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Reducing Self-Study Method Abandonment | ||
Tags: Burn-out | Self-Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 89 of 139 01 September 2013 at 5:04am | IP Logged |
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It's funny, I easily put up with the slowness of htlal (and occassional log outs while writing a reply etc) but I cannot stand the "noise" trying to make a website fancy and nice looking at the expense of easy functionality.
I actually think the independent authors are sometimes in a better position to try the new things and become major players in specific segments of the market. And especially when teaching a less common language. You cannot start changing the language learning world from English because there will always be too many big fish trying to eat you. But there are other languages. Lernu is a great example. Or the Say Someting in Welsh site. Or yet different xxxpod101.com courses (they are awesome to make those for small languages as well despite what the financial advisor told them! they explain in the blog). And one might find a few more. Those are all the great examples of how it can be done. Original, functional, focused on the customer. Lernu is free but the others are not. But there will always be a few catches to this website focused future: 1.If you put it all online, you are preventing people from using it when travelling, when visiting a cottage in the mountains, when the wifi breaks down or your computer or home electricity gets broken. There should always be a way to download enough to keep you through such situations. 2.Many learners remember much better when they study from paper books and can easily work with the text. Highlight, make notes in the text, underline and so on. Sure, you have such options in computer or tablet but it is not the same. Especially when you are learning larger amounts of something. 3.For both 1 and 2, many people will want to print de facto a textbook out of all that.But instead of a book, they will end up with that typical mess of copies many students of language classes know. The book format is actually quite practical for many uses. 4.Harder to get attention to your product in particular. There are already tons of crap learning websites and there will be more with every passing week and good things appear surely at least a few times a year (even though many good ideas and beginnings die out too soon). Advertising will be unfortunately of crucial importance when the real boom comes and that will as well move the price for the customers. You could say there are already tons of crap book courses among which you find the few rare jewels and marketing already is important. That much is true but it is much easier and cheaper to create a crap but good looking website than a paper book. 5: I don't think there will be more successful learners just because the courses move to fully computerized forms. That is nonsense. Not even if the courses are complete and with all the links and parts you mentioned. It is about the student. A motivated student can already learn perfectly comfortably with today's tools. Bigger invention than the internet isn't going to happen in the next several decades (even though Star Trek is sometimes very precise in the technological predictions and many were already fulfilled). A lazy student can have everything served on a silver plate and still fail miserably. I might say that some kinds of people will be even more likely to fail because they won't have needed to find the things (no time investment at the beginning before the real struggle starts) and they won't feel the money spent despite the price paid for most such resources. It is well known that people tend to spend more money when using mostly a card compared to counting the money physically present in your hand. And now both the money and the "books" will be untouchable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 90 of 139 01 September 2013 at 5:28am | IP Logged |
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I would like to take @iguanamon's idea even further and suggest that we move away completely from the idea of
a book with a related website. This is an intermediary step I will admit, but I think the future is really the completely web-based method with no book but with printable material online. Let's call it a learning environment for the time being. Most likely it would have to be financed by some sort of subscription rather than a one-off purchase in order to finance the continuous upkeep and updating. Basically, the idea is that the website is a pool of resources with all the things already mentioned in previous posts. In my opinion, the most exciting promise of such a learning environment would be the possibility to interact with native speakers of the TL. This could take various forms of course: maybe some type of structured language exchange or even individual native resources (also known as tutors and entirely optional, of course). What I would love would be some sort of virtual café where a small group of people would meet via Skype at a given time and with the assistance or one or more native speakers. Payment could possibly be made in kind (e.g. I assist others in other to receive assistance), I think some online operations already do something along these lines. There could be all sorts of activities, free or paid for. People could volunteer to host events. Good teachers and speakers could be invited to lead workshops on specific topics. Let's say someone decides to do a 90-minute workshop in the Spanish imperfect subjunctive for a maximum of 12 people at $10 USD a head. I would certainly sign up. Or maybe it's a workshop on accent in French. The idea is that you the learner can learn at your own pace and in accordance with your style. This means that the book, especially the textbook, has to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 91 of 139 01 September 2013 at 5:36am | IP Logged |
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There are already such things. And they are hardly going to get better soon. Firstly, natives of small languages will have it no easier to find a language partner, which quite bothers me as it is one of the worst handicapps related to these native languages. And by making a package of things into a learning environment instead of specialized services, you will just have to pay more and even for services you won't use because you will combine more learning environments, each for the best part. Just like you mix sources now :-) +all the catches I described in the previous post.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 92 of 139 01 September 2013 at 5:56am | IP Logged |
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Frankly, I do not know what is going to happen in the future. I look at trends and directions and try to extrapolate. I
look at the possibilities and the promises. I do not focus on the negatives. I don't know how people can predict what will not work. If there are problems to be solved, we'll solve them. For me, the invention of the tablet completed the missing link on the hardware side of the new learning environment because it basically provides portability, convenience and contents of a book with the advantages of a computer. Some people prefer paper phone directories, paper maps, paper dictionaries and paper textbooks but these will probably disappear the way encyclopedias have disappeared and for the very same reasons. Look at what the invention of the GPS and Google maps is doing to the map publishing industry. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 93 of 139 01 September 2013 at 1:11pm | IP Logged |
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I am not looking just at negatives, I am only not being naive. I don't predict, I look at trends, directions and the results we can already see.
Yes, "we" will solve them and abandonning a wrong path to pursuit a better one is one kind of solution. I just think some of those new experiements will prove to be the wrong path. For example, I cannot see any single reason why one size fits all online learning environment you suggest should be in the end better than one size fits all class or textbook. The clever people will still combine various things (in your future ideal world probably several expensive learning environments), the "stupid" will either get lucky to accidentally find their size or not that lucky and quit. Which tablet have you got? While I am excited about some features of my ipad, there are some limitations that could actually block the path for a long time. It will take a lot of feedback from the customers to change them. (Of course mostly in the form of not paying for things that are crap). Yes, paper encyclopedia disappeared. But so did pocket machine translators, ultrabooks are nearly dead and so are airships, no matter how much they all seemed to be the future. And actually the paper book argument is the wrong one here. I am all for ebooks, no matter how much I love the paper ones, I actually can't see why do you expect I want us to nearly go back to the papyrus and clay tablets. I am just not thrilled by the idea of the market being flooded by stupid shiny toys for brainless stupid "learners" where finding a source for real learners will be nearly impossible. I am actually an optimist. I believe our society will soon learn the value of good quality learning (of anything) in comparison with just having fun and looking like learning. We will have to. Because this flawed mentality we are experiencing in our countries is actually costing Europe and America a lot in comparison with Asia. Our civilization became lazy. People who choose worthless superficial tools so that their learning wouldn't hurt are just one of the symptoms. And another piece of optimism: there will be many more ebooks and the market and the entertainment industry will have to get back to senses so one day, we will no longer be restricted at what to buy just because of stupid details like nationality or adress. I as well believe the new models of selling and of more direct customer-creator interaction will lead to much more space for independent authors and new things. And when something really good appears, the rest will follow. And while we may disagree about good quality base sources in book format (no matter whether paper or computerized) against some virtual learning environments, it is not where the "battle" will be decided. The accessible native materials will be the important thing in the end. I am not a mamoth dwelling on paper at all costs. I am just not a naive fool. I don't want the society to go the Fahrenheit 451 way. Both fictional antiuthopies and real cruel ideologies count on one thing. The society and its members getting dumber and dumber. And while internet gives us a unique opportunity to counter these attempts to dumb us (from various sources. governments and marketing are just the two biggest among them), it can always make our downfall much faster. Will we focus primarily on the form or the content? That is the choice behind all that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 94 of 139 01 September 2013 at 2:47pm | IP Logged |
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I hear you. Let's move on.
What I find really exciting about the current trends is the possibility of true interactivity in the learning process. In my opinion, the fundamental flaw of the book and the traidtional self-teaching method is the directional and linear nature of the teaching method. I use the word teaching and not learning because that is what these products are designed to do. As we have seen, this is fraught with problems. One size doesn't fit all. People get bored for all kinds of reasons. The content can't please everybody. Things become stale. Learning from a book and listening to recordings can work but only to some extent. People are not engaged and go on to something else or drop out. The real promise of online learning is to shift the focus from teaching to learning. Users can choose the materials, and the methods that they like. There is no beginning or end. Start and stop where and when you want. And above all, there will be the possibility of interacting with native speakers and their culture. In my opinion, this is the most exciting aspect of this evolution. This is what will make learning a language exciting. After all, that's the goal of learning a language. For authors and publishers, there is of course a major mind shift. It goes without saying that the printed book with all its rigidity and datedness has to go. This contents will be presented in some modular form. Let the users print out what they want. And the payment model will have to change as well. All this is happening right now. Edited by s_allard on 01 September 2013 at 7:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 95 of 139 01 September 2013 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
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I think you are putting together two contradictory things.
On one hand, you want people to choose pieces and put them together. On the other, you expect that all to be a part of one learning environment and for more languages together since you want there the interaction with native speakers. If you base it as a purely learner exchange part of the site, it will be crap because as usual, only natives of few huge languages will be able to get a partner. If you base it on tutors, it will be more comfortable but less free. Which one do you mean? However I disagree about your dogmatic dividsion old=teaching focused and bad, new=learning focused and good. It doesn't work like that. Now it is about learning. The successful learners already apply some kind of modular approach. And even your dream learning site will be based on teaching as long as you transform the functions of a book into it. I would be very careful before throwing away the classical books you dislike so much. There were already several shifts away from them and those who wanted to learn properly have always returned. Sure, it is happening now. There are new and new nice looking sites teaching you to say hello, thanks, how are you and I'm hungry. Even the good example Fluenz ends somewhere around A2 (assumption based on the contents of the highest level of course) But I have yet to see a site that would give all you need to become prepared for the real situation and native materials. Lernu is different because Esperanto is different. But show me any site attempting to teach you all the base skills up to B2 so that you can begin using the language properly. I think this all can end up totally differently than you think. Just as many of us are today seeking out copies of old and more complete Assimils, there will be days when people will sell for high prices the used old and working textbooks on ebay while the masses will be fed fun, interactive ways to learn A1 level skills online naively believing it will be enough. And even if your optimism is correct and most learners will follow the modular online approach, there will be even more need for some kinds of old school things. Such as reference grammars. Especially the more intelligent and logically thinking people need the wider context. The day we exchange books (no matter whether paper or ebooks) for shiny toys will be the days we threw away our brains in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 96 of 139 01 September 2013 at 8:02pm | IP Logged |
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I've heard the message loud and clear. Thank you. We're moving on.
Ae we shift to more interactive multimedia-rich online learning environments, the very nature of language learning methods will change. There will be more potential for truly active learning. Intelligent and adaptative exercises than can diagnose weaknesses; extensive use of voice recognition software, lots of corrective feedback, up-to-date authentic materials and the presence of native speakers in some form. All of this will engage the user and make learning attractive and exciting. Doesn't this sound like a form of virtual immersion? You would be learning as if you were in the country. Well sort of. It won't be the same but it will be a hell of a lot better than reading that book and listening to those same CDs endlessly. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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