John Kelley sends me some recommendations for enhancing my French curriculum. John says I should add some science, math, and technology objectives (we do use Google Docs!), French history (we do read some articles), and discussion of world economic turmoil as it relates to the French experience with fiat money (that's going to take some effort!).
In a few years, those enhancements might be all I'm teaching, if my job even exists. While Bill Gates advocates bad education policy, Microsoft is developing technology that will put French teachers and maybe all high school foreign language teachers out of work.
This video shows Microsoft chief research officer Rick Rashid discussing Microsoft's live translation technology. Throughout the video, Microsoft's language recognition software produces a reasonably accurate transcript of Rashid's speech. Past the 6:00 mark, they switch on the text translator to produce a running Mandarin Chinese script. And around 7:30, they switch on the newest tool: live audio translation of Rashid's words in to Mandarin Chinese, modulated to sound like his own voice.
Rashid explains the state of the art:
During my October 25 presentation in China, I had the opportunity to showcase the latest results of this work. We have been able to reduce the word error rate for speech by over 30% compared to previous methods. This means that rather than having one word in 4 or 5 incorrect, now the error rate is one word in 7 or 8. While still far from perfect, this is the most dramatic change in accuracy since the introduction of hidden Markov modeling in 1979, and as we add more data to the training we believe that we will get even better results [Rick Rashid, "Microsoft Research shows a promising new breakthrough in speech translation technology," Next at Microsoft, 2012.11.08].
We are ten years from the Star Trek universal translator. (Microsoft must have found Henry Starling's back-up disks.) Microsoft has put me ten years from seeking other work... or at least radically transforming how and what I teach in a foreign language classroom.
But remember: someone still needs to train the programmers... and foreign language training makes brains grow (among other benefits)! Now, class, turn to page 52 on the collapse of Louis XVI's fiscal policy....
One manner that schools, and yes, even professors and teachers allowed their profession to drift too often - into less than excellence is practicing the same teaching methods as those used in 1096. I mistakenly thought that when Governor Janklow wired all the SD schools that might drive substantive change in education. I was wrong. It became just another toy; just another impediment to status quo teaching and results.
After retiring from one career and while earning a doctorate I was profoundly disappointed and discouraged that the civilian professing was light-years behind those in the military's officer schools. One easily could image instead of loafers and dockers that the professors might be as comfortable in Socrates' sandals and robe for they taught the same way - through uninspired lectures, and scratching limestone on slate. Video? bah, distracting. Audio? bah, unreliable. Internet? bah, fad.
Fortunately the creative disruption of the internet will no longer allow the education-industrial complex to stifle truly caring, creative, innovative professors and teachers. They are and will find ways to improve on Socrates and Oxford's methods of 1096.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2012/11/12/alex-tabarrok/why-online-education-works/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/education/colleges-turn-to-crowd-sourcing-courses.html?hp&_r=0
While we are encouraged that Abraham Lincoln and this kid were largely self-educated while living 170 years from another - the facts remain that most of us require help in securing our education and that the education-industrial complex in the US can do so much better - if it will get out of its own way to excellence by stopping its mindless protection of the status quo.
http://thebrowser.com/videos/self-taught-african-teen-wows-mit
Les habitudes ont la vie dure.