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>> Vance Stevens: We're live!
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Hello, everybody. Somehow my video disappeared.
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It's there, but that's my - it's just an avatar format.
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[missed words]
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OK, well anyway, this is Vance Stevens in Abu Dhab... sorry, in L.A.
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I'm living in L.A. now, if you want to know where I'm living.
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Today is the 8th of December.
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They move me around so much, you know.
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And, anyway, it's the 8th of December 2013.
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We're talking with a good friend of mine, Phil Hubbard,
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from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
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And he's been doing some really neat stuff in Cal.
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I've known him for a long time in the Cal intersection Tea [missed words]
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>> Phil Hubbard: Since we were kids.
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>> Stevens: We were, 20 years ago[br][Hubbard laughs]
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>> Hubbard: reaching 30 [check][br][background voice]
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>> Stevens: Someone has a -- someone needs to have a headset on.
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[missed words] is muted.
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Errh not sure: it could be someone listening to the stream.
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Yeah, if you're listening to the stream -- OK.
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Their call has gone away [check]
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Someone has corrected it, that's good.
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All right, well, OK. Someone has announced in the stream chat that they're listening to it there.
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So that's good, everything seems to be working.
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We're doing a Hangout on Air, as we often do.
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We're streaming it on webheadsinaction.org/live
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At the moment we have six people in the hangout,
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there's room for four more.
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So if anyone is listening on the stream and would like to join us, they can.
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And right now we've got Claire Siskin and Jim Buckingham, Rita Zeinstejer and
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let's see, and also Rob, Rob is there, and me, Vance Stevens. Rob Permanus, is that correct?
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Correct me if I'm wrong. Permanus, Permanus - how do you pronounce your name?
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>> Hubbard: You have to unmute him chuckles
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>> Stevens: it's Perhamus -- Perhamus, OK, Good, I'll never forget that again, all right.
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Thank you very much, Rob. Rob is an occasional participant in our hangouts.
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Well Phil, take it away and anybody who wants to --
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by the way, you're all muted by default when you come into the hangout.
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You can unmute yourself.
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If you're going to unmute yourself and talk, please mute yourself again,
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so we don't get keyboard noises and things like that.
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And there's Elizabeth Anne, also shown up from Grenoble in France.
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And Halima [check] in Tashkent has also joined us, I see.
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>> Hubbard [check] I think we're great, well, hello, everybody.
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It's Good Morning for me, a little early in the morning,
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but the sun is beginning to show through the back window here.
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Thank you all for being here from all over the world.
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What I wanted to do today is talk about largely an idea and a project that I've been working on
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for the last couple of years, very sporadically.
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Unfortunately I get interrupted easily, as I'm sure all of you do,
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so what started out as a -- what I hoped was going to be a much more robust collection of materials
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has turned out to be a little more anemic
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but I still think that I have enough here that I can demonstrate the idea
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and especially share my thoughts about how to go
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about dealing with this relatively new notion of curation,
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although in some ways, maybe it's just a label for an old notion that we've had for quite some time.
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So, let me give you a little bit of the background,
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like several of the things I've worked on in the last few years,
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like learner training.
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This is something that has emerged out of my classroom experience
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with an advanced listening and vocabulary class,
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and I see Vance is showing some of the slides now.
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The class is for graduate students at Stanford
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and it's a really nice sandbox for playing with ideas,
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because these are -- well, they're all in graduate school already,
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they're, for the most part, in the high 90's onwards to the 100s in the TOEFL iBT
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so they really are advanced in that sense.
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And many of them are taking the course because we require them to do it.
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So they're kind of a captive audience
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but it's also a small course: we have a maximum 14 students in it
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and it allows me to not only play around with ideas, but get a chance to talk to the students afterward,
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not usually with formal research, but just informally as part of our normal tutorial sessions
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and find out what they thought about them and what I can do to make them work a little better.
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So, the problem that I noticed - an important part of this class
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is that students do independent projects
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and those independent projects are supposed to be for a minimum of three hours a week.
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Sounds like I am getting some echo in the background, but I will keep pushing through here..
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Uhh.. those projects are for three hours a week
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and they are responsible for doing the selection of the material
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with my help and with my guidance both before and after.
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And over the years, I have discovered that they are actually not really good at that.
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What they are good at is finding material that is interesting to them.
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But, they are not necessarily good at finding material that helps them.
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They discover that on their own a little bit down the road
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and often it doesn't become clear to both of us
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because I have a very slow learning curve and quickly forget things.
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So, I get to the end of the class and then I go
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"Oh, I should have provided them with a little more guidance.".
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So, about 2 years ago, I started doing this
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and it came as a juxtaposition of a couple of things.
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First of all, just my own general interest in the development of autonomy had been growing
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and as I have gone out and collected materials that I would just use in class,
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it was pretty clear to me that there is a huge amount of really interesting materials out there.
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And people have been collecting these for a while
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and teachers have been building lessons out of them
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-- sometimes pretty sophisiticated lessons --
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but I needed something that students could work with on their own.
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And so, I wanted to find a way to help them without just my advice
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as to how to look for materials, to actually start collecting materials
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in ways that would still give them quite a bit of freedom of choice
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but would also make it better as a language learning experience.
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As part of this course, they are also required to build vocabulary.
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They have to identify at least 35 new words and phrases every week,
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from the material they are using.
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So, this is a bit of the backdrop.
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In 2011, I came across a book, kind of independently.
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It was just recommended to me, for some reason, by Amazon:
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you know how that works.
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And the book was called 'Curation Nation'
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and there is, I think, a slide there perhaps somewhere, it's like the sixth slide.
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There's a -- if you want to pop that up.
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If not, it's just a picture of the book.
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But it's a book it's a book by Steven Rosembaum.
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>>Stevens: I will. Could I --
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I am supposed to be able to mute mikes, as the owner of the chat,
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but I am unable to mute Halima's for some reason
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and that is where the echo is coming from.
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So, Halima, could I ask if you could click on the "mute" on your mike when not speaking?
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And if you want to unmute, you can always speak to us.
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That is where our echo is coming from.
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And okay, I will do what Phil has asked me to do and pull up 'Curation Nation'.
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>> Hubbard: laughs Alright, thanks.
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Anyway, this is not a book about education by any stretch,
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but it did come up with this notion that we have so much material on-line now
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and we are having so much difficulty in sorting out
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what the good stuff is from the chaff, for any reason, for news and so on.
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Now we have all these feeds:
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You know, if you -- those of you on Twitter or any of the other networks that have lots of feeds,
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you get the -- even Google+ -- you get feeds from your friends,
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you get feeds from people that whoever runs the site thinks might be interesting to you
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and you are just overwhelmed with an enormous amount of material.
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Some of it's pretty cool.
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Much of it is stuff you wouldn't find on your own and that's great.
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But when you've got the specific target of trying to improve your language
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-- and of course, the group that I work with doesn't actually do a whole lot with social media
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because they don't have time as full-time graduate students --
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I am lucky if I can squeeze a few hours out of them to do the work
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that they need for the course that they are taking for credit from me.
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So, this notion of curation is based roughly
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on the idea of what people do in museums and in art galleries.
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You get an expert, somebody who actually knows a fair amount about a particular area
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and you have that expert create collections, add value to them in one way or another,
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and then you release those collections for the consumer - whoever it might be --
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to have a look at and to interact with.
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So, the key difference between this and what a lot of people are doing with this material
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-- you may have heard concepts like "digital curation",
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which can just mean curating digital materials
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but often means that computers are doing the job for you.
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Google news is a really good example of that:
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I find a lot of interesting stuff in there, I can even ask it to find particular categories,
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but it's still being selected without any human intervention.
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You compare that with something like Huffington Post,
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which is material that's been brought in by people who are
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-- in some cases, they're producing it, but in other cases they are aggregating it
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and trying to make sense out of it for the rest of us.
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So, a key point here is that curation isn't the same as aggregation, or listing, or tagging.
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It's okay to use that term for that but that's not the way I am using it.
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There is a really nice quote in my slide there that -- I think it's maybe --
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two more slides down, Vance. One more. There you go. Past curation.. yeah, that one.
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So this is - it's maybe a little mean, but I think it's right on point
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that when you just get collections of things, you've just got collections of things
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and its not necessarily anything other than "these are things that I liked"
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or "these are things that I think you will like".
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So, I prefer the next slide: you want to go to it, Vance?
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This is more the way I see curation,
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where you collect material, you organize it,
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there is even the potentially a path, well, there is certainly a path
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through the individual material groups,
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and then mayble even a path through the groups,
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although at the moment I haven't done that last point.
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So, this is, you know, kind of captures the idea that I want to talk about today.
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Curation, importantly, is not the same as creation or recreation
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or adaptation or sampling, or synthesizing.
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It's taking the material and adding something to it, maybe just a commentary,
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maybe just collecting it into some logical framework or logical sequence.
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So, when I took that idea, which I was getting through the Curation Nation book,
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and thought about it with respect to the material that I was using,
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I decided to experiment with that and come up
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with some collections of materials from -- as you probably know from the title here and also the PDF,
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if you've had a look at it -- comes from TED Talks.
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And in a moment I will talk about why I think TED talks is so good for that
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but at the base level, these were very popular with my students.
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What the students were doing more--
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they were having trouble coming up with good ones.
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They would always pick what was interesting
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and then often come back to me and say
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"Well, this was interesting, but I had trouble understanding it because my --
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the accent of the speaker was not easy for me to understand."
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or "I had trouble understanding it because -- it was interesting
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because I didn't know anything about it and I didn't have the background
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so there was a whole bunch of new vocabulary."
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So t could be interesting for all sorts of reasons,
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but it wasn't interesting for the right reasons,
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for what we think is good for independent language learning.
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Again, this doesn't mean that all of those collections, with the help of a teacher,
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couldn't have been very valuable in a classroom
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and especially getting to the content for connecting to discussions.
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But that's not the same thing as letting students work on their own.
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So, I do want to emphasis that.
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My perspective here, at least initially,
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is getting students to be able to do these things outside of class
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and then just come back and report on them
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rather than having something we do in class
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or that everybody does the same homework assignment on.
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Alright, so that's the set-up for what I believe curation should be,
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or at least can be, within this framework.
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So, I think what I'll do here is pause for a second and see if anybody has questions.
0:15:40.968,0:15:46.983
and bring it up by trying to look at some of the chat pieces here
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Uh -- [he hums]
0:15:51.994,0:15:53.539
[reading:] "What is meant by sign..."
0:15:53.539,0:15:56.667
OK, so some of these chats are to each other about the chats.
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So I got to go to the other window
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Uh -- anybody -- anybody have any questions here?
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If not, I'll continue on.
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>> Stevens: I have to admit I have trouble following all the chats.
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There's also a back channel here, with Google: some people could be in that one.
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I never see that one until I get off of --
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>> Hubbard: Well, the last chat -- the last piece on the group chat said:
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"Yeah, we agree with you, Phil."
0:16:28.621,0:16:29.849
So: that's great.
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I'll stop [check] there and if everybody agrees with me, I don't really need to --
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>> Stevens: you need go no further [br]>> Hubbard: [overlapping, inaudible]
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No [Hubbard and Stevens laugh]
0:16:38.976,0:16:41.808
>> Hubbard: OK, well, so, again, that's kind of the background,
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this idea that I needed to start collecting things.
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So, I'm still kind of almost two years in the past, now,
0:16:51.241,0:16:54.997
telling you the story of how I got to where I got here.
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So I picked TED talks and I started going into TED talks.
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I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to collect them
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but I knew there were some of the ones that I liked
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and I also knew some characteristics that I thought were useful for the students.
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I thought it was important to collect them into themes.
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You know, we've known for a long time that if you have related content,
0:17:21.069,0:17:25.790
that it kind of feeds -- the materials feed one another
0:17:25.790,0:17:29.920
and the students get probably a better and a richer experience,
0:17:29.956,0:17:32.986
they get more natural repetition and key vocabulary
0:17:32.996,0:17:36.425
than if you have people just kind of jumping out piecemeal
0:17:36.855,0:17:40.002
with unconnected bits of material.
0:17:40.944,0:17:48.436
I -- in the 1980's I was forced to teach a course with a book I don't remember the name of that.
0:17:48.436,0:17:48.686
I do remember the author, but I'm not going to mention it on air.
0:17:51.517,0:17:59.717
It was a reading textbook and the reading textbook had really interesting little chapters,
0:17:59.717,0:18:02.103
at least most of them were interesting to me,
0:18:02.634,0:18:05.397
but, you know, one chapter would be on the Olympics
0:18:05.397,0:18:07.681
and the next chapter would be on sea-horses.
0:18:08.707,0:18:14.054
And it's that kind of jumping around -- we typically don't do that with textbooks anymore.
0:18:14.189,0:18:18.099
And yet when we turn students loose, a lot of times, that's what they decide to do.
0:18:19.584,0:18:22.829
So again, even though I had been giving them guidance, saying:
0:18:22.839,0:18:28.462
"Well, collect several bits of, you know, pieces of material, videos or podcasts
0:18:28.462,0:18:31.050
that are related to one another in some way,"
0:18:31.806,0:18:35.553
they wouldn't follow that advice, because it hadn't been done for them.
0:18:35.553,0:18:42.310
They were still kind of chasing around, looking for the spots that just seemed interesting.
0:18:44.428,0:18:49.208
OK. I think what I'll do is tell you what the
0:18:50.112,0:18:53.592
-- at a kind of the abstract level, what I came up with
0:18:53.592,0:18:56.469
about what the curator's role should be.
0:18:57.255,0:19:02.039
And again, this is specifically for this target audience,
0:19:02.039,0:19:05.950
but I think it can be tweaked and extended to other ones.
0:19:06.548,0:19:10.976
The first thing you have to do is collect the stuff: you want digital materials,
0:19:11.206,0:19:14.342
you want to organize them in some way:
0:19:15.278,0:19:18.059
mine are organized systematically, but you could do
0:19:18.250,0:19:21.119
-- you know, you could take news stories and do them chronologically.
0:19:22.972,0:19:28.712
You need to sequence them and this is where a lot of collections fall short.
0:19:28.732,0:19:32.150
They're just -- they're either randomly sequenced
0:19:32.470,0:19:34.180
or they're not sequenced at all.
0:19:34.751,0:19:40.448
And I think it is possible, as, you know, as the resident [check] expert, the teacher,
0:19:40.921,0:19:41.923
to be able to say:
0:19:41.923,0:19:48.039
"Here's a way to move so that the earlier ones might be a little bit easier to follow
0:19:48.549,0:19:53.496
and the later ones are better understood if you've done the earlier ones."
0:19:54.765,0:19:56.653
The fourth point there that
0:19:56.653,0:19:58.350
-- on the slide that Vance has --
0:19:58.350,0:20:01.791
is the hardest part of all of this,
0:20:02.563,0:20:07.479
and that is trying to get this material levelled in some way.
0:20:08.465,0:20:12.049
Wilfried Decoo in 2010 wrote a book, it's at the end
0:20:12.049,0:20:15.115
-- the reference is at the end of the slideshow here --
0:20:15.840,0:20:17.528
on systemization.
0:20:17.540,0:20:20.248
And it was kind of a return to the idea that
0:20:20.618,0:20:24.057
even if you're using authentic material,
0:20:24.057,0:20:27.410
and especially if you're trying to create course material yourself,
0:20:27.940,0:20:35.059
that you need to have a kind of natural development of that material
0:20:35.059,0:20:38.564
from, you know, easier at lower levels, to harder
0:20:38.949,0:20:43.671
and he went to the point of even talking about keeping databases
0:20:43.681,0:20:45.156
that were very finely tuned,
0:20:45.156,0:20:50.289
so you would be able to pull out lexical items and grammatical points and so on
0:20:50.289,0:20:54.224
in a scope and sequence that fit
0:20:54.224,0:20:56.640
what we thought we knew about language learning.
0:20:57.776,0:21:01.588
And you know his -- I think his perspective is
0:21:01.588,0:21:05.546
what I think is a reasonable one to bring up again,
0:21:05.592,0:21:11.317
because I think we are often not cognizant of the difference between
0:21:11.317,0:21:16.572
accessible and barely accessible and inaccessible materials,
0:21:16.572,0:21:19.549
especially now that students can go in and, you know,
0:21:19.549,0:21:27.174
get their first-language subtitles and transcripts for a lot of these materials
0:21:27.174,0:21:32.854
and then have the illusion that they are actually understanding the English, in this case,
0:21:34.115,0:21:38.173
and that they're building their English proficiency, where they --
0:21:38.173,0:21:44.132
-- they may be to some extent, but probably not to the extent that they think they are.
0:21:44.148,0:21:49.700
So there is the, you know, that idea of --
0:21:51.270,0:21:54.711
well, in Decoo's book of fine tuning material.
0:21:54.711,0:21:58.265
That doesn't work for me because at the levels I have,
0:21:58.265,0:22:01.301
first of all, I have mixed-level classes to some degree,
0:22:01.301,0:22:03.437
although they are all fairly advanced.
0:22:03.437,0:22:07.878
They come from different backgrounds, I don't know what they know going in.
0:22:08.570,0:22:13.225
So it's a little tricky to do it in the way that he likes.
0:22:13.640,0:22:19.266
But it still gave me the impetus to try and see if I could come up with something,
0:22:19.266,0:22:21.970
you know, I'll show you that in a bit.
0:22:22.555,0:22:27.901
So, the last part of that, then, once you can give at least some kind of level information,
0:22:27.901,0:22:34.435
is to go ahead and then present your pedagogical support,
0:22:34.435,0:22:36.066
whatever it might be.
0:22:36.850,0:22:44.765
This is fairly open-ended, I mean teachers can get -- and often do get -- into material
0:22:44.765,0:22:48.065
and they start stripping out what they think are key vocabulary,
0:22:48.065,0:22:52.777
they produce, you know, pre-listening activities,
0:22:52.777,0:22:56.745
they have post-listening activities,
0:22:56.745,0:22:58.151
they have discussion activities.
0:22:58.151,0:23:02.223
All these are great, but they're based kind of on a classroom model
0:23:02.223,0:23:06.587
and even more important: they take a lot of time away
0:23:06.587,0:23:11.287
from the job of collecting this material.
0:23:11.287,0:23:15.325
So if you put the hours into making full lessons,
0:23:15.535,0:23:20.659
you end up not having the time to even produce as much as I have,
0:23:20.679,0:23:23.019
which, as I mentioned, is not as much as I'd like.
0:23:23.984,0:23:30.364
OK, so that's the curator's role and then -- Vance, if you could go to the next slide.
0:23:32.632,0:23:33.708
Did we lose you?
0:23:33.990,0:23:36.493
>> Museum curator MC [check]: Hi Phil, I just wanted to add to something you--
0:23:36.493,0:23:37.298
>> Hubbard: Yes, go ahead
0:23:37.468,0:23:38.835
>> MC: Just because of my background:
0:23:38.835,0:23:42.315
I used to work in museums[br]>> Hubbard: Oh, fantastic
0:23:42.344,0:23:44.974
>> MC: in education and curation[br]>> Hubbard: A real curator!
0:23:44.992,0:23:49.311
>> MC: Yeah. Just one other item I would add to the list
0:23:49.311,0:23:53.027
and I made a note of it in the chat section
0:23:53.027,0:23:57.493
and that's the -- often without knowing it we're making assumptions about our audience.
0:23:58.108,0:24:01.898
>> Hubbard: Ah![br]>> MC: When we're selecting things,
0:24:02.271,0:24:08.871
whether they be objects for display or -- like in the museums -- or
0:24:08.871,0:24:12.502
objects for presentations to students, we're often unknowingly making assumptions
0:24:14.807,0:24:19.404
and I think it's a really important thing to know, to challenge ourselves
0:24:19.404,0:24:24.169
about the assumptions we're making in making those selections, those choices, as experts.
0:24:25.059,0:24:27.409
>> Hubbard: Yeah, I mean that's a very good point
0:24:27.422,0:24:34.204
and I have to -- as individuals, the students always change in my classes.
0:24:34.706,0:24:38.776
As a group, you know, I get to know the group better.
0:24:38.776,0:24:41.911
So I think, in this very targeted group, I can --
0:24:42.215,0:24:47.501
I can come up with at least, initially, some likely ones,
0:24:47.721,0:24:51.349
but I do in fact ask them for feedback on --
0:24:52.248,0:24:56.428
Well, first of all, I give them choices and then I ask them for feedback
0:24:56.450,0:25:01.795
both on, you know, what they chose and why, of the ones I selected for them,
0:25:01.795,0:25:05.816
and also what else they might like to see.
0:25:06.712,0:25:09.048
So it becomes a little bit od a dialog,
0:25:09.063,0:25:13.252
and that could be even more of a dialog, you know, if you have --
0:25:13.559,0:25:17.375
the way my class is structured, again, because it's so small,
0:25:17.388,0:25:23.568
we do a lot both within class discussion and with the individual tutorials.
0:25:23.568,0:25:28.335
But if you got a larger class and you got a discussion board or a wiki or something like that
0:25:28.335,0:25:32.402
where, you know, students can -- can chime in more regularly,
0:25:32.402,0:25:35.071
then you could get some information.
0:25:35.071,0:25:42.596
I also haven't formally surveyed them, so that would be useful too. I --
0:25:42.596,0:25:46.832
>> MC: You're inviting their feedback to inform --[br]>> Hubbard: Very much so. Yeah.
0:25:46.832,0:25:49.637
>> MC: Yeah --[br]>> Hubbard: But not as richly as I could.
0:25:49.637,0:25:54.600
So one idea I had was that, you know, like you've seen probably in museums,
0:25:56.450,0:26:02.146
sometimes they have the displays but they'll also have, you know,
0:26:02.155,0:26:04.710
places where people can, you know, write cards
0:26:04.710,0:26:08.744
and make suggestions and say things and drop those off
0:26:08.744,0:26:15.303
and I think, probably increasingly, we'll see museum displays
0:26:15.303,0:26:24.598
where the, you know, the viewers' thoughts are right up there and accessible to other viewers
0:26:24.598,0:26:26.875
when they go to look at the material.
0:26:27.765,0:26:36.956
So I think you're making a really good point and, you know, this is the --
0:26:37.755,0:26:42.788
figuring out exactly the role of the students who are still kind of developing,
0:26:42.788,0:26:48.598
you want to meet them half way but you also, in the curation model, I think,
0:26:48.598,0:26:52.490
want to be careful about the difference between curation and crowdsourcing,
0:26:53.520,0:26:56.068
because I've had students come up with some materials
0:26:56.068,0:26:57.755
that they thought were really exciting,
0:26:58.109,0:26:58.359
but when I looked at it, I could see what the problems were in terms of the --
0:27:04.248,0:27:07.042
the use of it by other students.
0:27:08.155,0:27:10.749
>> MC: Now I take your point: it's you acting as the filter.
0:27:10.959,0:27:12.484
>> MC: and finding --[br]>> Hubbard: Yeah, and that's --
0:27:12.511,0:27:16.946
and again that's -- and again that's the -- this is the kind of, to me, this the curation model.
0:27:17.354,0:27:19.426
>> MC: Yeah[br]>> Hubbard: The crowdsourcing model
0:27:19.426,0:27:21.852
is a great model too, it's just a different model
0:27:21.852,0:27:24.981
and it may work better in some cases.
0:27:24.981,0:27:28.426
Of course it also depends on, you know,
0:27:28.426,0:27:32.788
I've been to museums that I didn't think were very well run, were very well organized
0:27:32.791,0:27:34.046
or were confusing.
0:27:34.046,0:27:34.851
So --[br]>> MC: Yeah.
0:27:34.851,0:27:37.056
>> Hubbard: as soon as you have the human expert coming in,
0:27:37.405,0:27:40.693
they may not be as much of an expert as they think they are.
0:27:41.178,0:27:44.180
That's probably true of me, in fact.[br]>> MC: Yeah, and there are lots of people [check]
0:27:44.180,0:27:47.537
a lot of examples of museums, because I'm into curating things
0:27:48.783,0:27:54.622
and then I'm finding out that the interpretations that they were expecting audiences to have
0:27:54.622,0:27:56.452
were completely off-base.
0:27:56.721,0:27:58.624
>> Hubbard: Yeah.[br]>> MC: I think that's a good example
0:27:58.624,0:28:05.901
of big money going into these exhibitions and then being interpreted in a completely unexpected --
0:28:05.901,0:28:09.318
>> Hubbard: Yeah, well, the good news here is, I have no big money.
0:28:09.318,0:28:13.184
I mostly have no money at all for this. So -- [he laughs]
0:28:13.660,0:28:18.035
It's also, the nice thing is, you know, compared to the museum,
0:28:18.035,0:28:23.779
where you have all of these Unkosten [? check] to putting the material in,
0:28:24.025,0:28:26.063
once you have something, you start a web page:
0:28:26.063,0:28:34.435
if it is a disaster, or if it needs to be tweaked or significantly changed,
0:28:34.435,0:28:38.265
it's possible to do that just by finding a little bit of time.
0:28:40.726,0:28:44.331
[MC and Hubbard overlap][br]>> MC It's just [missed words check]
0:28:44.331,0:28:48.094
There's even an opportunity, actually, in, as an expert,
0:28:48.094,0:28:52.110
putting together a series of well-chosen articles
0:28:52.110,0:28:57.165
and then inviting students to assemble them and put them into a -- into an order or sequence,
0:28:57.165,0:29:01.309
and to try and explain the rationale that they've used,
0:29:01.309,0:29:03.255
what connections they've seen in the works.
0:29:03.255,0:29:05.960
It's just another angle to it I sure would --
0:29:05.960,0:29:08.911
>> Hubbard: No, it's a very good angle and in fact, you know,
0:29:08.911,0:29:16.363
as I've moved through stages in probably about 15 years of teaching this course,
0:29:16.363,0:29:23.279
I've tried to give students more independence but also to give them guidance in that independence
0:29:23.279,0:29:28.371
and one of the -- what I hope I'm doing with the material I have,
0:29:28.371,0:29:30.667
I do show them how I put it together.
0:29:30.667,0:29:34.766
And I hope I'm, you know, kind of modeling curation for them as well.
0:29:35.627,0:29:41.664
The idea of getting them to maybe do a little curated piece of their own,
0:29:42.771,0:29:45.914
that could be an interesting final project for the course.
0:29:45.914,0:29:48.982
I will be revisiting it again in Spring.
0:29:49.658,0:29:52.731
I'll be away from it in Winter quarter here
0:29:52.731,0:29:54.677
because we have -- we teach 10-week quarters.
0:29:55.677,0:29:59.355
But that's a possibility for Spring, actually.
0:29:59.355,0:30:04.231
It could also greatly enrich the collection of material that's available to other students.
0:30:04.231,0:30:08.111
Again, as long as I'm there to be a kind of a filter,
0:30:08.111,0:30:10.566
rather than just releasing these into the wild.
0:30:11.504,0:30:14.813
Or if I do release them, you know, making sure that students know the difference
0:30:14.813,0:30:18.486
between ones that are student-produced and the once that I produced
0:30:18.486,0:30:21.756
and why, you know, I did mine one way.
0:30:21.756,0:30:26.381
Then they can -- they can judge to some extent, you know,
0:30:26.381,0:30:32.144
whether they think the rationale used by their peers, you know, was useful for them.
0:30:32.144,0:30:35.683
So, that's a nice idea, I'm making a note of that.
0:30:40.174,0:30:42.468
OK, shall I move on?
0:30:42.468,0:30:48.754
>> [Stevens? check] Yeah. I'm aware of a podcast - there's the slide on I'm talking --
0:30:48.754,0:30:50.669
>> Hubbard: Yeah, thanks[br][they laugh]
0:30:50.669,0:30:56.384
>> Stevens (?): I listened to a podcast where some educators had gone to Europe,
0:30:56.384,0:30:59.005
probably on a junket but ostensibly[br][Hubbard laughs]
0:30:59.005,0:31:01.594
>> Stevens: to visit museums and find out, you know,
0:31:01.594,0:31:05.349
especially ones that had audience attract--
0:31:05.349,0:31:09.204
you know, the idea was that museums, people didn't have to go there,
0:31:09.204,0:31:10.380
they have to attract people.
0:31:10.380,0:31:13.986
So what do they do to attract the people, as opposed to schools?
0:31:13.986,0:31:17.841
And then, how can we design our classroom environment
0:31:17.841,0:31:19.294
so it's more like a museum?
0:31:19.294,0:31:23.631
So that was actually a serious project and I'll never remember --
0:31:23.631,0:31:30.044
I'll never forget how to get it back, but maybe I will tell you in Portmont [check].
0:31:30.044,0:31:32.599
>> Hubbard: Ah OK? So that was good.
0:31:33.080,0:31:38.012
Yeah, so Vance has put up the slide that I wanted to make a point of here,
0:31:38.012,0:31:41.871
because there are a couple of things that are important about this slide, I think.
0:31:42.563,0:31:45.804
The first is, even though these are just little bullet points,
0:31:45.804,0:31:51.668
that actually took me a while to kind of figure this out, maybe because I'm slow, but --
0:31:52.298,0:31:54.842
Oop, Vance, I lost the slide.[br]>> Stevens: it is here again? >> Hubbard: thanks.
0:31:58.025,0:32:01.920
Because of all the other distractions I have
0:32:03.381,0:32:10.931
and because of other elements of where I am and what the -- sort of the visibility,
0:32:11.300,0:32:18.985
the first thing I have to make sure is that anything that I curate is actually legally available.
0:32:20.969,0:32:26.269
And a certain amount of stuff that I had used years before, even in my own class,
0:32:27.238,0:32:32.877
I wasn't quite so sure about what the legality was, I think, in the early days of the internet.
0:32:33.861,0:32:38.880
Even now with YouTube I try to be careful about making sure that
0:32:38.880,0:32:43.133
what I've found is something that whoever put it up either has the right to
0:32:43.133,0:32:45.597
or they're reposting something that is --
0:32:45.597,0:32:50.785
that's already got a Creative Commons license or something like that.
0:32:51.166,0:32:55.123
So, especially for something I'm going to put some time into here,
0:32:55.123,0:32:59.430
I want to make sure that what I've got is something I can use.
0:32:59.430,0:33:01.621
I also always want to make it freely available
0:33:01.621,0:33:05.464
because my students have friends back in their home countries
0:33:05.464,0:33:10.798
and they have even colleagues here who don't end up taking my class
0:33:11.644,0:33:17.455
and I have colleagues that are interested in using some of the material I do,
0:33:17.455,0:33:23.949
so everything I do in this kind of a project, I try to make sure it's freely available on the Web.
0:33:24.769,0:33:29.036
Vance, we lost the slide again, or at least I did.[br][incomprehensible metallic voice - check]
0:33:29.036,0:33:32.712
>> Hubbard: Oh wait, is this Halima saying something? Uh, you know--
0:33:32.712,0:33:37.752
>> Stevens: No, Halima is unmuting herself as soon as she comes into the chat.
0:33:37.752,0:33:41.633
So I'm going to have to -- Halima, can you mute your microphone?
0:33:42.571,0:33:44.194
Because it's causing feedback.
0:33:45.009,0:33:50.652
And I hope you can figure that out, and meanwhile we put this back.
0:33:50.667,0:33:54.120
Is it back yet [missed words check] Phil?[br]>> Hubbard: Yeah, that's great. >> Vance: OK
0:33:55.012,0:33:59.666
>> Hubbard: Yeah, so the "freely and legally available" is an important quality
0:33:59.666,0:34:03.582
and you know, TED talks obviously are ideal for that.
0:34:04.458,0:34:06.373
They're likely to be interesting.
0:34:06.373,0:34:09.829
Again that's something -- oops, lost the slide again,
0:34:10.705,0:34:12.604
but I'll just go ahead and walk through these.
0:34:13.050,0:34:19.808
"Likely to be interesting", I guess that connects to a previous commentary [laughs]
0:34:19.808,0:34:22.506
that we don't always know what students think are interesting,
0:34:23.429,0:34:25.675
but I try to pick things that I think are,
0:34:25.675,0:34:29.839
you know, have a good chance of being interesting for the students.
0:34:31.639,0:34:37.032
The good technical quality: there is a lot of stuff, obviously,
0:34:37.032,0:34:44.375
available on the Web that's not, that's interesting and freely and legally available,
0:34:45.328,0:34:51.656
but the technical quality is such that it may be less ideal for language learning.
0:34:53.254,0:34:57.517
We're getting better at that now, certainly, than in the old days,
0:34:57.517,0:35:04.043
but when - when you're looking for material, if it's been overly compressed,
0:35:04.043,0:35:07.392
or it was done with devices that weren't that good in the first place,
0:35:08.607,0:35:13.418
it doesn't necessarily lend itself as well for language learning.
0:35:13.956,0:35:18.189
Stability is a really important point, because I don't want to do this
0:35:18.804,0:35:24.400
and then find out what I did is not available the next time I teach the class,
0:35:24.400,0:35:26.253
or even the next week.
0:35:26.729,0:35:32.188
So again, finding material that has -- either has been up for a while
0:35:32.188,0:35:35.562
or that you know is going to continue to be up for a while.
0:35:36.522,0:35:41.262
The 5th one is a -- you know, people have different views of this,
0:35:41.262,0:35:47.670
but because I'm so tied in with vocabulary development along with comprehension,
0:35:48.546,0:35:55.584
to me it's critical to have captions at least -- [coughs] excuse me, losing my voice here --
0:35:58.333,0:36:03.074
to have captions at least and ideally, to have transcripts.
0:36:03.074,0:36:08.933
And one of the reasons for transcripts is to be able to try to use some material
0:36:09.609,0:36:12.837
which I'll show you in a moment here some of you are probably familiar with:
0:36:12.837,0:36:16.182
the vocabulary profile from lextutor.
0:36:16.766,0:36:22.106
By using -- by dumping the transcript into that, you can get an idea of levelling.
0:36:23.749,0:36:25.525
And if you don't have a transcript,
0:36:25.525,0:36:29.821
then you have to kind of use just intuitive feels for what's the level.
0:36:29.821,0:36:34.194
Then I've personally seen some pretty significant problems with that.
0:36:35.058,0:36:37.755
I may mention one towards the end here
0:36:37.755,0:36:42.397
when I get to some of the alternative sites I know that already exist for this.
0:36:43.182,0:36:45.411
And then ideally, if you can find complem --
0:36:45.411,0:36:47.341
something that has complementary materials.
0:36:47.694,0:36:51.930
Again, in the case of TED talks, you've got materials that are --
0:36:52.837,0:36:59.487
you have a brief summary of whatever the talk is, right there available,
0:36:59.487,0:37:02.246
you don't have to create it as the curator,
0:37:02.246,0:37:06.463
you've got the bio of the speaker, which is good background information,
0:37:06.939,0:37:11.979
and in some cases you even have -- I think, what do they call it, TED Ed or something --
0:37:11.979,0:37:17.160
there are some TED talks that even have some additional material that --
0:37:17.160,0:37:22.277
that people have added to them, in the way of discussion questions and things like that.
0:37:23.015,0:37:28.138
TED's not as rich as, say, you know, if you're doing a newscast for example,
0:37:28.138,0:37:34.395
and you might have several written forms of the same news story
0:37:34.395,0:37:35.910
that you can use for back up:
0:37:35.910,0:37:37.363
it's not quite as rich as that,
0:37:37.363,0:37:44.202
but it's still pretty good with giving you some of these complementary materials, besides the video itself.
0:37:46.786,0:37:50.293
OK. You want to move on to the next --
0:37:51.984,0:37:54.729
>> Hubbard: Actually, it's probably the next couple of slides[br]>> Stevens: Yeah.
0:37:54.729,0:37:56.136
>> Hubbard: does someone have a question?
0:37:56.689,0:38:04.026
>> Stevens [check]: Yes, Peggy George has asked questions in the text chat, the Etherpad one.
0:38:04.795,0:38:06.710
Let's see, I can -- she asks:
0:38:06.710,0:38:10.976
"Are your students able to share your curated content with others outside the course?"
0:38:10.976,0:38:15.266
>> Hubbard: Yes. Yes, som you'll see the --
0:38:15.266,0:38:20.397
in fact I think it comes up here on the next slide or couple of slides.
0:38:20.397,0:38:25.352
Actually the next slide, if you go to the next slide, let me talk briefly about that,
0:38:25.352,0:38:30.531
because it does have to do with the sharing.[br]>> Stevens: Mmm - OK
0:38:30.924,0:38:36.351
>> Hubbard: So that the link there is to the advanced listening website
0:38:36.351,0:38:39.045
and you'll see, you know, quite a bit of material there,
0:38:39.045,0:38:40.506
not just the TED talks.
0:38:41.223,0:38:45.365
The link - the specific link to the curated TED talks is a couple of slides from here
0:38:45.365,0:38:52.346
but those are -- those themselves are legally and freely available.
0:38:52.346,0:38:55.430
They're my websites, they are on the Stanford server:
0:38:55.430,0:39:01.159
Stanford is not going away any time soon, as far as I know I'm not going away any time soon.
0:39:01.635,0:39:06.380
So those are not only, you know, available on the World Wide Web,
0:39:06.380,0:39:11.226
unless you happen to be from a country that is for some reason blocking access to Stanford:
0:39:11.702,0:39:14.114
that has happened a few times in the past.
0:39:16.201,0:39:19.125
But if not, then you can get to that material
0:39:19.125,0:39:23.420
and all it does is jump out to the TED talks themselves
0:39:23.420,0:39:26.641
and the TED talks again are, you know, freely available.
0:39:27.317,0:39:31.073
I noticed in one of the preliminary discussions
0:39:31.073,0:39:38.663
that somebody had put in some comments, before this began, on the learning2gether site,
0:39:38.663,0:39:45.799
and mentioned YouTube videos, and YouTube videos are certainly a great resource,
0:39:46.460,0:39:52.745
most of my students are from China and most of them, then, unless things have changed,
0:39:53.130,0:39:57.879
can't freely and legally get the YouTube videos there.
0:39:58.491,0:40:03.737
And so for that reason I try to -- I don't avoid YouTube
0:40:03.737,0:40:07.812
but I try to limit it and I like to make the curated collections
0:40:07.812,0:40:14.174
something that my students will be able to use and their friends will be able to use.
0:40:17.771,0:40:19.946
OK. Any other questions?
0:40:21.019,0:40:26.865
Uh, so, yeah, so they are available and when I -- just so you know --
0:40:26.880,0:40:35.245
when I redo the course every quarter, that URL there stays the same, the material is new.
0:40:35.829,0:40:38.552
Well, most of it is old actually, but I do update it
0:40:38.552,0:40:41.418
sometimes because I come up with other ideas
0:40:41.418,0:40:45.627
and sometimes because some of my other class material disappears.
0:40:47.119,0:40:52.874
But the home page of that each quarter has the link to the previous quarter's materials,
0:40:52.874,0:40:58.528
so you can actually step back from quarter to quarter and go back.
0:40:58.528,0:41:04.268
I never throw anything away on the Web, so it's probably got stuff from 5 years ago
0:41:04.268,0:41:09.394
if you keep clicking back through the previous quarters' material.
0:41:09.978,0:41:16.009
So you can see what it was like in the past ["without"? check] sort of my own Internet Archive.
0:41:18.248,0:41:24.538
OK. The way that I did this material, let me move on to the --
0:41:25.760,0:41:27.536
Well, I guess on this slide,
0:41:28.243,0:41:35.087
the problems that my students have, typically, fall into issues with speech rate:
0:41:35.579,0:41:38.483
some of the TED talks are too fast.
0:41:38.483,0:41:43.486
It doesn't mean they can't, you know, use top-down skills to understand the basic content,
0:41:43.486,0:41:46.852
but that's not necessarily going to help them drive their --
0:41:46.852,0:41:54.129
either their listening proficiency, you know, their ability to process English, automatize it,
0:41:54.129,0:42:00.709
or their ability to pick out the vocabulary that they don't understand or --
0:42:00.709,0:42:05.666
even more interesting is the vocabulary they sort of understand or partially understand,
0:42:05.666,0:42:11.833
but they just can't get to it, they can't access it in the time with a faster speaker.
0:42:11.833,0:42:16.700
And there are others in my class, actually, that do OK with some of the faster speakers,
0:42:16.700,0:42:20.215
but just having knowledge of the speech rate is useful.
0:42:21.552,0:42:28.016
Preliminary knowledge of the accent: just a -- since in some cases we have students
0:42:28.016,0:42:33.663
that are having particular difficulties with particular accents, often of their professors,
0:42:34.647,0:42:39.950
and they may actually be doing a project where they're trying to focus on that accent.
0:42:40.690,0:42:45.640
And so in that case, knowing more about the accent is helpful.
0:42:45.640,0:42:50.886
And others are really trying to -- I wouldn't say "master",
0:42:50.886,0:42:59.161
but at least becoming -- become more proficient with the North American accent
0:42:59.161,0:43:04.149
because they plan on not only doing their graduate work here, but staying a few years afterwards.
0:43:04.149,0:43:10.060
It's a very common professional track for our students whether at the Master's or the Ph.D. level, to --
0:43:11.981,0:43:15.330
because so many of them are in technology, they want to hang around Silicon Valley
0:43:15.330,0:43:18.683
as much as the can after they, after the graduate.
0:43:20.223,0:43:23.411
OK. If you could go to the next slide, Vance?
0:43:26.865,0:43:30.330
>> Stevens: OK I might [br][both overlap]
0:43:30.330,0:43:35.744
>> Stevens: You mentioned Claude Almansi's contribution to the wiki earlier
0:43:35.744,0:43:45.113
and one thing that she said -- she left this on the Google+ page as well:
0:43:45.113,0:43:50.068
I post this to several pages.[br]Let me just get rid of that slide for a second.
0:43:50.068,0:43:53.922
I see I can do that by clicking off the screen share for a second, OK?
0:43:53.922,0:43:58.394
Well, anyway. She does work in closed captioning,
0:43:58.394,0:44:01.842
she does a lot of very interesting work relating to MOOCs [check] where she is.
0:44:01.842,0:44:08.343
And one of the suggestions she made -- I didn't know this, but maybe you did already,
0:44:08.343,0:44:16.991
but you can -- she said you can, if you get the MP4, if you get an MP4 of a YouTube video,
0:44:16.991,0:44:20.436
you can then load it into Audacity -- I didn't know that --
0:44:20.436,0:44:29.521
and then you can adjust the rate of speech there, without causing any chipmunk effects.
0:44:30.182,0:44:31.928
>> Hubbard: Mmm.[br]>> Stevens: I thought that was kind of neat.
0:44:31.928,0:44:34.138
Sounds like useful information?
0:44:34.859,0:44:45.063
>> Hubbard: Yeah, that's -- again, there are lots of things you can do to go more deeply into this stuff.
0:44:45.601,0:44:52.019
I -- one of the things I do with TED talks is, you can also download TED talks and you can --
0:44:52.711,0:44:58.337
even if you put them into something, well I use the VLC player,
0:44:58.337,0:45:03.383
because the speech rate slider is right on the top,
0:45:03.383,0:45:08.938
it's much easier to get at than it is in QuickTime or in Windows Media Player.
0:45:08.938,0:45:12.050
I like the VLC player for other reasons, in fact.
0:45:12.495,0:45:20.027
But, you know, once you have downloaded you can use the VLC player to --
0:45:21.532,0:45:24.048
for the most part you don't really get the chipmunk effect
0:45:25.032,0:45:29.930
because it's trying to expand the time domain without changing the frequencies,
0:45:29.930,0:45:34.590
it's not like the old days with LP's and cassette tapes
0:45:34.590,0:45:38.253
where time and frequency were connected to one another.
0:45:38.253,0:45:41.161
Digitally, you can isolate those.
0:45:42.037,0:45:47.079
What we found is that if you slow somebody down to about 80%,
0:45:47.079,0:45:54.181
you can get a lot more processing time and it still sounds natural as long as you have good material.
0:45:55.011,0:45:58.228
If you have material that's already been compressed too much,
0:45:58.228,0:46:04.109
then those compression artefacts become stronger if you try to slow it down.
0:46:04.515,0:46:08.955
Occasionally, we get people that my students want to speed up
0:46:08.955,0:46:13.164
but most of the time, for language learning processes, we're talking about slowing it down.
0:46:14.040,0:46:21.178
So it's -- using, changing speech rate, that's a whole different talk,
0:46:21.178,0:46:31.456
but it's, I think, a very underused functionality and something that students sometimes baulk from
0:46:31.456,0:46:41.000
but we have some research evidence that it's helpful when the students have control over it.
0:46:41.753,0:46:44.627
Anyway, I don't want to diverge too much on that, but that's a --
0:46:44.627,0:46:47.232
I do encourage everybody to read that post
0:46:47.232,0:46:51.981
and see in more detail what some of the options are for doing that.
0:46:53.580,0:47:00.362
In fact, one of the -- one of the problems with using the VLC player with those is,
0:47:00.362,0:47:09.049
if you -- if you do try to slow down the speech rate by downloading it and putting it in the VLC player,
0:47:09.064,0:47:12.298
you actually move the subtitles, because the subtitle feature --
0:47:13.159,0:47:20.899
the captioning feature in the TED website is built into the website, it's not built into the video.
0:47:20.899,0:47:26.627
And so you would need to do some additional captioning if you want to do that.
0:47:27.481,0:47:34.506
My -- if your goal is general comprehension and you've got decent material,
0:47:35.044,0:47:41.312
then I'm a fan of using the Google beta transcription.
0:47:43.695,0:47:46.604
Even with good material, it makes a lot of mistakes
0:47:46.604,0:47:50.136
and with material which, you know, isn't really, really clear,
0:47:50.136,0:47:53.500
either because the speaker wasn't clear, or because the signal wasn't clear,
0:47:53.500,0:47:54.853
it makes a lot more mistakes.
0:47:55.307,0:47:59.597
And in my case, when I'm trying to have students use it for vocabulary development,
0:48:00.166,0:48:05.289
if it's got -- if it picks the wrong word, then they're going to be learning something pretty weird.
0:48:05.289,0:48:07.970
And it does that all the time.
0:48:08.624,0:48:15.242
If you change that and, you know, get around to Google Translate, to get first-language captions,
0:48:15.242,0:48:18.662
you just accentuate the error rate.
0:48:19.431,0:48:22.725
So again, it really depends on what the goal is.
0:48:22.725,0:48:29.445
If the goal is letting students watch a video for cultural and general content information,
0:48:29.983,0:48:32.884
maybe to trigger classroom discussions, things like that,
0:48:32.884,0:48:38.693
then using the automated captions is not a bad idea
0:48:38.693,0:48:44.726
and being able to slow down is not necessarily -- is, well, I think a good idea.
0:48:46.620,0:48:50.587
So again, it depends on what the goals are, but you have to be careful,
0:48:50.587,0:48:54.117
because the Google beta, there is a reason why they keep calling it beta,
0:48:54.117,0:48:57.572
it's because it's pretty error-prone.
0:48:58.418,0:49:00.464
It's getting better but it's not there yet.
0:49:01.362,0:49:04.721
And if students think it's an accurate rendition
0:49:04.721,0:49:06.328
that's going to be even more difficult.
0:49:06.328,0:49:12.756
If you do use the automated captions then the students need to be prepared for --
0:49:13.463,0:49:16.414
you know, to be able to recognize when something doesn't make sense.
0:49:17.090,0:49:19.737
It's usually -- it's a very obvious semantic issue
0:49:19.737,0:49:21.506
with the words they pick.
0:49:24.072,0:49:28.859
OK. One other thing, I don't remember if it was in that post or another one but
0:49:28.859,0:49:36.097
something I hadn't noticed before someone mentioned that there is a slight delay
0:49:36.097,0:49:39.881
in the synchronization of the captions in TED
0:49:40.296,0:49:43.649
compared to the system that they were suggesting.
0:49:44.163,0:49:48.985
So, uh, that's something else to take into account.
0:49:48.985,0:49:54.082
You might, If that delay seems to be an issue for you or your students, then --
0:49:56.773,0:50:00.845
it's something that I plan to explore because I hadn't noticed that before.
0:50:01.850,0:50:05.785
Okay, a little bit about how I finally figured out to do this,
0:50:05.785,0:50:09.164
which is not the way I would recommend doing it now necessarily
0:50:09.917,0:50:17.277
But this is how I started working on this. When I did it I guess it was Spring of 2011.
0:50:18.184,0:50:27.345
The first thing was to...oh no, it wasn't Spring: Fall of 2011.
0:50:27.773,0:50:30.717
The first thing to do is to get the TED database.
0:50:30.717,0:50:35.492
It turns out you can get an excel spreadsheet that has all of the Ted talks on it.
0:50:35.492,0:50:39.395
If you go to their website you can see that there's a link for that.
0:50:40.176,0:50:45.474
And the nice thing about that is that you can skim that a whole lot more easily
0:50:45.474,0:50:47.624
than you can skim other material
0:50:47.624,0:50:55.086
and you can also look, among other things, it tells you what the length of the talk is.
0:50:55.086,0:51:04.124
And most Ted talks are around 18 minutes and most students attention focus ability is less.
0:51:06.981,0:51:17.365
Um, okay, the database then, when I did it myself,
0:51:17.365,0:51:19.865
it was smaller for one thing, at that point.
0:51:19.865,0:51:24.829
But I did sort of skim it and looked for ideas, looked for themes
0:51:25.490,0:51:27.343
and searched for keywords.
0:51:27.343,0:51:30.100
So creativity was one of the first ones I did,
0:51:30.100,0:51:34.022
so I was just able to search for anything that had creativity
0:51:34.022,0:51:37.467
either in its description or in its title.
0:51:38.467,0:51:43.295
I put together a list of candidates within that.
0:51:43.295,0:51:48.094
I was looking for four or five talks to make a kind of a cluster,
0:51:48.094,0:51:52.217
a sort of a virtual room in the museum if you will.
0:51:53.317,0:52:01.441
And for each of those, I -- well, first of all, I did listen to the accent and got that. (52:01)
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I wanted to get at least a proxy for the speech speed
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and so -- the speech rate.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So I just took the transcript, dumped it into Word
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so that I got a word count, divided that and came up with words per minute.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I was actually quite surprised at the range that I could see there.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If you go to the website for cre-- the link for "creativity"
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
on my ted1 website of the curated talks there,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the slowest speech rate is like 91 words a minute.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Some of that is because there are pictures being shown in between
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but it still means you got a lot more time to process the language coming in
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
than if you got somebody coming in at -- at a higher rate.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Some of my students do a --
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
there's a website at Stanford called "Entrepreneurship corner"
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and they have a lot of Silicon Valley types come in
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and give talks on campus.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They also have transcripts and subtitles for that
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and one of the talks that I always have the students try
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
is Marissa Mayer who, at the time she gave the talk, was a VP for Google
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but is now the CEO of Yahoo!.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And she talks between 220 and 237 words a minute on the one I have,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so I use her as an example of where you might try to use the speech rate shift
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and be able to use the slider to slow her down to 80%.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
OK. The next thing, once I have that rough speed --
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and again, it's just a rough speed, but it's better than not using technology
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and try just to use intuition about "This is too fast, this is too slow."
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The vocabulary profiler -- this is Tom Cobb's work of genius in my opinion.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
There are a lot of parts to that lextutor.ca site,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but the one that I use for this purpose is the --
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
well, at the time, was the British National Corpus profiler
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and there is the link to it there.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Basically, you dump a text, a transcript into it
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and it gives you as output all the words divided into 1'000 verbal frequency bands,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so, you know, which words are in the first thousand words of English,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the second thousand words of English, and so on,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
all the way up to the 20'000 level.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
For my students, we try to focus more on the, you know, just doing a short --
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
well, we -- I try to get them to focus more around the 5'000 level,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so anything below that that they don't know,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it means it's a word that they should learn.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And when you go to my site, you can see how that's split up.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I skim the transcript for unusual terms and idioms --
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Oh, I meant to mention: in the last few weeks,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Tom has actually added the Coca, it's a contemporary corpus of American English
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and blended those in,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
so it now goes up to the 25'000 level.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And it has much more American English in it now,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
rather than just the British.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So, for those of you who like, you know, concordancing
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and corpus studying, study and so on,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it's got a much richer layering out than it did when I was using it for this purpose.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
OK. So that's the process.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now I said, you know, I would do it a little bit differently, probably.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It turns out that, since the time I began this and now,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
TED has come up with its own curated collections.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And so, if you go to the TED website,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you will see a link to something called "playlists"
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and these are collections of material that people have put together.
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
In some cases, it's done by TED itself,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
you know, whoever is in the background working there,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but they also have curated collections by Bill Gates and Bono
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and, you know, other famous folks,
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
or in some cases, they're people who are less famous
9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but, you know, are very well-known within their, you know, their more restricted field. (56:34)