It’s All Just A Ride

We recently acquired two iPod Touches…Touchs?…iTouches?…anyhow, we got two of them to test out and brainstorm ideas on how they could fit into coursework. With the announcement that there will soon be an iPhone/iTouch SDK this little gizmo is looking pretty promising. Though, there are still some things that could make it much better.

My big gripe, as of now, is that the QuickTime plugin that runs in the mobile Safari browser does not support RTSP streaming. This is unfortunate since our media server streams all the videos in RTSP from a Darwin Streaming Server, which can’t stream via HTTP because of port conflicts with Apache. **Grumble**. One has to wonder why this functionality was left out of the plugin. Browsing the web is fine on the device, and the multi-touch interface is easy to get used to. I can already see the widescreen display being much easier on the eyes when trying to watch films too.

What I am excited for most, however, is to see some of the 3rd party apps that will start popping up once the SDK is released. One of my personal “must see”s is iFlash on the iTouch. iFlash is a great app, especially for language learning, and the iTouch interface feels like it would fit like a glove with iFlash.

The iTouch has also spawned a whole host of “if I knew how to program better” ideas in my mind as well. For one, a web-based home media library to catalog video files on a media server that you can access on the road. No need to load up your iPod with huge files if you can stream them over Wi-Fi when convenient. You can already do this in a very manual sort of way if you set up a webserver in your house and manually edit the pages and files, but it would be great to have a WordPress-like system by which you could store and access the videos.

That also gets me wondering…why can’t one access a shared iTunes library via the iTouch? Perhaps the practicality of that isn’t as much as is I think. I could see situations where it would come in handy though.

Apple’s IME system in OS X is about the most painless in existence as far as I have seen. Adding input support for different languages is as easy as checking a tick-mark in a box. Unfortunately, in practice, it proves to be a bit less user friendly when dealing with certain languages. In my case, the support for Chinese characters is a bit cumbersome. The standard Apple “International” IME only allows entry of one charcter at a time, while Microsoft’s IMEs will input multiple-character phrases (good luck figuring out how to set it up, though).

Also, you could previously buy tablets and third-party software for hand-written character recognition, such as PenPower, but those have been discontinued as far as my research on the subject has shown. With InkWell being integrated within OS X one would think that character recognition would be a breeze to implement (just license an algorithm from a third party), but it looks as if Apple only cared enough to include support for European languages in InkWell, which is a shame, because a Modbook with Chinese character recognition would be super-sweet.

The best answer I have found to date to the first problem, that of keyboard input, is to install OpenVanilla, but even that has its drawbacks. First, it defaults to Simplified Chinese input in pinyin, even though OS X supports both Traditional and Simplified. Why not have a preference item to select the default input? Odd. Also, the input system itself is a bit clunky, unless I’m just doing something wrong. When you input a pinyin word that has more than ten possible character matches, hitting the space bar, which would normally select the first match, takes you to the next set of ten matches, so there is no way to select the first match, which is usually the one you want. It just keeps cycling through the match sets. Annoying.

Apple needs to get their buns in gear. With Leopard coming out soon, better IME support is going to be a big factor in my impression of it. InkWell needs to be updated to include popular non-Euro languages, like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Especially the Asian, non-phonetic scripts, which certainly seem like the more logical choice for handwritten input, as opposed to languages like English which work just fine via keyboard input.

Also, with OS X having been out for eons the third-party developers need to get cracking with more software too. Too many companies never left the dustbin of OS 9 since Classic was there in OS X to fall back on, then Apple yanked it in 10.4. Heck, even the Vistas Spanish text still comes with an outdated piece of multimedia software that isn’t technically supposed to run on OS X (but does if you don’t follow the instructions) which is actually kind of ridiculous since I assume most of these multimedia CD-ROMS are built with Macromedia software like Flash, and would only mean they’d have to re-export the previous file on a new system. One more reason for Language technology specialists to get in gear and actually start producing more software instead of just using what is given to them by the consumer market.

Our Language Lab currently serves up its foreign music collection via an iTunes server that is built in to our Infrant ReadyNAS 1100. The NAS itself is a great piece of hardware, especially for the price, and allows us to archive media, student projects from iMovie and Garageband, and store backup images of our application servers. So far the only issues we’ve had have been so-so AFP performance, and some spotty issues with Samba transfers. These seem to have been cured with a memory upgrade to 1 Gb from the standard 512 Mb.

The biggest disappointment with the iTunes server, however, has been its less than full-featured nature. Specifically its inability to create playlists. With large collections of Spanish and French music students are a bit annoyed to have to sift to get what they’re looking for. Because of this, and probably for other reasons as well, Infrant has decided to ditch the iTunes server for a Firefly Media Server when it rolls out its next firmware update (speculated as sometime in August).

Being the impatient perfectionist that I can be at times, I decided to build a test Firefly server on my laptop at home. The setup couldn’t be simpler, really, and on Linux that is saying a lot. All one need do is install Ubuntu on a box with fairly large disk space (for the media) and then install the mt-dappd package through the Package Manager. Then point a browser to the right port on localhost and configure the media server’s directories and behaviors. Voila! You have a full-featured music server capable of streaming all popular formats, including Ogg and Flak, converting them on the fly for iTunes clients. You can create smart playlists that update automatically using certain criteria, or create an m3u playlist for specific files. I havn’t gotten an m3u to work yet, but I suspect it is because the program I exported the playlist from did not use a relative directory structure.

One could easily throw a large hard drive in an unused PC with decent specs, install the server, and breathlessly serve up audio to anyone on the local network. I need to wait a week to see how the server performs under a substantial load, but I don’t anticipate much of a problem. The thing is VERY zippy even on my older, bottom of the barrel, HP laptop. Streaming lossless Flak files to my Powerbook G4 (which requires on-the-fly transcoding as iTunes does not support Flak) was just as fast as if I had loaded a song from the local drive. Very cool.

On the fun side of things, Felix Kronenberg from Pomona College did a demonstration of some of the software available for making comics and manga, and some of the projects that students have used them for. Felix mentioned Manga Studio, which I saw at Digital Stream, but rightly pointed out that it is too complex to build into a course and have students use, unless they want to do so on their own. Most of the presentation was focused on Comic Life and Pulp Motion.

I’ve seen both before, but never used either. The lab manual for our lab system, DiLL, was created using Comic Life, so I know what it’s capable of, but I wasn’t aware of how easy it was. I can’t wait to find a reason to start making some comics. Pulp Motion was featured on Cool OSX Apps, and it looked fun, but I couldn’t see any reason to make use of it. Maybe I need to stop letting that hinder me from playing around.

This was a really interesting talk on how a new generation of student learns. Mark Knowles from Yale University talked about the book “Everything Bad is Good for You,” and how its premise that games and reality television, far from simply being the bane of modern existence, plunging society toward “more sophosticated ways of delivering stupidity,” could actually be thought of in a positive way. Things like video games and reality television can actually be seen as ways of nurturing a generation of viewers and students that demand ever more complex ways of experiencing not only entertainment, but how they learn as well.

He used the example of Dragnet, the television series, to explain “multithreading”. Dragnet’s plots were entirely linear, while later shows started to incorporate more and more layers of plot and character interaction, culminating with shows like “Lost” that have innumerable plot strings, with not all information being presented at any given time. The “fog” of not having all the information is the point. So the question becomes, how do instructors plan lessons for such a mindset that is so used to, and in fact most comfortable in situations where there are myriad layers of meaning and information being conveyed concurrently? Certainly just drilling from a textbook is not enough, as if it ever were.

The best thing about the presentation was that he did not instinctively say that in order to capitalize on that preference for gaming as a medium of entertainment, instructors should use games (i.e. make a game like WoW, but in a foreign language), per se, but he said that instructors should be aware that students are functioning in that mindset, and must therefore make classroom instruction fit with that mindset, in whatever form it may take.

The session began with a brief and largely comical overview of the history of Language Labs, which until the advent of computers had largely been based on rote learning, assisted by technology that was not specialized (i.e. was co-opted) for language labs, and which offered little in the way of extensions to out-of-class learning.

The big idea here is that a language lab’s function in this new digital age is to provide tools that students can use outside of class to supplement their learning, and these tools need to be interactive and adaptable, rather than reproducing mechanical learning techniques.

Streaming On-Demand media, Distance Learning, and live game interaction are some of the main tools presented in the lecture. All of these tools provide methods for creating an immersion atmosphere that students can enter. Also touched on the usefulness of podcasting class sessions, so that students can re-learn or revisit material from a class session.

Practical barriers to podcasting class sessions: teachers may be reluctant to broadcast sessions for fear of enabling students to skip class, “If they can just watch the class podcast whenever they want, then why would they come to class?”, and reluctance to disperse their image onto the web, so that mistakes and errors can be revisited again and again. Chipping your flaws in stone, so to speak. In the age of YouTube Journalism images can be used against you. As Alfred Gell pointed out, it isn’t so much the seeming property that a picture can “steal your soul” so much as it is that simulacra of any form (be it hair, blood, or your own image) can be a force that can turn against you when released to the wider world.

Today was my first day at IALLT, and I attended the pre-conference workshop by Samantha Earp, Implementing an iPod program for language learning. Samantha is the Project Manager of the Duke Digital Initiative.

The workshop was great, and it covered just about every aspect of planning, technology, and pedagogy that such a program can touch on. Having been part of a much smaller, yet similar program, It was helpful to get some insight on how those who have travelled the same road have coped with the various pitfalls of using the iPod for language learning. Samantha continually emphasized that they most important thing to remember is to always keep in mind what practical use the iPod can be, and not to simply hand out iPods for their own sake. While students like the idea of having free iPods, if the class they took to get those iPods does not effectively use them then it will not go down well.

Projects like these always have the capability to seem easy in the outset, but can soon turn into a nightmare, especially if you’re giving iPods out to over a thousand students. The initial planning and faculty support phase can be long and involved in and of itself, even before putting the iPods in students’ hands. You have to know what the capabilities of the technology are, and how to present those capabilities as useful tools to faculty who might be interested in building coursework around the iPod.

Samantha also pointed out one area where iPod programs in general could be improved, and that is in the area of published research on the effectiveness of such programs in students’ learning. What is useful, what isn’t, and why? What sort of improvements do you see over classes who do not choose to use iPods? However, a good point was raised about what issues such studies might raise in the sense of students crying foul when they receive an F in a non-iPod class, and blame it on not having equal access to the right tools.

Overall, I’m still a bit on the fence as to the real effectiveness of iPods as a teaching tool in language learning. On the one hand, the convenience factor is huge. I know that being able to have resources with me wherever I go is very handy. I can watch that clip I need for my film class while taking the bus to class, or listen to my lab audio during lunch in the cafeteria. The ability to listen to music in Japanese or Chinese is also a big plus, since it creates a sort of “immersion” (an iPod may be the single greatest tool for blocking out the world around you, for good or bad). However, beyond convenience, I’m not sure the iPod adds anything novel to the mix. If Apple had published its development platform for the iPod games, or made the interactive features more robust beyond the clickwheel menus, then it could be much more effective, but as it stands the iPod, in my view, is best seen as a portable extension of the language lab (and even then only a partial subset of a labs functions) as we currently see it, and not a redefinition. Samantha underscored a similar point when talking about how some administrations might see the iPod as a replacement for a traditional lab.

Tomorrow I leave for Boston to attend the IALLT conference at Tufts University. I’ll be blogging spontaneously throughout the day on interesting lectures in the use of technology in language learning, the most interesting of which looks to be the Wednesday night pub crawl! 7:30 sharp!