Dave’s Whiteboard

Our DVD player came with a manual, which I last consulted when hooking up cables.  Every so often the player seems to tire of its default settings; it activates a feature we didn’t know existed.

Last weekend we watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (here’s the trailer), based on the life of French magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby.  A massive stroke left him unable to move except to blink his left eye.  (The French title is Le scaphandre et le papillon.)

I think the DVD player chose to play a version dubbed in English, rather than in French with English subtitles.  I found it confusing that the characters spoke English (with French accents) but pronounced the alphabet in French.  Only afterward did I realize the the movie hadn’t been made in English.

For me, trying to follow a soundtrack in French is confusing enough. There’s an almost unavoidable gap if you understand the spoken language as you’re reading subtitles — things get left out for the sake of speed or clarity or simplicity. And of course nuances get lost.  The Italian proverb is traduttore, traditore — “translator, traitor.”

Like the quirk in the English title — “scaphandre” isn’t “diving bell,” as in bathyscape — it’s “diving suit.”

This morning I read Starting with Cantonese on John Biesnecker’s blog. John speaks Mandarin and is learning Cantonese. As he says in an earlier post, he wanted more exposure to the language than he was getting in a formal class.

What language classes really provide is not language education, but rather structure and expectations. You have to show up at a certain time, and you have to study in order to keep up with the class. In a perfect world, those things would push students to excel, but in reality the result is often frustration and abandonment.

There’s a lot to what he says, I think. The best formal language classes generate interest and excitement. They provide incentive to learn, and some students transform that into their own motivation.  But not all do.  I was thinking how enthusiastic I was in high school, learning French — but none of my three schools had language labs, and so my exposure to high-quality spoken French was limited to my teachers (which may account for the hint of Québec in my accent).

So I studied, which may explain why as a junior in Maine, I tended to get the highest grade in my class, but was unable to flirt with girls the way classmates like Boissoneault, Parisien, Bolduc, and Gagne could — they spoke French at home, they spoke it with one another, they joked around with the French-Canadian and French-Canadian-descended brothers who staffed the school.

John’s not a complete novice for either Cantonese or Japanese (another language he wants to improve), so his strategy of viewing movies and other media isn’t bad.  No worse than sitting in a language class with its inevitable reversion to the mean.

Last night, my wife and I went to a Smithsonian event, a book-tour chat by chef Jacques Pepin (who does a hilarious Julia Child impression).  Pepin’s been in the U.S. for 50 years, stiff with a strong French accent.

The point is that he’s succeeded in an English-speaking world, communicating clearly and entertainingly on a variety of topics.  He hasn’t let the accent stand in his way.  He’d notice that scaphandre doesn’t strictly mean “diving bell,” but he’d probably pay more attention to the compelling story in the film.

(A 2005 interview with Pepin by Bruce Cole.)

Diving suit photo by Terekhova.

In a post on her Making Change blog, Cathy Moore offers valuable advice on concise and lively writing.  Part of her advice: don’t fret about the needlessly specific reading level; focus on reading ease.

Despite the title, I’m pretty sure Cathy doesn’t want everyone to sound just like Ernest Hemingway, whose prose sometimes reads as though he hacked it out of scrap wood with a steak knife and a tire iron.  Pappa’s stubbornly plain style differs greatly from Samuel Johnson’s, but Hemingway would agree with this sentiment:

What is written without effort
is generally read without pleasure.

Much of that effort comes during a rewrite, when you go over your great idea and try to get out of your own way.  For example, I love analogies that surprise people — but when they’re too surprising, they don’t highlight and clarify, which is what you hire analogies to do.  If Sarah Vowell’s going to compare the Rolling Stones to a pastry (that covers the surprising part), she has to follow through without straining.

(Maybe they’re like bagels — sometimes the leaden, grocery-store brand with almost no appeal, just the shape and color.  And sometimes they’re tough on the outside, satisfying on the inside, taking us back to what feels like emotional hot coffee and crackling autumn mornings…)

Here’s one approach to going editing your own work when you’re writing to guide others (training material, guides for independent learning, job aids).  More than three steps, it’s three passes.  Editing is complex; the idea is to have a focus for each pass.

First edit: completeness

Are you saying the right things?  Is anything missing (a key step, a prerequisite, a clarification of an outcome)?  Are you technically correct?  Depending on the situation, you might need to have an expert make this pass.  (If you do, make clear that at this stage you don’t necessarily want to rearrange things; you just want to make sure that you’re complete and correct.  Concise isn’t bad, either.

Second edit: sequence

The goal of the first pass is to say the right things.  The goal of the second pass is to say them in the right order.  People like Cathy Moore understand that you don’t need anywhere near the amount of preliminary folderol that trainers and educators tend to lard things up with.  Even Robert Mager will forgive you if you don’t state fifteen behavioral objectives at the start — and most learners will bless you.

If you’re writing a guide, a job aid, something meant to take people through a process, then sequence is critical.  You don’t want to mix things up and pretend that’s “creativity.”  For complex processes, it helps to give the big picture, and then to have independent, standalone sections that model variations or elaborations of the process.

Take a look at some of the examples at the maxdesign website (the Floatutorial, about controlling images and text on a web page via CSS, is especially good).

Third edit: language

As you go through the first two edit passes, you’ll fix some of your language.  You can’t help it.  Control yourself, though; catch any obvious flaws, but discipline yourself.  You want to make a third pass through the work to look specifically at how you say what you say.

In the third pass, you deploy all your sharp tools: parallel construction, active verbs, shorter sentences (when it comes to words, twenty is plenty).  You’re completing the work, the way you complete your paint job by cleaning drips, touching up places you missed, and removing the masking tape.

Editing and the world of right now

Many pressures work against editing and revision.  Who edits blog posts?  Who rewrites email?  I think there’s an analogy with Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation.  In the real world, you don’t do level three or level four evaluations for every program.  You do them, or you should, when your effort is supposed to make a significant difference.

So, no, you don’t necessarily need to let your tweets rest so you can rewrite them before sending them out to enrich the world.  Some bloggers pride themselves on the speed of production (maybe there’s an award I don’t know about); I find I usually do better when I take my time posting (and I sometimes do worse if I don’t take my time commenting).

“The tartan is all of the one stuff,” goes the proverb, and so is the process of writing for learners.  But there are several sub-processes, and all of them matter:

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

– Thomas Edison

Mick Jagger photo by SpreePiX - Berlin / René.
Bagel-shop photo by threecee / tracy collins.

Ken Carroll notes that ChinesePod has posted its 1,000th lesson.  I think the count’s off (looks like more to me), but you can see for yourself.  Its companion site, FrenchPod, which launched earlier this year, isn’t just loafing on the Left Bank, either.

Ken doesn’t post often at his blog, but in the last week or so I found a lot in two posts.

In the first, he discusses CLIL (content and language integrated learning), “where language is taught through subject areas — math through English, for example.”  Although the term’s a bit wordy, it’s a sharper focus than its synonym, immersion.

As Ken says, team teaching is a hallmark of ChinesePod, FrenchPod, and the other Praxis language sites.  When I first visited ChinesePod, I listened to a lesson on buying a train ticket.  I was struck by the depth and range of sound teaching in the lesson — including the interplay between a native speaker of Chinese and a skilled non-native speaker.  Among things I found useful:

• A quick overview in English
• A plunge into a short, Chinese-language session
• “Post-game” discussion between the hosts
• Variations and extensions (e.g., “So how would  you say…?”

)

And, along with the native/nonnative voices, I thought there was value in pairing male and female speakers. A wider range of examples of how people speak the language.

Ken’s post touches on other key points: learning needs a context, and mobile is the new immersion.  Perhaps the most striking statement:  Ultimately, the object of study on ChinesePod is culture, not language.

The second post I wanted to mention, The lexical approach revisited, goes further into the theory of how to teach language.  In a way, learning a language at one of the Praxis sites is much messier than learning French at St. Louis High School — though I think that’s only because the typical high-school approach is more formal, and more formulaic. (I do realize there are many variations — I’m generalizing.)

It’s not always apparent that self-directed learning means you have to do one of two things:

• Direct yourself, or
• Find someone else’s direction that suits you.

Taking control of your learning sounds great, but it demands a sort of cognitive infrastructure.  My analogy is with physical health: you have to have the infrastructure of diet, exercise, preventative care, etc.  You have to learn what questions to ask, what sources to consult, what factors to weigh — and in many cases, the farther you go, the less clear it is that you’ll find the answer.

The alternative, though, is expecting someone else to do it all for you.  That can happen, but it doesn’t seem likely.  The golden mean may lie in taking charge of what you feel competent to manage, and “outsourcing” when you find the skill and expertise of others appropriate to your goals.

學而時習之 不亦說乎
Is it not enjoyable to learn
and practice what you learn?
– Confucius

I’m looking for examples of collaboration tools doing actual work in the workplace.

Notice how deftly I avoided saying “web 2.0″ tools?  That’s what a lot of these things are, but I have a suspicion that the examples I’m looking for will be from people who don’t say “web 2.0″ a lot.  Or “blogosphere.”  Like the people in this video from BNet Intercom.

What I hope to find is a collection of mini case studies:

• Here’s a problem we had at Montcrieffe Heraldry and Landscaping.
• Here’s what we tried because we thought it would let us do X, Y, and Z.
• Here’s what happened in reality.
• Here’s where we’re going next.

Why am I looking?  Rather than saying to people “you ought to have a blog” (or a wiki, or a mashup, or whatever), I’d like to show real-word examples in terms of the problems they addressed and the results they delivered.

For example, procurement people at a petrochemical company wanted to track and share what they learned in dealing with suppliers.  You may recall this saying:

Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.

The corollary is that the bad judgment doesn’t have to be yours.  So the procurement people used an online tool to report on negotiating strategy, dealings with particular vendors, and other things that procurement people pay attention to.  They restricted access to just their department, but allowed people in that department to revise or add to the information.  So, over time, topics emerged, as did cross-references, as did changes in thinking.

It was a wiki.

The key is that if you’re reading this, you probably know what a wiki is.  You’re likely to have written or edited something on a wiki.  But, when you say “wiki” to many people in the corporate world, they think of Wikipedia, which means they think of:

• Political staffers and folks with agendas trying to change the pages for Barack Obama or John McCain
• Featured articles like these (shown on the main page on the last four Fridays):
  • The anekantavada doctrine of Jainism
  • Film star Jackie Chan
  • The Calgary Flames hockey team
  • Walter de Coventre, a 14th-century Scottish ecclesiastic who spent at least 25 years of his adult lift away from Scotland
• The Buffyverse, an astonishing number of pages related to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

What are you seeing that’s working?  Let me know, either in a comment, or by email to dferguson at strathlorne youknowwhatgoeshere com.

I look forward to Ken Carroll’s posts about language learning, in part because he’s actively experimenting. As he says, he reads a lot of education theory, but he’s also trying to put theory to work via sites like Chinesepod.

In that post from last Friday, Ken linked to another New York Times mention of Chinesepod (highlighting in this case Chinesepod’s use of the Olympics).

Comments both on Ken’s post and on the NYT piece exhibit a wide range of opinion regarding how to learn a language — all the way from “you’ve got to take a class” to “do what you want.”

To me, this is another example of a covert discrimination — Joe Harless’s term for an apparently simple case (”learn a language”) that conceals a number of different situations requiring different actions.

There’s isn’t a “right” way to learn a language, any more than there’s a right way to cook dinner. Do you want to read, or to read and write? Do you want to read and speak? Do you want to work in a scholarly or professional or formal or technical setting in the new language?

As I talk (via voice) with francophone friends in Second Life, I often receive compliments on how well I’m doing. That’s how I learned the verb se débrouiller (“Tu te débrouilles bien – You’re doing well”).

I’m all too aware of my shortcomings, though. And after only eight months or so, insight came to me with my usual lightning speed:

First, I think people appreciate what they see as sincere effort. I have always liked the idea of speaking another language, and I remain grateful for Brother André’s enthusiasm back when I was a high school freshman.

Ce n’était rien qu’un peu de miel
Mais il m’avait chauffé le corps
Et dans mon âme il brûle encore
A la manièr’ d’un grand soleil…

(It was only a little bit of honey
But it warmed me all over
And in my soul, it’s still burning
Like a great sun…)

– Georges Brassens, Chanson pour l’Auvergnat
(video with less-than-perfect English subtitles)

More to the point, though, I finally realized something that should have been obvious:

• When I’m speaking (or text-chatting) in French, the people I’m talking to understand every word (except the French words I manufacture out of thin air from English ones).
• When they speak to me, they understand every word also — but they can’t really tell how well I’m following.

On another language-learning site, I discovered a rule of thumb that I reinterpret like this: a middle level of language skill means that you can speak comfortable in paragraphs. You don’t have to pause and pre-assemble what you plan to say — at least not any more than you do in your native language.

I’m just not there yet. I feel more like someone who’s moved to a strange city. I know there are bagel shops somewhere; I know there must a good place to get my bike fixed; I’m pretty sure there’s a great family-run Italian restaurant. Not to mention a much better route for getting from point A to point B.

I just haven’t learned those things yet. And while I can take in a lot of advice (which is really the theory that Ken Carroll talks about), I have to apply that advice, probably several times, before I can really judge its value for me and go about incorporating it into my repetoire.

I remember learning from Brother André that the French equivalent of “it’s Greek to me” is “it’s Chinese to me.” It delighted me even more to read once that the ancient Greeks supposedly would say, in the same situation, “it sounds like Hebrew.”