I just spent a few days in New York attending the Third International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching at Columbia University. I presented a short paper in which I argued that flashcard study in language education is one area where there is great potential for the separation of form and content in educational technology and shared some ideas on how this could be done and why I think it is useful. I also gave two of the workshops at the conference, where I showed everyone my new version of the OWLS software that I will be releasing July 1st under the GPL open source license, and let all the instructors work with the software throughout the workshop. I doubt my paper presentation left much of an impact, but the workshops were warmly received and I hope this translates into some use of the software by instructors in the future.
In my talk on technology and flashcard study I argued that we needed to create an open standard for language glossaries which will serve to motivate students and teachers to release glossaries from their texts and such that can be imported and used in a variety of flashcard programs. I discussed the weaknesses of current solutions and offerings online and in my own previous work on flashcard software. I emphasized that flashcard study is still a huge part of the time students spend studying languages and the increasing popularity of “interval study” or “smart repetition” study in software on the market. I also said that I was willing to put the work into developing an XML based format for language glossaries if I got some good input on what language instructors believed was needed. I want to make a glossary format which is useful to instructors and students of many languages. I will then use this format in a project I’m working on called the House of Cards (an online flashcard repository and study site) for easy download etc. I then want to promote the format with developers of flashcard applications. However, instead of asking techies about the standard, I want language instructors involved in the design of this glossary format.
My workshops, which I did with some great help from Sutaitai (my friend and the instructor for whom the software was originally written) presented the new version of OWLS. OWLS is essentially some “templating” or “authoring” software, written in PHP, that gives instructors a way to easily generate interactive Javascript-based exercises for their students and combine them with a reading or audio files. Another instructor was presenting a workshop on the commercial Quia.com site, which does much the same as my software but which has many more features. I argued that using an open source solution may have certain advantages over Quia, which is expensive and essentially claims a right over any content you create, I can’t compete with their feature set but my price (free) is right. The instructors who tried the software during the workshop provided me with lots of very useful criticism and feedback.
There were some interesting other presentations given at the conference, including one on the courseware software Moodle, and one on Chinese annotation software and its current weaknesses. I hope some day that I can somehow combine Moodle with OWLS or make the latter into a plug-in for the former.
I was amazed to see how many Chinese language instructors are using technology in their teaching, and the amazingly diverse array of tools and solutions presented at the conference. I was delighted to meet people during both my workshops, who had found some of my software from my Fool’s Workshop useful in the past, and apparently some instructors of Chinese have been using a Pinyin to Unicode conversion site I put up a long time ago.