can't, you know, use top-down skills to understand the basic content,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but that's not necessarily going to help them drive their --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
either their listening proficiency, you know, their ability to process English, automatize it,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or their ability to pick out the vocabulary that they don't understand or --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
even more interesting is the vocabulary they sort of understand or partially understand,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but they just can't get to it, they can't access it in the time with a faster speaker.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And there are others in my class, actually, that do OK with some of the faster speakers,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but just having knowledge of the speech rate is useful.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Preliminary knowledge of the accent: just a -- since in some cases we have students
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that are having particular difficulties with particular accents, often of their professors,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and they may actually be doing a project where they're trying to focus on that accent.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And so in that case, knowing more about the accent is helpful.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And others are really trying to -- I wouldn't say "master",
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but at least becoming -- become more proficient with the North American accent
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because they plan on not only doing their graduate work here, but staying a few years afterwards.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's a very common professional track for our students who are at the Master's or the Ph.D. level, to --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because so many of them are in technology, they want to hang around Silicon Valley
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as much as the can after they, after the graduate.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
OK. If you could go to the next slide, Vance?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Stevens: OK I might
[both overlap]
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Stevens: You mentioned Claude Almansi's contribution to the wiki there
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and one thing that she said -- she left this on the Google+ page as well:
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I post this to several pages.
Let me just get rid of that slide for a second.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I see I can do that by clicking off the screen share for a second, OK?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, anyway. She does work in closed captioning,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
she does a lot of very interesting work related to MOOCs [check] where she is.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And one of the suggestions she made -- I didn't know this, but maybe you did already,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but you can -- she said you can, if you get the MP4, if you get an MP4 of a YouTube video,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you can then load it into Audacity -- I didn't know that --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then you can adjust the rate of speech there, without causing any chipmunk effects.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: Mmm.
>> Stevens: I thought that was kind of neat.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Sounds like useful information?
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
>> Hubbard: Yeah, that's -- again, there are lots of things you can do to go more deeply into this stuff.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I -- one of the things I do with TED talks is, you can also download TED talks and you can --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
even if you put them into something, well I use the VLC player,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because the speech rate is right on the top,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's much easier to get at than it is in QuickTime or in Windows Media Player.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I like the VLC player for other reasons, in fact.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But, you know, once you have downloaded you can use the VLC player to --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
for the most part you don't really get the chipmunk effect
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it's trying to expand the time domain without changing the frequency,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's not like the old days with LP's and cassette tapes
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
where time and frequency were connected to one another.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Digitally, you can isolate those.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What we found is that if you slow somebody down to about 80%,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you can get a lot more processing time and it still sounds natural as long as you have good material.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If you have material that's already been compressed too much,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
then those compression artefacts become stronger if you try to slow it down.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Occasionally, we get people that my students want to speed up
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but most of the time, for language learning processes, we're talking about slowing it down.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So it's -- using, changing speech rate, that's a whole different talk,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but it's, I think, a very underused functionality and something that students sometimes baulk from
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but we have some research evidence that it's helpful when the students have control over it.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Anyway, I don't want to diverge too much on that, but that's a --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I do encourage everybody to read that post
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and see in more details what some of the options are for doing that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In fact, one of the -- one of the problems with using the VLC player with those is,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if you -- if you do try to slow down the speech rate downloading it and putting it in the VLC player,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you actually move the subtitles, because the subtitle feature --
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the captioning feature in the TED website is built into the website, it's not built into the video.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And so you would need to do some additional captioning if you want to do that. (47:38)
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
My -- if your goal is general comprehension and you've got decent material,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
then I'm a fan of using the Google beta transcription.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Even with good material it makes a lot of mistakes
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and with material which, you know, isn't really, really clear,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because the speaker wasn't clear, because the signal wasn't clear,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it makes a lot more mistakes.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And in my case, when I'm trying to have students use it for vocabulary development,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if it's got -- if it picks the wrong word, then they're going to be learning something pretty weird.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it does that all the time.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If you change that and, you know, get around to Google Translate, to get first-language captions,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you just accentuate the error rate.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So again, it really depends on what the goal is.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If the goal is let the students watch a video for cultural and general content information,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
maybe to trigger classroom discussions, things like that,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
then using the automated captions is not a bad idea
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and being able to slow down is not necessarily -- is, well, I think a good idea.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So again, it depends on what the goals are, but you have to be careful,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because Google beta, there is a reason why they keep calling it beta,
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's because it's pretty error-prone.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's getting better but it's not there yet. (49:00)
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And if students think it's an accurate rendition
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
then that's going to be even more difficult.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If you do use the automated captions then the students need to be
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
prepared for... to be able to recognize when something doesn't make sense.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Because usually it's a very obvious semantic issue.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
With the words they pick.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One other thing, I don't remember if it was in that post or another one but
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
something I had noticed before someone mentioned that the slight delay in the
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
synchronization of the captions in Ted compared to the system they were suggesting.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So, uh, that's something else to take into account.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If that delay seems to be an issue for you or your students it's something that I plan to explore
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because I hadn't noticed that before.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Okay, uh, a little bit about how I figured out to do this which is not
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the way I would recommend doing it now necessarily
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But this is how I started working on this. When I did it I guess it was Spring of 2011
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The first thing was to...oh no, it wasn't Spring, it was Fall of 2011.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
First thing to do is to get the Ted database.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Turns out you can get an excel spreadsheet that has all of the Ted talks on it.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You can go to their website you can see that there's a link for that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The nice thing about that is that you can skim that a whole lot more easily
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
than you can skim other material and you can also look, among other things, at what the
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
length of the talk is. And most Ted talks are around 18 minutes and most students attention focus ability is less.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Um, okay, the database then when I found it myself, it was smaller at that point for one thing.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I did sort of skim it and looked for ideas and looked for theme
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and searched for key words
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So creativity was one of the first ones I did
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so I was able to search for anything that had creativity
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
either in its description or in its title.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I put together a list of candidates in that.
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was looking for four or five talks to make a kind of a cluster
99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
sort of a virtual room in the museum if you will