[Edu-sig] Low Enrollments - programming as anti-intellectualism

[Rob Malouf]

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 10:58 -0800, Kirby Urner wrote:
> In my Classroom of Tomorrow, the teacher has random access to a
> gazillion
> video shorts in the archive, and during Q&A might pull up just the
> right
> ones to sustain the dialog.  It's not a matter of the teacher losing
> control
> to "A/V" (e.g. half- to full-hour documentaries).  I just screen a
> quick
> animation of a fetch instruction:  bits on the address bus trigger RAM
> to
> dump some content onto the bus, which get loaded into a register on
> the CPU
> (25 seconds play time).

We're working on something like that here for language teaching.  We've
got a big archive of "authentic language materials" (digital audio and
video media), annotated (semi-)automatically with information that lets
language teacher call up segments that are relevant for their lessons --
say, suppose someone wants a real example of a second conjugation verb
used in the pluperfect in a conversation between two characters of equal
social status in an Albanian sitcom. We're not imagining it as a
real-time system yet (teachers would collect the digital media segments
and assemble them into a powerpoint presentation before class), but
there's no reason the archives couldn't be searchable on-line like that
someday.  

-- 
Rob Malouf <rmalouf at mail.sdsu.edu>
Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages
San Diego State University