>> Vance Stevens: We're live!
Hello, everybody. Somehow my video disappeared.
It's there, but that's my - it's just an avatar format.
[missed words]
OK, well anyway, this is Vance Stevens in Abu Dhab... sorry, in L.A.
I'm living in L.A. now, if you want to know where I'm living.
Today is the 8th of December.
They move me around so much, you know.
And, anyway, it's the 8th of December 2013.
We're talking with a good friend of mine, Phil Hubbard,
from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
And he's been doing some really neat stuff in Cal.
I've known him for a long time in the Cal intersection Tea [missed words]
>> Phil Hubbard: Since we were kids.
>> Stevens: We were, 20 years ago [Hubbard laughs]
>> Hubbard: reaching 30 [check] [background voice]
>> Stevens: Someone has a -- someone needs to have a headset on.
[missed words] is muted.
Errh not sure: it could be someone listening to the stream.
Yeah, if you're listening to the stream -- OK.
Their call has gone away [check]
Someone has corrected it, that's good.
All right, well, OK. Someone has announced in the stream chat that they're listening to it there.
So that's good, everything seems to be working.
We're doing a Hangout on Air, as we often do.
We're streaming it on webheadsinaction.org/live
At the moment we have six people in the hangout,
there's room for four more.
So if anyone is listening on the stream and would like to join us, they can.
And right now we've got Claire Siskin and Jim Buckingham, Rita Zeinstejer and
let's see, and also Rob, Rob is there, and me, Vance Stevens. Rob Permanus, is that correct?
Correct me if I'm wrong. Permanus, Permanus - how do you pronounce your name?
>> Hubbard: You have to unmute him chuckles
>> Stevens: it's Perhamus -- Perhamus, OK, Good, I'll never forget that again, all right.
Thank you very much, Rob. Rob is an occasional participant in our hangouts.
Well Phil, take it away and anybody who wants to --
by the way, you're all muted by default when you come into the hangout.
You can unmute yourself.
If you're going to unmute yourself and talk, please mute yourself again,
so we don't get keyboard noises and things like that.
And there's Elizabeth Anne, also shown up from Grenoble in France.
And Halima [check] in Tashkent has also joined us, I see.
>> Hubbard [check] I think we're great, well, hello, everybody.
It's Good Morning for me, a little early in the morning,
but the sun is beginning to show through the back window here.
Thank you all for being here from all over the world.
What I wanted to do today is talk about largely an idea and a project that I've been working on
for the last couple of years, very sporadically.
Unfortunately I get interrupted easily, as I'm sure all of you do,
so what started out as a -- what I hoped was going to be a much more robust collection of materials
has turned out to be a little more anemic
but I still think that I have enough here that I can demonstrate the idea
and especially share my thoughts about how to go
about dealing with this relatively new notion of curation,
although in some ways, maybe it's just a label for an old notion that we've had for quite some time.
So, let me give you a little bit of the background,
like several of the things I've worked on in the last few years,
like learner training.
This is something that has emerged out of my classroom experience
with an advanced listening and vocabulary class,
and I see Vance is showing some of the slides now.
The class is for graduate students at Stanford
and it's a really nice sandbox for playing with ideas,
because these are -- well, they're all in graduate school already,
they're, for the most part, in the high 90's onwards to the 100s in the TOEFL iBT
so they really are advanced in that sense.
And many of them are taking the course because we require them to do it.
So they're kind of a captive audience
but it's also a small course: we have a maximum 14 students in it
and it allows me to not only play around with ideas, but get a chance to talk to the students afterward,
not usually with formal research, but just informally as part of our normal tutorial sessions
and find out what they thought about them and what I can do to make them work a little better.
So, the problem that I noticed - an important part of this class
is that students do independent projects
and those independent projects are supposed to be for a minimum of three hours a week.
Sounds like I am getting some echo in the background, but I will keep pushing through here..
Uhh.. those projects are for three hours a week
and they are responsible for doing the selection of the material
with my help and with my guidance both before and after.
And over the years, I have discovered that they are actually not really good at that.
What they are good at is finding material that is interesting to them.
But, they are not necessarily good at finding material that helps them.
They discover that on their own a little bit down the road
and often it doesn't become clear to both of us
because I have a very slow learning curve and quickly forget things.
So, I get to the end of the class and then I go
"Oh, I should have provided them with a little more guidance.".
So, about 2 years ago, I started doing this
and it came as a juxtaposition of a couple of things.
First of all, just my own general interest in the development of autonomy had been growing
and as I have gone out and collected materials that I would just use in class,
it was pretty clear to me that there is a huge amount of really interesting materials out there.
And people have been collecting these for a while
and teachers have been building lessons out of them
-- sometimes pretty sophisiticated lessons --
but I needed something that students could work with on their own.
And so, I wanted to find a way to help them without just my advice
as to how to look for materials, to actually start collecting materials
in ways that would still give them quite a bit of freedom of choice
but would also make it better as a language learning experience.
As part of this course, they are also required to build vocabulary.
They have to identify at least 35 new words and phrases every week,
from the material they are using.
So, this is a bit of the backdrop.
In 2011, I came across a book, kind of independently.
It was just recommended to me, for some reason, by Amazon:
you know how that works.
And the book was called 'Curation Nation'
and there is, I think, a slide there perhaps somewhere, it's like the sixth slide.
There's a -- if you want to pop that up.
If not, it's just a picture of the book.
But it's a book it's a book by Steven Rosembaum.
>>Stevens: I will. Could I --
I am supposed to be able to mute mikes, as the owner of the chat,
but I am unable to mute Halima's for some reason
and that is where the echo is coming from.
So, Halima, could I ask if you could click on the "mute" on your mike when not speaking?
And if you want to unmute, you can always speak to us.
That is where our echo is coming from.
And okay, I will do what Phil has asked me to do and pull up 'Curation Nation'.
>> Hubbard: laughs Alright, thanks.
Anyway, this is not a book about education by any stretch,
but it did come up with this notion that we have so much material on-line now
and we are having so much difficulty in sorting out
what the good stuff is from the chaff, for any reason, for news and so on.
Now we have all these feeds:
You know, if you -- those of you on Twitter or any of the other networks that have lots of feeds,
you get the -- even Google+ -- you get feeds from your friends,
you get feeds from people that whoever runs the site thinks might be interesting to you
and you are just overwhelmed with an enormous amount of material.
Some of it's pretty cool.
Much of it is stuff you wouldn't find on your own and that's great.
But when you've got the specific target of trying to improve your language
-- and of course, the group that I work with doesn't actually do a whole lot with social media
because they don't have time as full-time graduate students --
I am lucky if I can squeeze a few hours out of them to do the work
that they need for the course that they are taking for credit from me.
So, this notion of curation is based roughly
on the idea of what people do in museums and in art galleries.
You get an expert, somebody who actually knows a fair amount about a particular area
and you have that expert create collections, add value to them in one way or another,
and then you release those collections for the consumer - whoever it might be --
to have a look at and to interact with.
So, the key difference between this and what a lot of people are doing with this material
-- you may have heard concepts like "digital curation",
which can just mean curating digital materials
but often means that computers are doing the job for you.
Google news is a really good example of that:
I find a lot of interesting stuff in there, I can even ask it to find particular categories,
but it's still being selected without any human intervention.
You compare that with something like Huffington Post,
which is material that's been brought in by people who are
-- in some cases, they're producing it, but in other cases they are aggregating it
and trying to make sense out of it for the rest of us.
So, a key point here is that curation isn't the same as aggregation, or listing, or tagging.
It's okay to use that term for that but that's not the way I am using it.
There is a really nice quote in my slide there that -- I think it's maybe --
two more slides down, Vance. One more. There you go. Past curation.. yeah, that one.
So this is - it's maybe a little mean, but I think it's right on point
that when you just get collections of things, you've just got collections of things
and its not necessarily anything other than "these are things that I liked"
or "these are things that I think you will like".
So, I prefer the next slide: you want to go to it, Vance?
This is more the way I see curation,
where you collect material, you organize it,
there is even the potentially a path, well, there is certainly a path
through the individual material groups,
and then mayble even a path through the groups,
although at the moment I haven't done that last point.
So, this is, you know, kind of captures the idea that I want to talk about today.
Curation, importantly, is not the same as creation or recreation
or adaptation or sampling, or synthesizing.
It's taking the material and adding something to it, maybe just a commentary,
maybe just collecting it into some logical framework or logical sequence.
So, when I took that idea, which I was getting through the Curation Nation book,
and thought about it with respect to the material that I was using,
I decided to experiment with that and come up
with some collections of materials from -- as you probably know from the title here and also the PDF,
if you've had a look at it -- comes from TED Talks.
And in a moment I will talk about why I think TED talks is so good for that
but at the base level, these were very popular with my students.
What the students were doing more--
they were having trouble coming up with good ones.
They would always pick what was interesting
and then often come back to me and say
"Well, this was interesting, but I had trouble understanding it because my --
the accent of the speaker was not easy for me to understand."
or "I had trouble understanding it because -- it was interesting
because I didn't know anything about it and I didn't have the background
so there was a whole bunch of new vocabulary."
So t could be interesting for all sorts of reasons,
but it wasn't interesting for the right reasons,
for what we think is good for independent language learning.
Again, this doesn't mean that all of those collections, with the help of a teacher,
couldn't have been very valuable in a classroom
and especially getting to the content for connecting to discussions.
But that's not the same thing as letting students work on their own.
So, I do want to emphasis that.
My perspective here, at least initially,
is getting students to be able to do these things outside of class
and then just come back and report on them
rather than having something we do in class
or that everybody does the same homework assignment on.
Alright, so that's the set-up for what I believe curation should be,
or at least can be, within this framework.
So, I think what I'll do here is pause for a second and see if anybody has questions.
and bring it up by trying to look at some of the chat pieces here
Uh -- [he hums]
[reading:] "What is meant by sign..."
OK, so some of these chats are to each other about the chats.
So I got to go to the other window
Uh -- anybody -- anybody have any questions here?
If not, I'll continue on.
>> Stevens: I have to admit I have trouble following all the chats.
There's also a back channel here, with Google: some people could be in that one.
I never see that one until I get off of --
>> Hubbard: Well, the last chat -- the last piece on the group chat said:
"Yeah, we agree with you, Phil."
So: that's great.
I'll stop [check] there and if everybody agrees with me, I don't really need to --
>> Stevens: you need go no further >> Hubbard: [overlapping, inaudible]
No [Hubbard and Stevens laugh]
>> Hubbard: OK, well, so, again, that's kind of the background,
this idea that I needed to start collecting things.
So, I'm still kind of almost two years in the past, now,
telling you the story of how I got to where I got here.
So I picked TED talks and I started going into TED talks.
I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to collect them
but I knew there were some of the ones that I liked
and I also knew some characteristics that I thought were useful for the students.
I thought it was important to collect them into themes.
You know, we've known for a long time that if you have related content,
that it kind of feeds -- the materials feed one another
and the students get probably a better and a richer experience,
they get more natural repetition and key vocabulary
than if you have people just kind of jumping out piecemeal
with unconnected bits of material.
I -- in the 1980's I was forced to teach a course with a book I don't remember the name of that.
I do remember the author, but I'm not going to mention it on air.
It was a reading textbook and the reading textbook had really interesting little chapters,
at least most of them were interesting to me,
but, you know, one chapter would be on the Olympics
and the next chapter would be on sea-horses.
And it's that kind of jumping around -- we typically don't do that with textbooks anymore.
And yet when we turn students loose, a lot of times, that's what they decide to do.
So again, even though I had been giving them guidance, saying:
"Well, collect several bits of, you know, pieces of material, videos or podcasts
that are related to one another in some way,"
they wouldn't follow that advice, because it hadn't been done for them.
They were still kind of chasing around, looking for the spots that just seemed interesting.
OK. I think what I'll do is tell you what the
-- at a kind of the abstract level, what I came up with
about what the curator's role should be.
And again, this is specifically for this target audience,
but I think it can be tweaked and extended to other ones.
The first thing you have to do is collect the stuff: you want digital materials,
you want to organize them in some way:
mine are organized systematically, but you could do
-- you know, you could take news stories and do them chronologically.
You need to sequence them and this is where a lot of collections fall short.
They're just -- they're either randomly sequenced
or they're not sequenced at all.
And I think it is possible, as, you know, as the resident [check] expert, the teacher,
to be able to say:
"Here's a way to move so that the earlier ones might be a little bit easier to follow
and the later ones are better understood if you've done the earlier ones."
The fourth point there that
-- on the slide that Vance has --
is the hardest part of all of this,
and that is trying to get this material levelled in some way.
Wilfried Decoo in 2010 wrote a book, it's at the end
-- the reference is at the end of the slideshow here --
on systemization.
And it was kind of a return to the idea that
even if you're using authentic material,
and especially if you're trying to create course material yourself,
that you need to have a kind of natural development of that material
from, you know, easier at lower levels, to harder
and he went to the point of even talking about keeping databases
that were very finely tuned,
so you would be able to pull out lexical items and grammatical points and so on
in a scope and sequence that fit
what we thought we knew about language learning.
And you know his -- I think his perspective is
what I think is a reasonable one to bring up again,
because I think we are often not cognizant of the difference between
accessible and barely accessible and inaccessible materials,
especially now that students can go in and, you know,
get their first-language subtitles and transcripts for a lot of these materials
and then have the illusion that they are actually understanding the English, in this case,
and that they're building their English proficiency, where they --
-- they may be to some extent, but probably not to the extent that they think they are.
So there is the, you know, that idea of --
well, in Decoo's book of fine tuning material.
That doesn't work for me because at the levels I have,
first of all, I have mixed-level classes to some degree,
although they are all fairly advanced.
They come from different backgrounds, I don't know what they know going in.
So it's a little tricky to do it in the way that he likes.
But it still gave me the impetus to try and see if I could come up with something,
you know, I'll show you that in a bit.
So, the last part of that, then, once you can give at least some kind of level information,
is to go ahead and then present your pedagogical support,
whatever it might be.
This is fairly open-ended, I mean teachers can get -- and often do get -- into material
and they start stripping out what they think are key vocabulary,
they produce, you know, pre-listening activities,
they have post-listening activities,
they have discussion activities.
All these are great, but they're based kind of on a classroom model
and even more important: they take a lot of time away
from the job of collecting this material.
So if you put the hours into making full lessons,
you end up not having the time to even produce as much as I have,
which, as I mentioned, is not as much as I'd like.
OK, so that's the curator's role and then -- Vance, if you could go to the next slide.
Did we lose you?
>> Museum curator MC [check]: Hi Phil, I just wanted to add to something you--
>> Hubbard: Yes, go ahead
>> MC: Just because of my background:
I used to work in museums >> Hubbard: Oh, fantastic
>> MC: in education and curation >> Hubbard: A real curator!
>> MC: Yeah. Just one other item I would add to the list
and I made a note of it in the chat section
and that's the -- often without knowing it we're making assumptions about our audience.
>> Hubbard: Ah! >> MC: When we're selecting things,
whether they be objects for display or -- like in the museums -- or
objects for presentations to students, we're often unknowingly making assumptions
and I think it's a really important thing to know, to challenge ourselves
about the assumptions we're making in making those selections, those choices, as experts.
>> Hubbard: Yeah, I mean that's a very good point
and I have to -- as individuals, the students always change in my classes.
As a group, you know, I get to know the group better.
So I think, in this very targeted group, I can --
I can come up with at least, initially, some likely ones,
but I do in fact ask them for feedback on --
Well, first of all, I give them choices and then I ask them for feedback
both on, you know, what they chose and why, of the ones I selected for them,
and also what else they might like to see.
So it becomes a little bit od a dialog,
and that could be even more of a dialog, you know, if you have --
the way my class is structured, again, because it's so small,
we do a lot both within class discussion and with the individual tutorials.
But if you got a larger class and you got a discussion board or a wiki or something like that
where, you know, students can -- can chime in more regularly,
then you could get some information.
I also haven't formally surveyed them, so that would be useful too. I --
>> MC: You're inviting their feedback to inform -- >> Hubbard: Very much so. Yeah.
>> MC: Yeah -- >> Hubbard: But not as richly as I could.
So one idea I had was that, you know, like you've seen probably in museums,
sometimes they have the displays but they'll also have, you know,
places where people can, you know, write cards
and make suggestions and say things and drop those off
and I think, probably increasingly, we'll see museum displays
where the, you know, the viewers' thoughts are right up there and accessible to other viewers
when they go to look at the material.
So I think you're making a really good point and, you know, this is the --
figuring out exactly the role of the students who are still kind of developing,
you want to meet them half way but you also, in the curation model, I think,
want to be careful about the difference between curation and crowdsourcing,
because I've had students come up with some materials
that they thought were really exciting,
but when I looked at it, I could see what the problems were in terms of the --
the use of it by other students.
>> MC: Now I take your point: it's you acting as the filter.
>> MC: and finding -- >> Hubbard: Yeah, and that's --
and again that's -- and again that's the -- this is the kind of, to me, this the curation model.
>> MC: Yeah >> Hubbard: The crowdsourcing model
is a great model too, it's just a different model
and it may work better in some cases.
Of course it also depends on, you know,
I've been to museums that I didn't think were very well run, were very well organized
or were confusing.
So -- >> MC: Yeah.
>> Hubbard: as soon as you have the human expert coming in,
they may not be as much of an expert as they think they are.
That's probably true of me, in fact. >> MC: Yeah, and there are lots of people [check]
a lot of examples of museums, because I'm into curating things
and then I'm finding out that the interpretations that they were expecting audiences to have
were completely off-base.
>> Hubbard: Yeah. >> MC: I think that's a good example
of big money going into these exhibitions and then being interpreted in a completely unexpected --
>> Hubbard: Yeah, well, the good news here is, I have no big money.
I mostly have no money at all for this. So -- [he laughs]
It's also, the nice thing is, you know, compared to the museum,
where you have all of these Unkosten [? check] to putting the material in,
once you have something, you start a web page:
if it is a disaster, or if it needs to be tweaked or significantly changed,
it's possible to do that just by finding a little bit of time.
[MC and Hubbard overlap] >> MC It's just [missed words check]
There's even an opportunity, actually, in, as an expert,
putting together a series of well-chosen articles
and then inviting students to assemble them and put them into a -- into an order or sequence,
and to try and explain the rationale that they've used,
what connections they've seen in the works.
It's just another angle to it I sure would --
>> Hubbard: No, it's a very good angle and in fact, you know,
as I've moved through stages in probably about 15 years of teaching this course,
I've tried to give students more independence but also to give them guidance in that independence
and one of the -- what I hope I'm doing with the material I have,
I do show them how I put it together.
And I hope I'm, you know, kind of modeling curation for them as well.
The idea of getting them to maybe do a little curated piece of their own,
that could be an interesting final project for the course.
I will be revisiting it again in Spring.
I'll be away from it in Winter quarter here
because we have -- we teach 10-week quarters.
But that's a possibility for Spring, actually.
It could also greatly enrich the collection of material that's available to other students.
Again, as long as I'm there to be a kind of a filter,
rather than just releasing these into the wild.
Or if I do release them, you know, making sure that students know the difference
between ones that are student-produced and the once that I produced
and why, you know, I did mine one way.
Then they can -- they can judge to some extent, you know,
whether they think the rationale used by their peers, you know, was useful for them.
So, that's a nice idea, I'm making a note of that.
OK, shall I move on?
>> [Stevens? check] Yeah. I'm aware of a podcast - there's the slide on I'm talking --
>> Hubbard: Yeah, thanks [they laugh]
>> Stevens (?): I listened to a podcast where some educators had gone to Europe,
probably on a junket but ostensibly [Hubbard laughs]
>> Stevens: to visit museums and find out, you know,
especially ones that had audience attract--
you know, the idea was that museums, people didn't have to go there,
they have to attract people.
So what do they do to attract the people, as opposed to schools?
And then, how can we design our classroom environment
so it's more like a museum?
So that was actually a serious project and I'll never remember --
I'll never forget how to get it back, but maybe I will tell you in Portmont [check].
>> Hubbard: Ah OK? So that was good. [31:29]
Yeah, so Vance has put up the slide that I wanted to make a point of here,
because there are a couple of things that are important about this slide, I think.
The first is even though these are just little bullet points,
that actually took me a while to kind of figure this out, maybe because I'm slow, but --
Oop, Vance, I lost the slide. >> Stevens: it is here again >> Hubbard: thanks.
Because of all the other distractions I have
and because of other elements of where I am and what -- the visibility (31:46]