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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 65 of 97 25 September 2011 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You may have heard of something called the "tech bubble". Lots of companies jumped up explaining the miraculous things they were going to achieve through the magical power of the internet. After millions upon millions were ploughed into these paper empires, the bubble burst. The technology companies died, while the traditional companies lived on. The great myth that powered the tech bubble was that the expense in traditional media is in the printing and delivery of the product -- it is not. The expense is in the amount of work it takes to prepare the work in the first place. If you look at the few companies who've made it big(gish) in internet language, you won't see anything of the scale of a traditional language course. Coffee Break do simple phrase-book stuff, and the podcasters specialise in scattered ephemera with little or no structure. In fact, the whole podcaster business model is fuelled by a lack of teaching, which keeps people learning and hence subscribing.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 66 of 97 25 September 2011 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The outlook would seem to be pretty bleak all round then. The traditional companies have (for the moment) the resources to produce high-quality courses, but are in danger of being ripped off by pirates whose "job" the new technology makes too easy. They can try to protect themselves with DRM (Digital Rights Management), and future technology, but as far as I know, DRM can currently be broken quite easily on DVDs, for example. Books, as has been stated, are easy game. And the new companies are too small to produce high-quality courses, and/or don't really want to, for the reason that you stated. I think we have yet to see the full impact of Kindle-type technology on the Languages business (and all of book publishing), let alone future technologies. I'm not sure how all of this affects the OP's proposal (or anyone else who wants to try something similar), but because I have a background in software, I've tried to think this through with the analogy of the Open Software movement (i.e. things like Linux and OpenOffice). In the early days of the internet and UNIX, the idea of writing software and giving it away for free was actually quite common, if not as formalised as it later became. Later on (partly as UNIX and then Linux became more widespread, and of course once the internet and the web became massively more widely used), the Open Software movement became a bit more formalised and of course much bigger than it had originally been (partly in response to the actions of certain manufacturers). Now this sofware was "free" but of course it wasn't really free, it was heavily subsidised, essentially by the employers of the programmers and system designers who produced this software, with the employers' blessing, since they saw it as a form of enlightened self-interest - it was a win-win situation. Often these were universities who could be expected to take a more relaxed attitude, but by no means all. Later still, some major corporations began to openly embrace and promote Open Software - I can think of Sun Microsystems; there must be many others - In the case of Sun it helped to sell hardware, and perhaps other software products that they did charge for - premium versions of the free software perhaps. And although the web browsers that we all use now are free (and originally produced by volunteers ... now it's all more commercial), there are plenty of products out there that have a free version, and a premium version that you have to pay for (e.g. anti- virus S/W). Trying to steer this back to languages, what would volunteers who produce the language "software" (in some cases it might actually be software) get out of giving away their effort? Well, the nearest analogy I can come up with from the software world was that someone or a team would put in a lot of their own effort to contribute a software tool, which they would use themselves, but also expect to have access to a whole lot of other tools that they could get direct benefit from. So, you might be part of a team that produced MT-style Scandinavian courses, you potentially have the benefit that another team will one day produce, say, an MT-style Serbian course which you have always wanted to learn but there were no suitable self- study courses. Or some volunteers might be language teachers, who might find these type of courses a useful adjunct to their own teaching (even self-learners need the help of teachers sometimes). That's one aspect of it. What about the idea of "software" firms getting on board with the idea of "Open Language 'Software'"? What would be in it for them (enough to make them want to contribute resources, for example)? Well, maybe they could offer premium, "added value" versions of the courses (and for them to be any good, we've got to be talking about the larger companies here, taking up Cainntear's point). Well, I'm just thinking out loud really. Maybe it will spark something off with others. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 67 of 97 26 September 2011 at 11:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The comparison to open source software is a bit of a stretch.
Going way back to the early Unix days, many computer programs were more like function libraries, and the full "program" was generated by tying these building blocks together in a shell script. The reusability of these early programs was infinite, to the point where command line tools such as grep, cat etc are still used relatively unchanged today. And then there's the general code libraries themselves -- no-one benefits from having to rewrite quicksort or bubblesort every single time when the algorithm is always the came. Successful OS projects these days don't rely on quite the same level of reusability, although they will still often give a few contributions to the resuable code libraries. However, the important feature of FOSS is that most donations of code are only donations in the form of "technical steps" -- very few contributors contribute in the form of a "creative step". That is to say that the precise goals of the software are usually mapped out in advance, and the contributor merely does the number-crunching/code-juggling required to achieve said task. The FOSS packages that do something new and innovative usually start out as a one-man project, because that gives him direct creative control. The community then contributes in terms of bug-fixes, porting to different software and/or hardware architectures, and finding solutions to problems the original author couldn't overcome. Larger FOSS projects are generally functional clones of someone else's design. In making a course like this, the technical steps and creative steps are not so easily separable. Moreover, as MT specifically avoided compartmentalising his lessons (as in "today we are going to discuss adjectives", "today we will look at the article" etc) there is no "encapsulation" of the material, meaning no boundaries on which to divide the work. A course like this needs to be under the direct control of an individual, and an individual with very specific skills, at that.
But with no reusability, your contribution doesn't really lead to that. In fact, your contribution achieves precisely nothing for you. If I write a music manuscript processor, I do it because I want to print out sheet music. I gain direct benefit, and I give it away for others to benefit from it. If I write a Gaelic course, it doesn't teach me Gaelic, because it only covers what I already know anyway. So I'm spending time for no benefit to myself.
The problem is that the most important, the most valuable, part of the course is going to have to be the bit you give away for free. If the free stuff is crap, who's going to pay for the extras? But if the free stuff is good, why would you need to pay for the extras? Edited by Cainntear on 26 September 2011 at 12:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 68 of 97 26 September 2011 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If that's not a rhetorical question, I will say because there isn't enough free stuff. For example, several podcasts that I frequent have a handful of free stuff that's pretty good, but I can burn though it in a few days. Paying gets me the rest. Whether or not this applies to the MT discussion, I haven't a clue. BTW - which language(s) are you doing for Paul Noble's series? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4910 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 69 of 97 26 September 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
As a language instructor, you should know better than that. The best way to learn something well is to teach it. Yes, in creating a course you are only covering ground you already know, but you will improve your understanding of that material by the process of developing the course. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 70 of 97 26 September 2011 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Ahhh. This is so true. Call me a dinosaur but I get so much more out of physical books than I do staring at a computer screen. I usually end up buying copies of the FSI course books even though the PDFs are free online. Sorry, I know this is a bit off subject of the thread, but I just had to agree with you there, Eric! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 71 of 97 26 September 2011 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It kind of does, but the stuff that MT teaches in his courses (and which I would teach if emulating one of his courses) is the real meat of the language, and (in my opinion) the most valuable part of it. And you can burn through it in a few days. (The MT Foundation courses were each recorded as a class in 2 days.)
As of yet, I'm not "doing" anything. I've put my name down as a candidate for producing the Scottish Gaelic course, but as it says on the PN blog: The Paul Noble Language Institute is engaged in a number of commercial endeavours and projects and so the Celtic language project will not begin in earnest until 2014 So nothing's decided yet, and it won't be for another two years. It's a potential future source of income, and I'm not going to stake my future on it. (But I'm also not going to throw away my future by giving away for free all the knowledge I've spent so much time and money accumulating.)
OK, so it'll teach me to teach Gaelic... to the level of the free course. So it's a kind of a pointless gain, because how am I going to turn a profit teaching to that level if my teaching to that level is available free of charge...? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4910 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 72 of 97 26 September 2011 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Are you just trying to win an argument here? I can't believe anyone on these forums calling any language gain "pointless". Again, as a language instructor you ought to know that preparing a course to x level will improve your knowledge of x level and higher far more than the person taking the course. I don't disagree with what I understand as your main point, which seems to be that nobody is really going to put so much time into something like this for no money. However, your language is too black and white when you speak of it having "no benefit" and "a pointless gain". You're using a form of the argumentum ad absurdum and it's not really working. Extreme arguments produce extreme responses. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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