Accent block

Normally, I do pretty well at speaking a language in a native-like accent, but my French accent had kind of slipped due to lack of use.  I figured it would come back once I was here, but it never happened.  I've found myself sounding more like my brother than a French speaker.

This frustrated me.  This annoyed me.  I tried a little bit, but I could only improve my accent while consciously working at it -- as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it got worse again.

The frustration is compounded when I say something in Corsican, and though my accent is far from good, I'm still new to it, and in terms of "time on task", my Corsican accent is much more promising than my French accent.

My first theory was that it was down to "speaking with learners" mode.  After all, most of my French recently was spoken with other Scottish people.  Given that I'm teaching English all day, could it be that I was simply slipping unconsciously into assuming that I was supposed to be speaking in a way that was easy for learners to understand?

But that didn't really sit right with me... it wasn't that.

So a few days ago I was thinking about it, and I was talking in my head in a fairly good accent -- the accent I think I used to have.  I tried speaking, and while it was better than normal, it wasn't as good as it was in my head.  Then it struck me: my accent was based on the north -- Paris, Lille and the like; people don't speak like that in Corsica.

And yet I'm not picking up the Corsican accent.  My brain seems to have filtered it off as incorrect, and left me in a bit of a limbo.  I'm not speaking with my old northern French accent, and I'm not picking up a Corsican accent.  I'm speaking a weird accent that muddles up vowels that I never muddled up before.

It's weird.  It's frustrating.  It's confusing.  And yet I don't think there's anything I really can do about it.  Should I write this one off as a lost cause?  Shrug my shoulders and just get on with other, more pressing, matters?

Well, for now: yes.  I've got a lot of lessons coming up, and not a lot of time to prep for them.

Maybe I'll work out how to deal with it, and maybe that will give me some extra insights into how to help my students, but it's not something I can really do much about right now.

Learning not to understand

My English classes at the moment are mostly in mixed-ability sets, and the level of English varies dramatically between one student and the next. It has long been my policy to blame the teacher for the students' failings, not the student, and I have been taking that to mean that previous teachers have failed them, and that it's my job to make up for it, not theirs.

I've tried to reassure them that it's OK not to understand, and that they should tell me when there's a problem.

Standard practice in the monolingual language classroom is to head to the weakest students shortly after setting the task to re-explain. But before I get there, someone has translated the task. And as the lesson continues, the weak students carry out the actual task in French. They receive the task in French, they carry out the task in French, and then they wonder why they aren't learning any English. Friday's lesson wasn't about practising interrogation techniques (I doubt any of my biology students are going to become detectives) but about asking questions in English.

I'm now fighting with myself over whether I actually can blame the students this time. Is it a lack of explanation, a lack of teacher effort in making them feel comfortable that is to blame here? But it's hard not to blame the students if they say things like “bonjour”, “ça va”, “merci” and “au revoir” to their English teacher – honestly, a little bit of effort would be nice.

I am reminded of the difficulty I have of saying “thank you” in certain circumstances. If I'm holding a conversation in a foreign language when I buy something in a shop, or get on a bus, I find it very, very difficult to thank the shopkeeper (or driver) in English. When I start a new language, I make the resolution to say the simple things in that language all the time. When I started taking short courses at the Gaelic college, I would thank the kitchen staff in Gaelic, even though I couldn't order the food in Gaelic. I can exchange pleasantries in a handful of languages I don't speak, because I forced myself to do it.

Because if you're not going to do the easy stuff, how the hell are you going to learn the hard stuff?

Anyhow, last night I was at a friend's leaving party. (Yeah, I've hardly been here two minutes and already one of the few friends I've made is leaving. Murphy's bloody law.) Everybody else was Corsican or French, so a native French speaker. I managed to keep up with the conversation... more or less. The “more or less” might be very important here, because there were definitely things that I didn't understand, but I pretended to understand in order to keep the conversation flowing.

The experience was rather similar to my experience as a Spanish learner in the world's best city for learning Spanish: Edinburgh. I have lost count of the number of times I found myself in parties where the Spanish speakers outnumbered every other demographic in the room. Naturally we spoke more Spanish than English, and I sometimes got a bit lost, but I didn't let every missed word derail the conversation – I kept it going until I could get back on track. This normally worked, and over time my Spanish improved to the point where I could hang about at these parties and get mistaken for a native (a fact I sometimes get too smug about – pride comes before a fall, and all that).

I'm not a fan of theories of “silent periods” or “assimilation”, but I know there comes a point where you have to accept your limits and put up with them. If you always fall back on your native language when things get tough, if you can always fall back on your native language when things get tough, why should your brain ever see the need to use the new language?

This reminds me of another anecdote I've probably mentioned here several times: Gaelic song concerts. As a learner, I went to lots of them, and over time I found I was listening less and less to the Gaelic, to the point where I eventually stopped trying to understand it altogether. Everything – everything – was said twice: Gaelic first, then English. My brain worked out that the path of least resistance was to wait for the English, and my Gaelic was in no way improved by the experience.

But how do you get that across to a bunch of university students? How do you get them comfortable enough in not understanding everything that they become functionally capable in English? Is it too late for the final year students who still say “merci” every time I hand them a worksheet? And, perhaps most importantly, to me at least: who's fault is it really...?

Failure to generalise.

Since I moved here, I've been frequently corrected on an annoying little error in my French: I keep saying J'habite en Corté instead of J'habite à Corté.  It's a tiny little thing, but it indicates a fundamental flaw in my internal model of the language.

But earlier today, as I came down off a mountain, I was thinking about this.  OK, so the simple explanation is interference from Spanish (vivo en Corte/Corti)  But didn't we do this in high school?  Didn't we do this lots in high school.  When I thought about the placenames of me and my classmates -- Stirling, Denny, Banknock, Alloa etc -- yes, I thought of the sentence correctly: à Stirling, à Denny, etc.

Why were these ones correct in my head, but not Corte?  If the Spanish interference was overwriting my French, why hadn't it made *j'habite en Stirling sound right to me? 

This would have to indicate a failure to generalise on my part -- that I had learned by rote, not by meaning.  This was the first phrase I was ever taught with the word à in it, so there simply wasn't the support for me to understand the whole structure, so I memorised it as sounds, just as I do the words to songs in languages I don't speak.

But something else caught the back of my head.  Maybe the reason I was confused was because of the exceptions, like... aha!  Countries.  There are no exceptions at the town level -- it's a stable rule.   But in my school, we got towns and countries thrown at us at the same time, which made the stable rule seem unstable and arbitrary, leading to a failure to generalise.

Or, to put it another way, perhaps I generalised that the preposition was arbitrary...?

Monetising MOOCs

I've just had an email from the organiser of a free online course that I took (but I never watched or read any of the materials at all).  It was borderline spam: it was an advert for the book he was about to launch.

Is that the future of the MOOC, then?  Someone using it simply to get a mailing list for his next publication?  If it is, I' not sure how I feel about that.  I'm not convinced that a marketing campaign is the correct motivation for someone to write a coherent and (crucially) academically rigorous higher education course.

The warnings were there earlier, though.  Coursera (before they were so-named) were at once point advertising an entrepreneurship course called Lean LaunchPad, but these guys eventually jumped ship and climbed aboard with Thrun's Udacity... presumably for commercial reasons.  Yes, the course started out as Stanford course, but the name strikes me as more than a little...trademarky.  Isn't real higher education supposed to be generic?  Aren't we supposed to present a moderately broad and balanced view of the whole area of study, and not hone in one one specific methodology to the exclusion of all others?

To me, that looks like education taking one more step towards being a simple packager of vendor-specific training courses.  It's cheap, but efficiency isn't much good when you sacrifice education in the process.

So what can we do?

Muvaffak commented on my earlier post, saying that courses need to be self-financing, but the big question is how to do that without affecting openness.  No, $10 isn't much to me, but there are places where it is a hell of a lot.  Simple fees aren't practical.

The solution normally kicked about is "something or other... certification".  No, not very specific.  The idea is usually the that course -- the "education" -- is free, but testing (and therefore certification) will be paid for.  But that threatens to bring us back into an inequitable state, because we're still establishing a two-tier system.  Rich people in rich countries get certified, poor people in poor countries don't.

So there is still the very real issue of openness at the commercial level.  The internet makes the obvious answer difficult to see, or possibly just difficult to swallow: different prices in different places.  If A Book On C isn't affordable in India at the US and European retail price, print it locally cheaper.  But every couple of years, someone in the US makes a big thing about being "ripped off" by US prices, or someone gets taken to court for importing unlicensed copies of books.

So while people rave about the potential for free education to improve the lot of the poor, as soon as you start talking about offering them the same thing at a different price, you're no longer seen as helping the poor, you're now ripping off the pretty well-off (even if you're miles cheaper than the alternative).

Realistically, I'd say the fair and equitable way to fund MOOCs is through proctored exams with differential pricing.  Institutions in various countries act as agents for the exam, and pay commission to the course writers.  Make that commission a percentage, and the local market will determine local pricing.

No major exams at the moment really have this local pricing though -- the biggest example of inequity would have to be a certain internationally recognised English exam, which is several hundred pounds wherever you sit it.  A reasonable chunk of cash for a European student, but a heck of a lot of money for someone from South America.  The reason?  They papers all go back to a rich country, where they're marked by people who demand pretty high wages (in global terms).

In order to allow differential pricing, then, we're going to have to allow the distribution of marking duties.  The institutions taking the students' fees are going to have to be hiring their own markers.

BUT...

Having a competitive market for examination centres is very dangerous -- just see how the multiple exam boards for England and Wales became mired in controversy a few years back, with claims that one group of trainers were giving teachers advance warning of exam questions.  Certain "bad apples" were effectively trying to get the pass mark up in order to make the exams more appealing to schools.

So the marking load has to be split, but you can't be marked by your own institution (so no way for them to game the system).

So what are you left with?

Well, say I sit the exam in Rome; I should now have no idea where my exam will be marked.  Say it ends up in Ouagadougou.  And a paper from Jean in Ouagadougou ends up in London.  So I've paid much more money than Jean.  But Jean's marker gets paid more than Jean paid for the entire exam, and my marker gets paid a tiny fraction of what I paid.

While the system would be entirely equitable -- we all get out the same, and we put pretty much equivalent amounts into the system -- it looks unfair, because people just aren't used to a barter economy.

So the most workable solution for funding these things will never happen.

So from now on, I'd expect to see more and more tie-ins to books and proprietary methodologies, because the only guys who'll be able to afford to do this are the people with something to sell.....

Online education's elephant in the room.

It's funny how things come together to give you a better understanding of your own mind. A couple of weeks ago I got caught up the internet debate on mass-participation online education started by an American stats professor critiquing Udacity'sIntroduction to Statistics by Sebastian Thrun.  Then the other day I started debating online education again, this time triggered by the Technology Review article The Crisis in Higher Education linked and debated on Slashdot. One thing I didn't mention in the first debate, but did in the second, was something that has been bugging me for a very long time, and it's really only thanks to the recent debates I've been having with Owen Richardson on DI that I was finally able to articulate it.

These massive courses claim the potential to be better than anything that's come before, thanks to the availability of masses of automatically-collected feedback that will be used to improve them. This, theoretically, means the fastest pace of change in the history of education.

But is that really the case in practical terms?

Right now, I'm at the steepest part of the learning curve with respect to the courses I'm delivering at the university. I can't write more than one full lesson plan at a time, as in each new lesson I receive crucial feedback on what my students are capable of. So I'm constantly revising my material.

My father, during his career as a Chemistry teacher, delivered the same course year after year to classes of no more than 20 pupils at a time. Every time he taught a lesson, though, he was looking for improvements and refinements based on the reaction of the class. If someone made a mistake, he'd try to change the teaching to remove the possibility of someone in the next class making the same mistake.

So in the case of a conscientious teacher, material is revised for every 20 students taking the course.

 

Sebastian Thrun's first sitting of the Artificial Intelligence course had 160,000 pupils. OK, only 14% completed the course, but 22,400 students is still an incredibly high number. That's 1120 iterations of a class for me or my Dad. We're talking about numerous lifetimes of teaching. For a course taught once a year, it's equivalent to going back to the first millenium AD, not only before the computer, but before algebra, cartesian geometry and even the adoption of the Hindi-Arabic number system in Europe.  So we're talking about "A.D. DCCCXCII", not "892 AD".

A millenium's worth of teaching, with no improvement – I think that qualifies as the slowest rate of change in education ever, rather than the fastest.

Worse than that, while Thrun complains that his contemporaries are simply throwing existing courses onto the net without making them truly match the new paradigm, these are at least courses that have a fair amount of real-world testing behind them.  By contrast, his attempt at completely new means that he has giving a course to over 20,000 students without having tested it even once (as far as I can see). That's... worrying.

So what's the source of the problem?

The problem as I see it has two root causes: the medium and (as always) money.

The medium.

The current trend to massive online courses is a development of MIT's OpenCoursware initiative. Essentially, MIT videoed a bunch of lectures and stuck them online with various course notes, exercise sheets and textbook references. I know a few people who got a lot out of one or two courses, but often the quality was bitty, with incomplete materials (due to copyright or logistical reasons) and little motivation to complete.

The early pioneers of the current wave saw a major part of the problem as being in the one-hour lecture format, and revised it to a “micro-lecture” format, delivering short pieces to camera, interspersed with frequent concept-checking and small tasks.

But however small the lecture, it is still fundamentally the same thing, with a live human writing examples on some kind of board, and any revision means the human going back to the board and writing it out again, and giving the explanations again. The presented material cannot be manipulated automatically, so the potential for rapid revision and correction is reduced.

Money.

Revising a course manually takes time, and time is money. Squeezing several lifetimes' worth of improvements into a rapid development cycle isn't a part-time job – it's probably more than a full-time job, yet in the brave new world of online education, this is nobody's day job. Most of the course designers are still teaching and researching, and Thrun himself is still doing research while working at one of the world's biggest tech companies and trying to start up a new company.

No-one's yet really worked out the way to cash in on these developments, so no-one's investing properly.

Here in the UK, online education (on a smaller scale) is already on the increase, but mostly as a cost-cutting measure. That's fine as a long term goal, but in the short-term there is a need for massive investment in order to get things right.

What are we left with?

Not a lot, frankly. Data-mining requires a widely-varying dataset, in order to allow the computer to detect patterns that are too subtle or on too large a scale for a human to be able to pick up independently. But the data collected on these online programmes is pretty much one-dimensional. There are no variables explored in the teaching – there is one course, so the feedback can say if something is difficult or easy (based on number of correct answers and time taken to answer) – it can't tell us why, and it can't tell us what would be better. That means that the feedback from 22,400 students is less valuable to a good teacher than one question from an average student during an average class. That's.... worrying.

So much for the revolution.

So what's the solution?

If there's two parts to the problem, there must be two parts to the solution.

Medium

The Open University has, over the years, moved away from lectures to producing TV quality documentaries that use the best practices of documentary TV to present material in a way that genuinely enlightens the viewer.

 

As a documentary isn't a single continuous lecturer, it would theoretically be possible to have a computer modify and re-edit a documentary to make it easier to understand.

 

On the most basic level, a difficult concept might be made easier by inserting an extra second of thinking time at a certain point in the video -- an algorithm would be able to test this dynamically.  Conversely, the algorithm might find that reducing the pause is more effective, and do so dynamically (we assume then that the concept is easy and that extra time allows the student to become distracted).

 

Then there's the slides and virtual whiteboards used in the videos themselves -- produced in real-time as the presenter speaks.  This splits the presenter's attention, often resulting in rushed, unclear writing, or pauses and hesitations in speech.  Revising the visuals means redoing the whole video.

 

Why doesn't the computer build the visuals to the presenters specification, but with the ability to modify them to optimise to student feedback?

 

Eventually, we would get to the point where a course definition is a series over voice-over fragments and descriptions of intended visuals, and the computer decides what to put where.

 

But the reason that'll never happen in the current model is reason 2:

Money

Where there is a genuine incentive to drive down the cost of education, there on-line education will find its most fertile ground. When you look at the tuition fees in places like Stanford, Harvard and MIT, you'll see that these aren't the schools with the biggest incentive to make online education work.

Instead, we need to look to Europe, and in particular the countries with significant public funding for higher education. Universities funded by the public purse are under intense pressure to cut costs – it's the only way to balance the books in a shrinking economy.

However, the universities alone can't make this happen, as the current pressure is for cost savings NOW, and so they're producing online programmes with insufficient research and the quality of education is suffering for it.

Governments are sacrificing students to the God of Market Forces, when they should instead be planning intelligently. Instead of cutting funding to force universities to be more economical, they should be investing to make universities more economical. Give universities money now in order to produce high-quality programmes that will reduce costs for years to come.

 

But It Will Not Be Cheap – quite the opposite.  The creation of a genuinely high-quality online course is phenomenally expensive in terms of up-front costs, while being ridiculously cheap in the long term.

The current clientele of Udacity, edX and Coursera will no doubt feel cheated that I'm talking about education for the classic “student” rather than the free “everyman” approach of Coursera et al, but there's no need to. Established, well-researched, properly tested and adequately trialled online courses may take a while to perfect, but once they exist, their running costs will be so low that they will surely be made widely available. And while they're being developed, they're going to need a constant source of beta testers, and that's going to mean people who're doing it for personal interest, not for grades – ie you. The end result will still be open education, but it will be better.

Sometimes fate brings things together in a way that helps illustrate something you've been trying to explain.  But it's not normally fate -- there's usually an intrinsic link.  This time, is was the How-To-Learn-Any-Language forum, which I've been looking in on recently as a result of getting increased traffic from there to this blog.

There was a link there to an interesting project on Kickstarter -- Endangered Alphabets II.  Now I'm pretty broadly in favour of that project, although there's a slight irony in bending the scripts to his chosen medium of wood carving; after all, the diversity of scripts in India is mostly down to the availability of local materials.  Most Indian scripts evolved out of the Devanagari, changing over the years.  Where they wrote on banana leaves, the script was curved (as straight lines would split the leaf).  Others used ink on animal hide, others a clay tablet and stylus, etc.  As a travelling exhibition, perhaps the natural setting would be better, but there's no denying that what he's produced so far is quite beautiful, and the educational side of the project is very much worthwhile.

But any time I look at a project on Kickstarter, I always have a nose around for what else is on offer, and I particularly tend to look at languages.

There's not a lot on the go at the moment, but one project that's seeking funding is called The Simplest Teach Yourself Spanish Textbook, aiming to raise $8,800 (US) to retypeset, illustrate and generally prettify a little textbook that a teacher has produced and uses with her own students.  She tells us in her video that

I use it with all my students, and they tell me that thanks to the simple explanations, things finally make sense.

There's two problems here:

1. "things finally make sense" -- this implies that we're not talking about true beginners.  That a book is good enough for a false beginner does not imply that it is adequate for a genuine ab initio new learner.  I can't stress this enough -- "I learned more in 5 days with X than in 5 years of traditional classes is a claim that's really hard to prove".
2. "I use it with all my students" -- therefore we really have no proof of the effectiveness of the book, but merely claimed testimony of Kristen's abilities as a teacher.

IE. there has been no genuine testing of this book.  I was having a discussion on the comments thread on my post Michel Thomas vs Direct Instruction, and I suggested that it's pretty difficult to get people to buy into the full DI philosophy, so the most important point to get across is the importance of trialling the material.  In the case of Kirsten's book, the important thing would be to get it tested with other teachers, not her.  Are the explanations really that clear in the book, or is it something she says when presenting the material in class.  After all, if the explanations were really that clear, why would any teacher be needed?

Furthermore, she wants to spend the money on professional layout and illustrating to make it "even more engaging".  But I ask: what is the pedagogical value of the illustrations?  I imagine the usual response would be to make it more attractive, therefore engaging.  The pedagogical value, I said.  And pseudoscientifically, the answer is "to lower the affective filter".  I say "pseudoscientifically", because it is a claimed based more on belief than evidence.

There has been a constant drive to redesign and reorder books to match the expectations of the learner.  This has led to a culture of boxouts, callouts, side bars and other fancy panels.  Essentially, many textbook writers started to try to mimic the layout of magazines, "because that's what people read".  However, any good magazine designer will tell you that the function of magazines is fundamentally difficult from the function of a textbook.  No-one reads a magazine front-to-back -- they flick through and read fragments of articles before choosing what to read.

This is precisely what you do not want when studying a language.  I've used magazine-layout books with school age kids, and it's very difficult to keep their eyes on the right part of the page.  This book also made several errors in trying to select material that would be "engaging" to students, with exercises that the kids themselves derided as pointless (and justifiably so -- there was a picture of a pair of twins, and the students were to discuss which one of them was called Such-and-such, and which one was called Something-or-other, and justify their choice) and songs that they didn't like (a poor-quality Michael Stipe soundalike singing "Everybody Hurts" painfully off-key was once dismissed as "emo" by a metal-loving teenager).  The pedagogical value of these exercises was limited and the failure to engage student attention would have been self-evident if they trialled it under real-life conditions.

Going back to Kristen's textbook (Spanish is Your Amigo), there is no mention of any revisions due to student feedback since her first Kickstarter project got the early version.  I'm sure there will have been things that needed extra work or explanation, but she's presumably simply answered them adequately in class such that it's not a problem... for her students.  But for anyone else using the book, it will be.  The project does not mention a teacher's manual, which might point out common student problems or suggestions for activities that tie in with the course content.  (It's a poor substitute for making a course that anticipates these problems itself, but it would be a start.)

And that was what I was trying to get across in my comment the other day.  You cannot change someone's view of the fundamentals of teaching overnight, but if you can convince someone to adopt a rigorous testing methodology, you've made progress.

The learning experience for the writer doesn't end when they start doing proper testing, because of course brute-force trial-and-error doesn't work, and the sooner people start testing, the sooner they'll realise they need to think more carefully about planning and design.  And then they'll start looking for information on effective methodologies.

Laziness

Last night I sat in on an Italian conversation group.  My Italian is really rusty, and I'm rubbish with irregular verbs.  Part of me was silently screaming inside about it being "good enough", and I'm now worried I've hit a point where it's going to be difficult to motivate myself to study.  I can understand a heck of a lot on TV and radio, and I can make myself understood, so why should I put the effort in to do it right?

And yet, if I'm stepping into someone else's learning experience, I have a duty not to spoil it for them, don't I?  If I'm throwing out weird Italiañol, it's hardly going to help them learn.

I suppose I now understand a bit better why all the foreigners I met in Edinburgh stopped improving, and if I can genuinely motivate myself to learn Italian properly, maybe I'll work out how to help all those people too.

But one thing's for certain -- effort's not the answer.  If it feels like hard work, I'm not going to be able to force myself to do it.  Well, maybe I can, but what's the value if I do?  I learn Italian, but I learn nothing about how to help those who just can't see the point in making the effort.