Monthly Archives: April 2010

Predicting the Future is a Risky Business

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Part of my day job involves following trends and predicting what might happen in the future of online education.  Pretty risky business – I remember ten years ago when one article predicted that all colleges would one day have at least one class delivered online through AOL.  A-O-Who? Do they still exist?

But despite the potential for immense embarrassment, I still find looking to possible futures fascinating (can you guess what my favorite genre of entertainment is?).  I enjoy it so much that I wrote an article on what education could look like in 10 years, based on predictions of where technology is heading. The article is called “When the Future Finally Arrives: Web 2.0 Becomes Web 3.0” and it will be a chapter in a book called Web 2.0-based E-learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching

The great news is that chapter will be published next month. The bad news is that it took two years to get published, so a lot of what I say about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 sounds pretty dated.  This situation in itself exposes the weakness of publishing in traditional media. All of your cool, hip terms will become over-used cliches before your article gets printed.

I wish that I could just post the whole article here – I just proof-read it and I got pretty excited thinking about what the future could be like.  Some of the topics covered are:

  • Affordable media centers that have wide-screen, high definition, holographic, three-dimensional, multi-touch screen monitors, with cameras that can follow your movement to manipulate the display (like Minority Report) or respond to voice commands
  • Classes that easily transfer back and forth from synchronous to asynchronous.
  • Integrated systems – virtual worlds integrated with the web and each other, smart-phones integrated with desktops, etc.
  • Greater use of tags to organize information with more accuracy.
  • Better interaction between students and between the student and instructors.
  • And finally, of course, really cool technology like three dimensional printers and scanners.

Much of what I wrote on is technology-focused.  I realize that good pedagogy needs to come first in all educational situations… but if you think enough when you read it, you will see how I snuck a bunch of good pedagogy in there. If you do get to read it, I would recommend just skipping down to the section called “An Example of Online Learning 10 Years in the Future.” The rest of the stuff before that was just my attempt to sound scholarly and all that 🙂

That is to say – if you get to read it.  This is the other problem with traditional media: this booked is pretty darn expensive.  And I had to sign all my rights away to get it published, so I can put it on my blogs.  I can always let people that live near me read the “draft” version that I printed up for proof-reading.  Maybe the library will get a copy? Or maybe we should talk Pete into hosting a symposium on the future of online learning?

(Pete is probably getting tired of all my suggestions for symposiums and conferences and gatherings that I think he needs to host 🙂

Teaching the Controversy in a Web Class

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I think we can agree that live classes are not mirrors of web classes, or vice versa. But there are some fundamentals that transcend the medium in which a class is taught. On the positive side, engaged professors make a difference, whether it be in a live class or a web class. Also, unleashing student’s creativity rather than squashing it makes a big difference in class morale, regardless of the class being online or live. I won’t list the lousy things in course design and instruction that plague live and web classes equally. We can leave that for another day.

I just had a great experience in my web class that I’d like to share.

The students in my web class have been emoting a lot lately in the message boards because they have been learning about the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970’s, in which some thirty thousand people were disappeared (detained, tortured and murdered, without having their bodies returned). Students have been surprised to learn about this episode in Argentine history, and have responded very emotionally, with sadness, and [justified] self-righteous anger. How can this have happened? Why is it we never knew about it? Why is it more people don’t know about this? These are the questions that keep on coming up on the message board.

One student, however, has offered a dissenting voice on the message board. She intervened to say that while she shares people outrage and sadness, she is concerned about the fact that no one is talking about how, in recent years, the U.S. has ‘illegally’ detained people suspected of terrorism and even exported them to CIA “Black Sites” where they are interrogated with “enhanced” techniques (often a euphemism for torture.) Rather than bemoan the past, asks the student, why not engage with the problems of the present?

It’s pretty provocative, and it’s pretty brave. They say that “teaching the controversy” is always a good technique for fostering engagement. But what’s making me happy today is that it was a student who is trying to teach the controversy. Regardless of where you fall on the issue of the detention of terror suspects and the issues surrounding the War on Terror, this is a debate worth having. The generals responsible for the Dirty War in Argentina committed their crimes in the name of the fight against Communism, at the height of the Cold War. Is it possible to compare this to the U.S. Government’s extreme and unorthodox measures to combat terrorism? At its bluntest, do the ends justify the means? It will be interesting to see if students reply and how. As I said, there’s no single answer to this question, but there are different positions to be articulated, defended and argued.

I’ll come back and keep you posted.

Online Translators

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Online translation is quite different from traditional translation. I note the tools I am using: Google Translator Toolkit (you need a gmail account to get on), Google Translator in two forms, Leo, the online dictionary containing a grammar site, dictionary definitions, and a corpus that I am using, and http://www.google.de (to see how certain words and phrases are used when embedded in text). Searches also take me to synonym dictionaries and even images on German and English websites. I could even envision using German Youtube. So, unlike a translator in the past, I have much more than my knowledge and my dictionaries of various kinds and my thesaurus at hand. I have those, as well as all these other tools. (And I know that there are even more tools available to which I’ve been exposed, but which I do not yet use.)

But what am I learning? I am learning what Google, for example, offers when one types a word into the search engine: more words, more phrases, depending on how you enter it. Take the word ‘Hospiz,’ for example (‘hospice’). I type the word in Google, and I get phrases (Hospizbewegung, Hospizarbeit, Hospize, Hospiz Stuttgart), but I note if I type in Hospizd,’ I get words like ‘Hospizdienst’ (‘hospice service’), whereas if I type ‘Hospiz d’ I get phrases like ‘Hospiz Detmold’ (‘hospice in the city Detmold’).

I note when I’m translating my short story from English into German, that I’m changing it as I go. I feel very free, since I am the original author of the English version. But I also think of things that never occurred to me when writing the English original, things like the fact that Germans would not easily say ‘I love you’ to their doctor as they were dying, but at the same time I can imagine that they might, if they were in the state that many patients seem to arrive at, if they are not on machines: an unusual state of bliss that transcends some cultural customs. Even in the U.S. people don’t normally tell their doctors “I love you,” but in the German culture, I would think that norms of respectful distance would even more strongly come into play here.

So when I’m translating, I actually address that, and thus I translate it to say: “I love you, Dr. Gomez. One wouldn’t normally say that. But that didn’t matter. She could. She did, because a deep feeling of well-being flooded her soul.” (I notice that even as I’m translating back into English I’m changing the English to accommodate the slight differences in the German from the original! It can become a never-ending loop of meaning making!) The other issue is the title, not ‘Dr. Gomez,’ as in the U.S., but ‘Herr Doktor Gomez’ (‘Mr. Dr. Gomez’), which has an even more formal feel, a feeling of distance, rank, and respect, which would make saying “I love you” even more profound.

I notice when I’m translating that I’m thinking of sentence length (probably partly because of Pete Smith’s words in his localization/translation course I’m a part of). In the original the sentences are often short. There are many sentence fragments. And I’m reminded that standard formal German sentences can tend to be quite long. And yet this is a short story. And sometimes short stories contain shorter sentences, but often to obtain a certain effect. It got me to thinking about whether formatting my translation like a prose poem might more successfully convey the tone I’m trying to effect.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts I’m having as I’m translating. The tools are wonderful. They really help non-native speakers, maybe even native speakers, easily get beyond the starting point and save a lot of time looking up words that one has in one’s passive repertoire (so one knows it’s appropriate), and words that one thinks might work and that get one looking in the right direction for the appropriate word. After that it does take some time rewriting what the machine translator has written, but time has been tremendously saved on the first go round. I find not only am I thinking about syntax and vocabulary on the sentence level, but I’m thinking about tone, about cultural meanings of words, syntax, length, and I’m thinking about impact on the reader.

I also realize how my knowledge and background in German are helping me out. It goes more slowly when I’m working on French, for I have to question more.

As we go into the future, I think we will begin changing our minds about translation tools on the internet. Right now, as educators we’re afraid of their abuse by students as tools for cheating. As we become more knowledgeable about them ourselves, I foresee teaching students how to use them effectively and productively from the beginning. If they know how to use these tools, they will be able to access information and ideas from around the world in many languages. If they know the limitations as well as the freeing aspects of these online tools, they will be better able to navigate ideas and information in other languages. Just as we teach students how to “read” language in literary texts, in oral discourse, in prose discourse of various non-literary kinds, we will, I believe, in the future teach students how to critically “read” machine translation.

We are still at the point that calculators were a few decades ago: we do not allow them in the classroom. But as we finally realized with calculators, they can be a very useful tool and serve our needs. I use one every time I want to know how much money I have left in the bank! Our goal: to keep every single student, even the one who takes one semester of foreign language, connected not only to cultures of the language we are teaching, but, even more, to the world’s cultures.

This reminds me, once again, of Father Guido Sarducci’s “Five Minute University,” and that is, essentially, what we are combating. (It’s wonderful, while sobering, because that is the mindset of many folks in our country, and I understand that mindset fully.) The “Five Minute University” was a comedy skit about university learning, first airing on “Saturday Night Live,” and it is an important comedy skit for me as an educator, for it reminds to take the long view, to remember all the students with whom I interact, and to ask myself: How can even one semester of a foreign language really and truly have a major beneficial impact on each and every student? How can we get beyond what people still say when we say we teach a language at the university: “Oh, I had Language X, and I don’t remember a thing”?

Wrapping back around to online translators: In the future this will be one way in which we will encourage students to stay connected to the non-native-language world. We will teach them not only how to applied their “critical reading” of literature to the web, but also how to use these translation tools to critically read the world and its cultures.

And my translation in the end? I left it in prose format. It just seemed to have longer sentences, too, that made it more like prose. And I thought of the short stories again and realized that the short sentences, the sentence fragments, as well as the longer fragments, created an acceptable tone and feel in prose format.

(You can access both versions of the story/vignette, the English and the German, at this blog.)

Broadcasting comes to Modern Languages

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Broadcasting major Patrick Modrovsky, who happens to be minoring in German, asked if he could create a video news item about German at UT Arlington for utanews, a website showcasing broadcasting students’ work. Of course, I said yes, and he did an excellent job of showing how we are trying to incorporate technology and active learning into upper level German classes here at UTA. We liked the video clip so much that it is now on the German homepage under

UTANews Interview with Dr. Lana Rings.

(The original is located under March 11, 2010 at http://utanews.com/page/2/.)

Thanks, Patrick, for believing German needs to be publicized more at UT Arlington!

I continued down the blog tonight and this was the result …

Well, after reading Ivan Illich off of Jim Groom’s blog, a bit of Stephen Downes, also off of Jim Groom’s blog, and finding Clark Adrich’s blog from somewhere I was reading, I am overwhelmed and back to my original question that I asked in graduate school: why are we here? And I think we cannot ask that question in a blanket way about the curriculum, but rather we have to ask it about each individual course (even about each individual student), because there are some students who will take only that course and not our whole curriculum. What, of value, will the student really take away? I am reminded, daily, of Father Guido Carducci’s Five Minute University, asking myself how I am or am not replicating the professors who people that university. To my mind, these are the questions I want to affirm, to remember, to center myself when I get sidetracked by this or that, these or those, others’ ideas of what it is we are doing, that are not my core values about our enterprise.