PILOTed

Learning to Speak English in Second Life with SRI

Innovation seems to be the hot topic of the moment. Countries have to innovate, or their populations are doomed to a lower economic status. Companies have to innovate or die. Education has to innovate to propagate educated workers and citizens that can compete in a flat world.

SRI has been innovating for 60 years. Curt Carlson, President and CEO, has written a book (well worth reading) on innovation (Innovation, The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want) and he will be the keynote speaker at the SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit on May 18 in San Francisco.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Valerie Crawford and John Brecht of SRI’s Center for Technology in Learning. They provided me with a preview of a really cool new technology, and also with great background information on what SRI does and how it works.

The technology was built around voice recognition software developed at SRI and is designed to support building fluency in English, through either formal or informal learning approaches. What was most cool was that the software worked with Second Life (SL). Second Life is a three dimensional world where visitors can travel, interact with each other, learn, build stuff, take classes, buy things, conduct meetings, etc. Once logged into SL, using SRI’s technology, students interact in social situations through speaking. The SRI software not only conveys the meaning into the Second Life world, it responds and also provides feedback about how well their speech compares with native speakers’. In SRI’s SL-based environment, users can engage in game-like activities, talking through a microphone and listening to responses. This allows them to practice and assess their English-language fluency, comprehension, and pronunciation, all with speech recognition technology. 

The core software for the speech recognition technology was originally designed for the exact opposite function. The software was originally written so that the computer would allow for errors in speaking, but would still recognize what the person was saying, a forgiving speech recognition system. In order for this to work, the developers had to understand the differences between how a native speaker would speak and how a non-native speaker would speak. The software has to select meaning from different possible interpretations.

The education application uses those same capabilities, but with the opposite purpose. It compares the user’s speech to an optimal voice pattern, scores the results, and provides feedback and possibly remediation to the speaker. For example, take the pronunciation of the letter “t,” which has different sounds depending on the context (wrestle, put, better, vacation, these, thing). One type of error would be to use a wrong but valid “t” sound in a word. A different error is to pronounce a “t” like a “d” or “z”. (My mother-in-law is Hungarian, so I always know when “ze dinner is on ze table.”) For each context, there must be trapping sequences for common speech errors.

A second hurdle involves interfacing the technology with SL.

Second Life has an API for developers wanting to create new applications. You would think it would be a quick leap to interface the speech engine with Second Life. But, the licensing agreement calls for Linden Labs to have unrestricted use of all intellectual property in SL. In order not to lose the IP, SRI had to put the speech recognition and all software architecture for the system outside of Second Life, without diminishing the user’s SL experience.

They were able to accomplish this through a combination of client software (on the user’s machine) and server software at SRI. Oversimplifying a little, the client software captures what the user is saying and communicates data over the Internet with the SRI server. SRI has also integrated into the SL environment to capture information about avatars’ actions in SL, and then communicate actions back to SL.

One vision is to develop this into a SL resort island. Visitors would have the ability to practice and self assess their language skills in a risk-free setting, and learning experts acknowledge that language use in context is the best way to build language skills, and a lot more fun than memorizing conjugations and verb tenses.

For example, visitors might go to a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender avatar might respond, “I think you asked for a drink, but your pronunciation needs a little practice.” They may be given a language improvement mission to complete before they get the drink. When they come back to ask again, if they still need practice, the bartender might respond, “Yes, I understood you, you want a drink. You still need some practice on pronunciation. If you want a glass of water I can give you some now, but if you want something more upscale, first go to the language gym to work on your letter ‘R.’”

As Valerie made clear, the speech recognition technology that interfaces with SL is not a stand-alone product. The CTL group of SRI does not create products but rather focuses on innovating new learning technologies, designs, and resources. They perform five different types of services, generally in the disciplines of math, sciences, and language.

1. They develop assessments of student learning (devising and deploying instruments to assess different cognitive skills)

2. They evaluate methods or products to determine their effectiveness in cognitive, information, or skill transfer

3. They research and study different methods that try to improve teacher effectiveness, specifically looking at how teachers learn complex forms of pedagogy. In fact, they host one of the longest running online social networks: Tapped-In (tappedin.org)

4. They develop technologies that can become the basis of products (creating feasibility demonstrations, and then partnering with others who will produce and sell the product). Once a technology is developed, they may also help specify an infrastructure that will allow the technology or products to scale.

5. They      provide consulting to commercial firms to leverage existing and new      research to inform product design and product strategy, to lower      innovation risk and enhance product effectiveness and traction.

The SL/Speech Recognition technology falls into the first part of the fourth service, technology development. To actually take this technology and turn in into a product that people can buy may still take $1–2 million and 9–18 months. That is where SRI looks for partners.

A partner can be a joint development effort, technology can be purchased, it can be licensed, or there can be royalty arrangement.

So what can we learn from SRI?

First, SRI may have a technology that you can use to create a business. SRI has a lot of different IP that can be applied to education, and they are looking for partners to commercialize the technology into products.

Second, successful innovation requires overcoming a number of different hurdles. CTL started with an existing voice recognition software, developed years ago at SRI’s Speech Technology Lab. There are a slew of complexities in figuring out how to best leverage this technology for learning in the current and near-future learning technology market, through integrating it with learning environments, such as Second Life and mobile devices. Creating successful products almost always takes substantially more resources than expected; plan to have the people and resources to continue moving forward even when obstacles slow you down.

Third, interesting ideas often come from where you least expect them. When developing a forgiving voice recognition application, who could have predicted that the product might also be used to grade the quality of speech of English language learners?

A Vision for Professional Development in Education

The Professional Development – Teaching Connection

At FETC this past week, I had a great discussion about education with Don Hall, CIO of the Muskogee County School District in Columbus Georgia, and Cory Linton, Executive Vice President of School Improvement Network.

We had just attended a focus group on School Improvement Network that was put together by the BLE group. School Improvement Network is a client of ours. Their fastest growing service is PD360, on demand online professional development based on The Video Journal of Education’s 17 years of publishing 8–12 PD videos a year. Don had been a member of the focus group, and the three of us just got into a discussion on our vision of how PD should fit within comprehensive education framework.

Don led our talk, and most of these ideas come from his vision. Don started out describing the following diagram of how good instructional material works with teachers, students, and classrooms.

A teacher looks at a student, and can start at any of three different places. She can look at what he needs to learn, or learning standards. She can start by using specific resources or methods to teach him what she believes he should learn next. Or, she can employ an assessment to find out what he knows, and what he has yet to learn. As an industry, we’re starting to do a good job of integrating those three, assessments are starting to point out what learning standards have and have not been achieved, while also pointing to learning resources that will help the student achieve the next step. Learning resources are being linked to specific learning objectives, with the goal of then fitting in with the way the students will be assessed.

The other side of the issue is to ensure that the teacher has the knowledge and skills to be able to use the standards, resources, and assessments to achieve superior results. Existing development plans and support resources include district wide professional development, coaching, and learning communities.

But the idea of integrating the specific information a teacher needs, at the time she needs it, in the way that she is most receptive to learning, is the next step and is illustrated by the diagram below.

How might this work?

Let’s say a new teacher, who has been schooled in the ideal world of classroom teaching, confronts her first real life hurdle. Wouldn’t it be great if she could pull up a resource that would tell her about different ways to handle the hurdle? And then, what if she could watch an exceptional teacher actually employ one of those solutions in a classroom? And then, if she wanted, learn why that method works?

Historically, the teacher would go ask the teacher next door for advice. But, as Don pointed out, couldn’t this be the continual perpetuation of bad teaching practices?

The ideal situation would be, for all teachers, to have experts available to describe what to do, show how to do it, and explain how to do it, right when they need it most, and tied to the learning standards, instructional resources, and assessments that they use every day. This diagram might look like this:

A teacher would thus be able to obtain the information about the standards each student needed to achieve, what he needed to learn, and would be able to skillfully use the available resources to fashion an appropriate intervention in an effective manner at the right time.

Wouldn’t that be great?

If you want to continue the discussion, Don Hall is at the Muscogee County School district, http://www.mcsdga.net. Cory Linton can talk more about how School Improvement Network is working with publishers, education experts, and school districts, and can be reached via http://www.schoolimprovement.com, or we welcome comments to these articles at http://academicbiz.typepad.com.

Paul Vallas on Philadelphia Schools

Paul Vallas is often credited with turning around the Chicago Public School System, and since 2001 has been the CEO of the School District of Philadelphia. On November 28, 2006, the Software and Information Industry Association invited him to address the attendees at their Education Technology Business Forum.

He always looked at technology as a tool that could become the great equalizer. He has been using technology for that purpose in four areas in the Philadelphia school district.

Teacher Competency: In order to improve the schools, he needed to install some consistency from school to school. He has acted from the belief that a superior instructional model, ongoing benchmarking of student performance, and access to a wide range of resources will turn a mediocre instructor into a competent one. Students are benchmarked every 6 weeks in elementary schools, 10 weeks in secondary schools; and teachers see the results almost immediately.

Classroom Resources: He asserted that most students are visual learners. The single greatest classroom improvement for the money is the use of smartboards with computers (see 26 second demo). They focus and engage students. It’s like going from a class of 30 to a class size of 15. Number 2 is providing enough laptops for all of the kids.

Parent Deficit: There is no parental involvement for a high percentage of the students in Philadelphia. By bringing parents into the schools as volunteers, and then training them in Philadelphia’s familynet system, parental involvement increases with access to benchmarks, lesson plans, portfolios, homework assignments, and class web sites from home.

Physical Improvement of Buildings: With a lot of help from Microsoft, Philadelphia built one school of the future: environmentally friendly, fully connected, a plethora of computers, labs, etc. They found that the operating costs of this school are 30–40% less than those of a traditional school. But, 90% of the schools in Philadelphia are in poor condition. If Philadelphia were to fully bring every school up to current standards, the cost would be close to $6 billion, an amount that is unachievable. But, by concentrating on laptops, internet connections, whiteboards, printers, and projectors, he can modernize every single classroom in grades 6–12 for $550 million; and that’s a number that’s achievable. While ideally, you want to accomplish full modernization, learning takes place in the classrooms. Once the kids are on the computers learning, the rest of the environment fades to the background.

He is not optimistic about reducing class size, nor is he expecting that technology will enable him to increase class sizes. When you consider the parents who have options of removing their kids from the district, they have two questions: 1) how safe is the school, and 2) what is the class size. When class sizes are over 30, these parents find alternatives for their kids.

When he arrived in Philadelphia, teacher retention was 72%; in 2005-6, it was 94%. He attributes this to superior instructional models, with access to materials and lesson plans, better preparation and training of teachers, better resources, and the use of thousands of student teachers. Philadelphia has one of the highest numbers of university students in the country; they bring in 1200 student teachers each semester, and 1/3 of them eventually apply for permanent teaching positions in the schools. Those teachers have already been through Philadelphia teacher training and already know what they’re in for.

When he arrived, schools had to first fill positions by allowing teachers with seniority, and only if there were not any internal applicants, could they hire. Now, schools can fill half of their openings with hirees. He finds that schools are using the seniority system for their gym teacher, but hiring the math teacher.

The one thing he wants to lobby for is to allow federal erate money (funds provided for technology in schools that derives from a tax on telecommunications services) to be spend for classroom modernization, electrification, and technology.

He does not have the money to provide supplemental pay for excellence. But, he can reward great teachers by paying them as mentors, or for performing other tasks.