Here Comes Everybody

  By the time we finished school, 90% of my generation hated the mandatory Irish lessons. Hundreds of thousands of kids (aka language learning machines) failed to master even rudimentary communication in the language we had studied for years. If the teachers had set out to kill the language, I’m not sure they could have done it more effectively. But, of course, they didn’t set out to kill it, they set out to teach it, which would sound almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.   

There is no single reason for the failure of traditional language teaching. It’s more like a constellation of bad pedagogy, irrelevant objectives, a school system that was calcified in another era, etc. Crowning it all was the illusion that you could and should teach a language to children, i.e. that you could/should explain it to them. The teachers’ focus was grammatical, rather than psychological - What are the structures of the language?, rather than How might we induce the language learning process?  It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that if the kids were encouraged to use the language they would pick it up painlessly and quickly. Nothing (and I mean nothing) could have been less relevant than lectures on declensions or the conjugation of prepositions (they do that in Irish) to a bunch of children, but that’s what we got.

I don’t want to harp on about my particular country. I used it to make a point but it was definitely not unique. For the most part, language teaching the world over remains in a fossilized state. The paradigms that inform it are often more Quintillian, and less web 2.0 even though there’s tons of amazing alternative ideas on the web these days - try Stephen Downes’ Stephen Web, or Connectivism for starters. (These treat learning generally, rather than language learning specifically, but they are relevant.) As far as I can see most kids leave schools to this day, with an abysmal record on language learning.

 Yesterday I talked with JP Villaneuva. He’s a tremendouly talented linguist and teacher who is leading the new SpanishPod team that launched last week. (You can sample his excellent work here.) Well, JP and I share a belief in the need for change in language teaching - in this case in how Spanish is taught. (Note: I’m not saying there are no good Spanish teachers out there. Of course there are! I’m saying the discipline as a whole needs change.) JP and I will be working together and reporting here as we progress. (I’m delighted to say that we also have an awesome tech team behind us to help make our ideas possible!)

 Over the coming week and months I’ll try to bring concrete examples of what we might call ‘language learning 2.0′. I beleive ChinesePod has already demonstrated a number of these, but I’m keen to keep developing the discussion beyond Mandarin. We certainly have ideas over here but we realize that you, the Big Brain, know far more than we ever could. I hope you’ll all stop by to add to the conversation in a ‘co-active’ way.

Ken Carroll

I love the Economist, but it ran an incredibly weak article today - False Eastern promise whose sub-heading tells us that the ‘craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad’. The craze for teaching Chinese may just be a fad? May be a fad? 

Of course it’s possible that this is a fad, but what precisely is that saying? There’s a lot of things that may or may not happen out there,  that may or may not be fads, no end of things we could speculate wildly upon without providing data. Why this particular issue? The premise is so vague, speculative, unsubstantiated, and out of the blue, that you have to wonder where the author suddenly got the idea from. It’s bizarre.

Then it gets worse. He states that there is worldwide growth in the study of the Chinese. That’s probably correct. Then he says that ‘Barring some kind of sea change in global language learning’ all these speakers of Mandarin will not be rewarded with better careers. Let me think about that for a second.  He first says that there is a masive change in worldwide learning, then he says that these people will not find jobs unless there is a change in worldwide language learning.  I’m not even going to try to uncork that one.

And anyone that knows anything about China should know that you don’t accept government statistics on face value anyway. Two years ago, the government claimed that there were 30 million people worldwide studying Mandarin, which is ludicrous. (The total number of people in Japan and Korea combined studying Mandarin is probably around 2-3 million. These are the countries with the highest density of Mandarin learners by far. The US has no more than a few hundred thousand. So, where are the other tens of millions of students?) The author simply accepts that number and goes on to unquestioningly accept the claim that it will reach 100 million by 2010.  This is facile stuff in any publication, but in the Economist it’s staggering.  

Then we’re told that the Chinese writing system is ‘horribly complicated’, which strikes me as entirely subjective, judgmental, and inappropriate for an article of this nature, as if to invoke ignorance as preferential to ’complicated’ things.

The author has now hit bottom, but he keeps digging:  “The vast majority of Westerners who travel to China to study Mandarin give up, go home and forget what they have learned.” How does he know that? How do you measure that? How much do they forget? Does it happen instantly? What does it even mean? And while you’re still reeling at that one, he suggests that people would be better of studying law instead, because law is easier. Well then, that settles the matter. Let’s all study law - no let’s all just study easy things, not hard things.

But then he crowns the vacuity with a sentence I shudder to see in the Economist (and it is a beauty),  “… anecdotal evidence suggests that there is little call for Britons with Mandarin”. Ah, yes, the anecdotal evidence. That seals the argument. If it’s one thing that the science of economics needs it’s vapid cliches to prove sweeping generalizations on the basis of what anecdotal evidence suggests.

Now look, I admit that I have a vested interest in promoting the study of Mandarin,  but this is probably the worst article I’ve ever read in the Economist. The writer seems to have put this together so quickly and superficially you have to wonder if he did it purely to fill a column space on a bad morning. As I said, I read and love the Economist, but this is appalling. Tell me this was written by an intern with a bad hangover, please!

Ken Carroll

I thought I’d follow up on my last post with a little more about HCE, or Here Comes Everybody. To my mind he is not a generic ‘everyman’, but represents in fact, a complex alternative to it. As the newcomer on the scene he is suspect. In fact, the entire narrative of Finnegan’s Wake evolves around rumors of HCE’s scandalous behavior in Dublin’s Phoenix Park with two girls. We never find out what actually happened there but, apparently, some ‘Welsh fusiliers’ saw the event.

Below is a passage from the book and what I interpret as HCE’s spirited self-defense. (You never know who’s saying what in this book.) He is righteously indignant at the very thought of the Phoenix Park accusations. I located this passage in his pub, the Brazen Head, which is probably as good a place as anywhere else. (The pub traces its origins back to the year 1198, btw.) I include an audio version of it that I recorded myself. (FW has to be read aloud, and since I have an ‘authentic’ Dublin accent, maybe it will make it more comprehensible. I’ve also tried to do it in the style 1930s over-the-top Irish drama.) Audio.

A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease. Athma, unmanner them! To such a suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made.

Nor have his detractors,who, an imperfectly warmblooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white caterpillar capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families, mended their case by insinuating that, alternately, he lay at one time under the ludicrous imputation of annoying Welsh fusiliers in the people’s park.

Hay, hay, hay! Hoq, hoq, hoq! Faun and Flora on the lea love that little old joq. To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous.

So that is HCE in all his perspectivist glory.

Now since there are 634 pages of this, you may find it comforting to know that there is a Finnegan’s Wiki to help. And yes, amazingly, there’s even a movie based on the book.

Ken Carroll

I’m learning more and learning faster than would have been possible 5 years ago. The participative web (aka, web 2.0) makes this happen. The new-found capacity to participate through the web has put learning on steroids, and ushered in a new kind of empowerment of the individual. Let me see if I can explain my thinking and at the same time relate it to, er, Finnegan’s Wake.

Here’s the web in 2007 from a (ridiculously-condensed) learning perspective:

Google organizes teraybytes of information and presents it to us almost instantaneously, while a slew of new web tools assist us with managing and participating in learning.

Let’s take a look at one of those tools: RSS. With RSS I can narrow my focus to an area I want to learn about, track the key words/concepts, and get notification whenever anyone, anywhere on the web writes about them. This includes online newspaper/magazines articles, blogs, forums, and more. RSS allows me to tap into a live, global, non-stop, river of conversation on my topics of interest, all delivered to my browser, through my RSS reader. This is big stuff (though it is going almost unnoticed amongst mainstream educators).

Note, however, that the participative web goes way beyond just high-speed access to information. It also enables us to form learning networks that include people, conversations, and information. This is a crucial development that we need to understand.

Networks offer radically new ways to organize learning. First, information can be presented in non-linear, and HTML formats. This frees the learner to explore it in ways that books do not. Secondly, the ability to participate (it’s now a two-way medium) moves us beyond a one-to-many format towards the many-to-many learning format, opening the door to anyone who wishes to participate, share, assist, or converse. Lecture formats don’t work particularly well on the web, but even where we do use them we can add readers’ comments and interpretations to create something new.

We’re uncovering ways to learn that are more efficient by orders of magnitude than the lecture format, ways that naturally challenge it, add to it, and take us beyond the single interpretation - that is, without having to synthesize information into a single perspective. Although it’s mass collaboration, and although it enables the co-creation of meaning, it does so in a granular way that preserves individual viewpoints. Peer-to-peer learning, then, is blurring the lines between what we used to neatly call teachers and students. Wikipedia is one type of example, but it’s actually happening everywhere, in various formats, and it’s something we have seen time and again on ChinesePod.

Consider the role of blogs in this scenario. They’re where you go to get the very latest knowledge on almost any subject. (By contrast, books in a library can be years out of date, for all we know.) Bloggers tend to narrow their focus to specific areas. There are hundreds of thousands of specialist blogs on the web, many written by talented, insightful individuals, and leaders in their fields. (You have to seek out the good ones, of course.) When you find something of value, you simply bookmark it or include it in your reader where it becomes part of your learning network.

I’d like to stay with blogs for a second, because they have many other features that make them well suited to learning and illustrate the new paradigm:

• They’re about people. All the discussion about technology sometimes confuses the issue. Learning is an exclusively human activity, done by humans, for the benefit of humans. Blogs aren’t lifeless databases of information. They are more like conversations with real people with whom we can connect and learn from.
• They’re free and accessible. Knowledge is not closed off to us on blogs. We don’t even need as much as a registration to access even the most valuable of them.
• Comments. Comments add nuance, perspectives, shades of opinon, and lead to a deeper understanding of the topic. Good posts also attract smart comments and a virtuous circle of participation and understanding.
• Links. Bloggers who know a lot about their fields tend to link to others in related fields. This broadens the conversation and the resources.
• Archives. These act as a kind of extended memory for the writer (not to mention the reader). It’s also a very handy resource of ideas that don’t need to be written and re-written (or even photocopied) no matter how many people wish to read them.

Right now, I have about 100 or so blogs on my list of favorites. Each has a different area of specialization and a different take on things. I know where to go to seek the types of ideas and information I may need. In addition, tagging, social bookmarking, blog search, instant messaging, as well as podcasts, video, and other tools all serve to enhance my learning network. But of course, I’m not passively consuming all this stuff. I also connect with people on my network through blogs, social networks, email, instant messaging, etc. I think you get my drift.

Clearly, we are all now learning from each other, not just from a caste of professors or experts. I see it as the best of both worlds, in a sense. George Siemens calls this the ‘rise of everyone‘. I take this to mean, not ‘the rise of the common man’ in some collectivist sense, but in this sense that every individual now has a voice in the Big Conversation. We’re about to see what happens when one billion people start to mobilize these resources to learn and do new things.

In Chapter One of Finnegan’s Wake, the protagonist sails into Dublin Bay (from Scandanavia, no less) after Finnegan, the hod-carrier dies. The new chap takes over the story, but he’s not a simple fellow. He speaks in riddles, puns, and multiple languages simultaneously as if to represent multiple perspectives and signify change. His name was Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCE for short, or Here Comes Everybody. I think he’s relevant. I’ll talk more about him in a later post.

Ken Carroll