New places to play

This week in class, we had Prof. Curis Bonk of Indiana U. lecture us via web conferencing software. His research on the future of e-learning is interesting, and me makes much of it freely available at http://www.publicationshare.com/. I was impressed by Prof. Bonk's ideas, but even more so by his seemingly nearly encyclopedic knowledge of cool learning tools on the web. His presentation covered a lot, and I scribbled down a long list of very useful names to check out.

I thought I'd highlight a few here that struck me as particularly interesting for language learning. One was dotSUB, a site designed as a collaborative "wiki" type environment for subtitling videos. I checked out the site's tanscription and subtitling UI, which aims to make the process easy enough that anyone can do it.

I really like the idea of crowd-sourcing subtitling, a task that theoretically anyone can do--it's just the work of actually getting the subtitles into the video that most people would get stuck on. Still, I think dotSUB has a way to go in some areas--it doesn't seem to have the same rigorous fact-checking ethos as, for example, Wikipedia. Also, the transcription process relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts to start and stop the video, which many causal users may be hesitant to learn. Finally, I wonder who dotSUB believes their audience to be; they don't seem to be particularly targeting language learners. As an English-speaking learner of Spanish, I found I could search for videos in Spanish, videos in English, videos with Spanish translations, and videos with English translations; but I could not specifically search for Spanish videos with English translations. I'm interested in using more video to learn Spanish, but dotSUB didn't make the process as easy for me as I would have liked. Still, all of these problems are correctable, and I'm interested to see how this pretty cool idea develops.

A second interesting website identified by Prof. Bonk was Voxopop, a tool for creating online, asynchronous voice discussion forums. A curious user can just click "Play" and immediately hear each post of a thread played in sequence; some discussions are just a few minutes, some run for hours. Unlike dotSUB, Voxopop did seem to be heavily geared for language learning, and I could see quite a few classes already using the site for this purpose. I didn't try starting my own voice thread, but the potential for meaningful interaction between geographically dispersed learners and teachers is pretty cool. Threads can even be exported to iTunes or as an RSS feed. On the whole, these are some really exciting resources to have been made aware of.