[ed298] My Web2.0 Diary, part 4 of 5

Playing with Yabla was interesting. They used video to teach language with interesting features like forward and slow down. The slow down option allowed you to slow the video but it still retained the same pitch. The technology element of the tool is interesting. As far as community, it seems fairly self-paced at first but then I realized you could integrate it into a course. So for example at the end of the Yabla game, a game where you earn 10 points for correctly filling in a missing word, a message is displayed that says "Your score has been recorded in your My Yabla records. If you are affiliated with a class, and this video is assigned, it is also avaialble to your teacher." They don't have ways to allow users to upload their own videos and subtitle them. It would add to the diversity of media. Learners could learn by editing other people's subtitles as well. Learners could contruct their own experiences which heightens understanding.


I'll compare that to another language immersion technology I found through audible.com. Audible is a podcasting service for book readers afficliated with amazon. Audible has a community of people who use the service, rate books and recommend them to friends. It has an amazon-like ratings system that allow you to see how other customers rated the book. It also makes recommendations based on the same author, narrator or provider. It doesn't allow you to create your own categories, but it does provide tanatalizing options like "be a kind again", "scare myself silly", "golf like tiger woods", or "escape the daily grind". It would be most powerful though with a tool like this to see what other people like you are reading. That might introduce you to stuff you might not ordinarily see. I went there to check out earworms, a technology to teach you Chinese using musical rapping performances. I was unconvince by the learning methodology here. I couldn't grok the osmosis approach to learning. I shared it with a peer in ED298 and he felt it was very behavioral in it's approach. It's challenging to be otherwise though I did find another product that attempted to get you to understand words in it's context and often scaffold english phrases while you learned.