Learning2gether with Phil Hubbard, Curation in CALL and TED Talk videos

Learning2gether with Phil Hubbard, Curation in CALL and TED Talk videos

>> 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 --

>> Stevens: 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 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 probably get a better 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:

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, 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 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. [20:56]