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ONE IS TEMPTED to categorize language-learning technology in terms of the first, second, or nth generation, on the basis of some crucial breakthrough that would supposedly distinguish each level from the next. Such classifying is not without its pitfalls, however. In discussion of so-called fifth-generation computers, for example, there is no real consensus on their being in fact “fifth,” or, for that matter, on what generation we are in at the moment. And the question probably will not be settled until we have had time to establish a certain psychic distance from what we are now doing. That said, one nevertheless cannot help feeling that we have just crossed over into a new generation in the creation of language-learning materials, one that might be called the Age of Hypermedia.
The concept of hypermedia can be traced to the computer visionary Theodor Nelson, who at least twenty years ago sketched out a new way of reading or interacting with text. This system, which he calls “hypertext,” allows readers to select a segment of text on the screen and cause it to zoom to a footnote, a translation, bibliographical data, or some other related text or graphics. (On a superficial level, at least, such interaction with the screen is now commonplace, thanks to the development of the “mouse” and the convention of clicking on icons on the screen to make things happen.) Nonsequential links between one document and another, or between one footnote and another, allow users to follow trails in any direction without losing their original context. Thus each reader in effect creates a new document by chaining together fragments of text in a novel fashion. For three thousand years, says Nelson, we have been reading text from top to bottom; “[s]uddenly we find that it doesn't have to be that way” (qtd. in Markoff 3).
What a hypermedia system adds to this point-click-and-zoom environment is access to other media: audio, video, graphics, and animation—in other words, hypertext with sound and pictures. Such a system considerably alters our notion of the “text.” In the same way that Nelson's hypertext could zoom open to reveal its inner secrets (by linking to other, related text), hypermedia can open windows and take the “reader” out into the world. To get a sense of the power of such a system, read the following Spanish sentence about churros and imagine that touching any of the boldface words would cause a color picture to appear on a screen before you:
El churro es un tipo de pasta que se come con una taza de chocolate espeso.
Hypermedia gives the student power over the medium: the power to explore a body of information without being constrained by the author's view of how it all fits together, the power to follow an idea as far as one's imagination, and the medium, will allow. In one experimental geography program, clicking on any point on a world map displayed on the computer screen invokes a full-color video image of that corner of the world (Liebhold). The user can also “fly” over the map while the video monitor follows along with a continuous color view of what one would see from a satellite overhead. Or the program can be used as a data base: the user types in the name of a country, city, river, or mountain, and it is then outlined on the map at the same time a corresponding color photograph appears on the video screen.
Interactive video is of course hardly new to our profession. Pioneering efforts such as the Spanish Montevidisco project at Brigham Young University, which gave the student an opportunity to “move around” in a Mexican village and interact with its residents (see Gale), and more recent materials such as those that have been developed by and for United States military academies have demonstrated the impact of using level 3 video as a language-learning experience. 1 What distinguishes these projects from simple linear, that is, top-to-bottom, video is a wealth of modes of access into the material. The student uses the computer keyboard to control the flow of the images; to back up and repeat (or jump ahead and skip); to ask for subtitles or key words to be superimposed on the screen; to consult help screens, comprehension questions, or translations. Some foreign language video series even offer students the option of listening to a second audio track containing a more deliberately pronounced and noise-free version of the dialogue, to help them sort out speech sounds that may be muffled or drowned out by the real-life din of the original.
Interactive video of this sort is a rich source of linguistic and cultural input. It is also, unfortunately, extremely expensive. To plan, script, and film on location a course-long series of new footage, edit it, and finally have it pressed into videodisc format could easily cost the developers $250,000. Hence the understandable interest in what has come to be known somewhat awkwardly as “repurposing” video: using existing images as part of a new medium offering a different type of access from that which is available in the original. As more and more foreign language material becomes available in videodisc format (or in CD-ROM, an equally attractive if still somewhat unexplored medium for interactive video), an increasing number of video-access or “front-end” systems will appear on the market. In fact, it would be reasonable to expect foreign language film and video distributors to begin offering their customers such software along with the videodiscs.
Where will such front-end programs come from? Some of them will be developed by commercial software firms that may or may not have access to language-teaching expertise. Others may very well come from language teachers themselves. The opportunities for nontechnical faculty members to become involved in the creation of such programs have increased considerably in the past year with the introduction of a number of hypermedia authoring systems. As of this writing, there are three such programs for the Macintosh alone: Course Builder 2.0, Course of Action, and HyperCard. Each allows the teacher-author to create and modify text, graphics, and animation without having to learn how to program. Each allows digitized voice or music to be added to the learning experience. And each offers easy control of off-line visual media: videodiscs, slide projectors, and so forth.
Since the first language software began appearing on the shelves, there has been a more or less continual debate over the role of the teacher in the development of programs. While it is clear that any competent language teacher knows more about designing language materials than do the computer people who have been writing the programs, it is also clear that most language teachers know very little about programming. Nor do they need to. Writing code is an extremely labor-intensive business, best contracted out to computer professionals. And in any case, there are several alternatives to creating a program from the ground up. For example, rather than using a general-purpose programming language such as BASIC or Pascal, a teacher interested in developing language-learning materials will probably be better off with one of the so-called authoring languages, such as PILOT or En-BASIC. The advantage of such languages is that they have been designed specifically for writing instructional software, so that much of the low-level programming work is already done. Instructing the computer to type out text on the screen, accept student input, and evaluate student answers is relatively simple in PILOT, for example, since these are precisely the tasks that PILOT was designed for.
Yet even an authoring language requires mastering a somewhat mysterious code and a rigorous, often mathematical way of describing things in order to make the program work. An authoring system , by contrast, is designed so that one does not need to handle the code at all. The teacher-author need only think about the content of the program—what it should say and where it should say it. The programming goes on behind the scenes, so to speak. Such systems are often referred to as “shells” or “templates,” since they contain all the structure but none of the content. With PROPI , one authoring system available for the IBM PC, the instructional designer selects icons representing the various modules that are to appear in the program and specifies the text to be contained in each; the system then generates the necessary PILOT code to make it all run. It is a little like dictating a letter to your mechanical secretary, which then types it up for you.
Apple's HyperCard takes authoring one step further. More than a program shell waiting to be filled in, HyperCard is like a stack of blank magic cards (magic because they have hidden powers), waiting to be used. For the teacher-author, the power of the system is in the tools that come with the blank cards: drawing tools, painting tools, text layout tools, and “clip art”—an album of cut-and-paste graphics. These tools are based on MacPaint and MacWrite, the familiar Macintosh graphics and word-processing programs, and the concept of the “clipboard.” For the reader who may not be familiar with the workings of the Macintosh, the clipboard is just that: a short-term storage space where text or pictures that have been cut out or copied are held until they are needed. Since the clipboard is part of the system, rather than of any particular program, it allows the user to move material from one application to another. In HyperCard, text fields, text, art, buttons, “script” (button commands)—everything can be copied into the clipboard and pasted down somewhere else.
But what truly makes it a hypermedia system is the button tool. A HyperCard “button” is a hot spot on the screen, an area that the user clicks on with the mouse in order to go to another screen, get more information, and so forth. Buttons link screens (“cards”) together, cause text fields to appear or disappear, and—in the most interesting example—control a videodisc player. Buttons, like fields, can be created with a few clicks of the mouse.
Creating text fields and buttons, and cutting and pasting pictures from a clip art file, clearly does not constitute programming in the usual sense. As with any other tool, though, there are varying levels of technicality with which one can approach such a system. Behind each button is a “script,” a miniprogram generated by the system in an English-like language known as HyperTalk. The teacher-author may well decide to ignore the script and use the button tool in the same way most of us use a word-processing program—without asking how it works. However, learning its idiom and coming to grips with its logic opens up another world of possibilities. These range from the trivial, like adding visual effects to buttons (“dissolve,” “wipe left,” “barn door open,” etc.), to the essential, like driving the videodisc player. For example, a button designed to play a particular segment of video, say from frame 1200 to 1450, would have a behind-the-scenes script something like this (“mouseUp” merely reminds us that this will all take place as soon as we let go of the clicker):
on mouseUp
video search, frame 1200
video play, till frame 1450
end mouseUp
Most other commands are equally transparent, though the syntax may be somewhat inelegant at times. A button intended to display a text field named “menu” on which we have typed a list of click-on choices might carry no more script (between “mouseUps,” that is) than this terse message:
show card field “menu”
A button that will take us from the card where we are presently reading about a place called Elmwood to a card in another “stack” of cards containing a map of Elmwood might contain this script:
visual effect iris open
go to card “Elmwood” of stack “Maps”
This script assumes that there is a set of related cards (a “stack”) containing maps and that one of these cards is called “Elmwood.” (The added visual effect makes the transition between the two cards more dramatic; the first card will open up like a camera lens to reveal the other.)
The author has developed a prototype HyperCard program based on the videodisc version of Zarabanda, a twenty-five-episode soap opera produced in 1973 by the British Broadcasting Corporation for the teaching of Spanish. The episodes are graded in difficulty, so that the sequence of vocabulary and structures corresponds roughly to that of the conventional first-year college text. The story centers on the exploits of Ramiro, a young mechanic from a small village in Spain who goes to the city to seek “oportunidades y dinero.” Although somewhat dated in places, the series was filmed on location in Spain with native actors and contains a wealth of linguistic and cultural information. Its reissue in 1986 in the videodisc version not only makes this information more accessible but also allows for the possibility of repackaging or repurposing the whole series as hypermedia.
Accessibility is the goal behind the Notebook. It was designed on the assumption that while the classroom teacher might tend to show an episode more or less from top to bottom, stopping occasionally to ask questions or make comments, students would later need tools for manipulating the material by themselves (or in small groups) at a language lab workstation. This is not to disparage the use of video in the classroom as a source of straightforward language input; if the material is at the appropriate level, is interesting and motivating, and is suitably introduced and annotated by the teacher, video may well be one of our best classroom resources. What repurposed video such as the Notebook offers is a way for students working alone to come to understand everything they see and hear—both at the linguistic level and at the story level.
Understanding of Zarabanda is facilitated through several different interactive guidebook-type features. In the prototype, which covers only the first episode, these are as follows:
The story. In this section, the student is offered three different introductions to the setting and the story (students may of course elect to use as many or as few of these as they choose). In the first, students control a segment of video that sets the scene for the whole series by showing and describing life in Ramiro's village; the color images on the video screen are accompanied on the Macintosh screen by the Spanish script of the voice-over. Flipping to the next “card” takes the student to a brief presentation of the cast of characters (“personajes”) for the first episode (see fig. 1). 2 Clicking on each camera icon causes the videodisc player to jump to a “snapshot,” a freeze-frame closeup of the character described.
The last card in the story section offers students a story map, a spatial representation of the sequence of scenes in the first episode (see fig. 2). Even on paper, such a map would make it easier for the student to visualize the flow of the scenes. The power of this map, however, is that it is alive: each of the icons representing the scenes is also a HyperCard button linked to a set of videodisc player commands. Clicking on a scene icon plays a ten-second preview of that scene, featuring a key line of dialogue and an important visual suggestion of the action at that point. By clicking on all thirteen icons in succession, the student gets a strong sense of the movement of the story in the episode.
The scenes. Following this preview, students can jump to the full scenes. Here they find the Spanish script of the dialogue for each scene on a separate card, with buttons that allow them to explore the material (see fig. 3). Clicking on the balloon button in the upper right-hand corner reminds the user how to access the segment of video corresponding to the script. The film button below that plays the video of the entire scene. When the student wants to play or replay a particular line of dialogue, it is only necessary to click on the desired line of text on the screen, since each line has a separate, invisible button. The button with the big E converts the dialogue instantly to English; clicking on an English line of text will again replay that segment of video, although of course still in Spanish.
Comprehension questions. The ¿ button takes the student to a stack of cards with questions about the characters, the setting, and the story. Since the goal of the Notebook is overall comprehension rather than mastery of any particular linguistic structures, questions are of the sort that require global understanding of what is taking place (though such understanding obviously depends on linguistic competence) and do not focus on vocabulary or grammar. Ramiro's girlfriend, for example, does not exactly say that she prefers to stay in the village; this important information is inferred from an understanding not only of what she says but also of how she says it (intonation, body language, etc.), the context in which she says it, and the implications of the situation itself. The purpose of the questions, then, is to focus students' viewing and listening and to give them a way to assess how well they are following the story.
The search feature. On the scene selection card (not pictured) is a button depicting a magnifying glass and labeled “Find.” This button converts the whole script into a simple data base. Students can type any Spanish word used in the script of the current episode into a “message box” at the bottom of the screen in order to locate a particular line of dialogue, to find all the different places where the word is used, or to check for the grammatical structure that is normally associated with that word. HyperCard will take them immediately to the line of text containing the word, which will then appear enclosed in a box; to hear the word spoken in context, they need only click on the word in the box, causing the segment of video corresponding to that line of script to be played (as described above). Conversely, one can type an English word into the search box in order to find the Spanish equivalent, since one is just a button-click away from the other.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, underlying any discussion of educational computing lie two fundamentally differing views of the role of the computer (48–49). Higgins defines them as the difference between viewing the computer as an obedient tutor-slave ( pedagogue ) dedicated to providing us with an environment inducive to learning and viewing it as a master ( magister ) insistent on controlling our way through the material to be learned (4). For Papert, the issue is whether the computer should control the student or the student should control the computer (5). These views are related to an even deeper question: Is technology being designed for the replacement (or minimization, at least) of human involvement, or is it being created to allow us to be better human beings, to extend our most creative and intellectual powers so as to make this a better (and more humane) world? Or the corollary: Does this software grow out of a basic human need, or is it driven by a particular technology? One can find evidence of both views in today's software industry.
With hypermedia, human involvement is clearly central. The virtual antithesis of the old programmed-learning device that would lead the student through the material with its own predetermined notion of the “proper” sequence, hypermedia has no sequence other than the one the student gives it. Moving from screen to screen and idea to idea, the student pursues learning by tracing his own train of thought: “I wonder what this is. … That reminds me of. … What would this look like if I … ?” It is well known that a learner thus actively and personally engaged in the learning experience retains more and retains it both longer and more deeply. And when the hypermedia system includes a videodisc rich in culturally authentic images, it appeals to yet another commonplace principle of human learning: visual memory. We remember images better than words, hence we remember words better if they are strongly associated with images. With the magic of hypermedia, words can be turned into images: descriptions of characters become lifelike images of real people, and written lines of dialogue become moving scenes in a film.
For all its magic, for all its power to link ideas and offer images, hypermedia will never replace the warm and responsive presence of a human being. Nor is it intended to. But it will go a long way toward getting the student actively involved in the language and the culture. It will provide massive doses of linguistic input made comprehensible through its many windows of access. And it is already proving to be an indisputable source of motivation: more than one observer has mused wistfully after a demonstration, “I wish I could have learned a language that way.”
The author is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies and Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages at Mills College.
1 Level 1 video is controlled by a hand-held remote-control keypad, level 2 by a menu program encoded into the videodisc itself, and level 3 by an outside (computer) program such as those described here.
2 All the figures are printouts from HyperCard screens that are part of The Zarabanda Notebook, developed by the author.
Course Builder 2.0. Computer software. TeleRobotics TM International, 8410 Oak Ridge Highway, Knoxville, TN 37931, 1987.
Course of Action. TM Computer software. Authorware, Suite 430, 8400 Normandale Lake Blvd., Minneapolis, MN 55437, 1987.
Gale, Larrie E. “Montevidisco: An Anecdotal History of an Interactive Videodisc.” CALICO Journal 1.1 (1983): 42–46.
Higgins, John. “Can Computers Teach?” CALICO Journal 1.2 (1983): 4–6.
HyperCard. TM Computer software. Apple Computer, 20525 Mariani Ave., Cupertino, CA 95014, 1987.
Liebhold, Mike. Apple Computer. Software demonstration at International Interactive Communications Society, San Francisco, 8 Sept. 1987.
Markoff, John. “The Master of Information Space.” San Francisco Examiner 18 Oct. 1987: D1–3.
Nelson, Theodor. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Chicago: Hugo's, 1974.
Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic, 1980.
PROPI. Computer software. ASYS Computer Systems, 104 Viewcrest, Bellingham, WA 98225, 1987.
Underwood, John. Linguistics, Computers, and the Language Teacher: A Communicative Approach. Rowley: Newbury, 1984.
Zarabanda. Videodisc. Films, Inc./EMC Publishing, 300 York Ave., Saint Paul, MN 55101, 1986.
Figure 1:
Zarabanda Notebook: Cast of Characters for Episode 1.
Figure 2:
Zarabanda Notebook: Story Map for Episode 1.
Figure 3:
Zarabanda Notebook: Dialogue Script for Scene 9.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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