The Magic Beans of Educational Technology

One of the trends I’ve noticed recently in my consultancy work is to get part of the way through an engagement before we reach what I’ve taken to calling ‘the magic beans moment’.

Sometimes this happens close to the beginning and sometimes almost at the end of a project, but it always involves a meeting with someone in the client organisation realising that the technology solution they’ve opted for is not the automatic route to profit/sexiness/increased student retention/a BAFTA (delete as appropriate) that they were hoping for. In other words, the magic beans they thought had been planted have resulted in a fairly standard-looking plant, not the mighty forest of their dreams.

To be fair, most of the people I work with don’t believe in magic beans. They’ve been around educational software and hardware long enough to understand that there are always limitations; that technology is not a substitute for good teaching or good instructional design, but there will always be some people - often those who control budgets and decisions - who believe that technology alone is enough.

One of the hardest things about being a consultant is having to deliver the news that I can’t perform miracles. At one meeting, a senior person in a technology team actually asked me to tell him why the software he was working a 70-hour week to build wasn’t ‘just a gimmick’. I went away and thought long and hard about it, but in the end I wasn’t able to reassure him. I decided that his product was potentially very useful (in conjunction with great pedagogy and teachers), but that wasn’t the headline-grabbing answer he was looking for. In short, I couldn’t give him the magic beans.

How not to learn a language

I've been teaching a language (English) for nearly thirteen years, and learning other languages (French, Mandarin, Norwegian) since I was five. Although I've never mastered a second language to fluency, I've got pretty far - enough to have regular, decent conversations in Mandarin when I lived in China and more recently in Norwegian. I've been teaching and writing materials for EFL (English as Foreign Language) all my working life. I was even commissioned to write several textbooks on the subject by Harper Collins. I thought of myself as something as an expert on the subject of learning and teaching other languages for some years.

Until I met Kevin.

Kevin wears pink shoelaces and likes jumping out of aeroplanes, but these are some of the less interesting facts about him. For me, the most interesting thing about Kevin is the way he's gone about learning Japanese. His goal is to move to Japan and teach English there, and so he's been diligently preparing for around 18 months by learning about the language and culture of Japan. This is in stark contrast to the approach I took when I moved to China to study English. A Pakistani newspaper vendor in Charing Cross station taught me how to say 'ni hao' (hello) and that was the only Chinese phrase I was equipped with when I moved there in April 2001. I could not have been less prepared. By contrast, Kevin is able to hold a decent conversation with any Japanese person he meets, and he hasn't even set foot in the country yet. What's really intriguing is how he's gone about this.

Kevin, speaker of Japanese, rider of tractors.

The general approach of anyone trying to learn another language is to buy a course - a set of face to face lessons with a class of fellow students; a book and audio CD; a multimedia course like Rosetta Stone; or perhaps just a textbook on its own. Kevin didn't really do any of that. Instead he jumped right in at the deep end and started having conversations with Japanese tutors and Japanese people as often as he was able.

He did this initially through a service called italki.com, a website which acts like an eBay for language tutors. You sign up, search for someone who speaks the language you want to learn and either pay them a small amount for a Skype lesson (if they are a professional tutor) or just arrange to talk for free over Skype (if they are just a conversation partner). Tutors are located all over the world, so you could learn Japanese from a Brazilian living in Poland, for example. Kevin has 3-4 regular tutors and conversation partners and schedules hour-long classes or chats with them at different times during the week. Since he started doing this, his conversational ability has increased incredibly quickly. In effect, he's mimicking the ideal situation for language learning - being thrown in at the deep end in the country where the language is spoken.

He has also joined a number of face to face conversational Japanese meetups, which he goes to in the evenings. There, the conversations cover all kinds of topics, making talking much more challenging. One of the problems of using a pre-designed course or textbook is that the conversations you practise there are highly structured and graded so that you aren't challenged too much. In real life, conversation flows from topic to topic, forcing you to search for new vocabulary and grammar structures all the time. Practising in this way means Kevin is far more challenged than the average language student, and can converse more fluently as a result (even if his grammar isn't perfect).

Kevin did go to a traditional Japanese teacher at first, but she was frustrated by his non-linear approach to learning the language, and the fact that he used slang and non-beginner grammar. Her strict methodological approach to teaching the language couldn't cope with his enthusiasm for absorbing Japanese any which way, and they quickly parted company.

As well as speaking Japanese regularly, Kevin uses digital support materials, such as Memrise, an app for helping you to memorise sets of vocabulary very quickly. I wouldn't normally recommend Memrise on its own, as it teaches words out of context, making them easy to forget. But if you are encountering new words every day in conversation or pieces of writing, an app like Memrise can reinforce this learning and help you to build a large vocabulary more quickly. This is especially useful once you have the most important grammar structures sorted, as it dramatically increased your conversational ability.

For the last nine months I've watched Kevin become more confident and more fluent in Japanese, to the point where it's become annoying. He often speaks Japanese to me, even though I can't understand a word he's saying!

His transformation into a Japanese speaker has been quite a profound education for me as well. It made me realise how much I still had to learn as both a learner and a teacher of language. For years I'd been following basically the same pattern, focusing on the course first and the conversation second. Kevin has helped to turn that structure on its head, and now the first thing I advise any language learner to do is to put the textbook away and get on italki. My own language capabilities have benefited as a result of Kevin's example. Yesterday I had satisfying conversations in three languages, and today I had my first Spanish class over Skype.

Today I also helped my step-daughter with her French homework - conjugating verbs. She was bored almost to tears by it, and says she 'hates' French. It makes me terribly sad that so many kids in the UK are being put off the magnificent experience of learning to communicate in another language. I honestly think there is nothing equivalent to the rush of having a successful conversation in another tongue. At least, as adults, we don't have to repeat the awful experiences of language learning at school. Get on italki, book a half-hour trial lesson (Spanish costs as little as £3 for 30 minutes) and then tell me I'm wrong.

Kicking the textbook: how I've started to study online

Despite the fact that I've been creating content for online language learning schools for (good grief) nearly twelve years, I've been a complete stick in the mud about my own language learning. In the past I've preferred to learn through face-to-face classes and textbook study; I've pushed boundaries in my work that I wouldn't go near in my leisure time.

This year I decided to stop being a prat about language learning and to fully embrace the myriad new digital opportunities there are. My chosen language at the moment is Norwegian, partly because I'm planning to travel to Norway next year, but mostly because it gets me in touch with my ancestral roots (my mother's side of the family are all Norwegian).

So in August I signed up to Memrise, the flashcard tool which employs spaced learning to help you memorise vocabulary. Since then I've been slogging away at their 1,200 basic Norwegian words. I'm not a big fan of learning vocabulary in isolation. I think it sticks better when we encounter it in a meaningful context, but nevertheless I've found Memrise very useful for revising the vocabulary I already know (I had 5 or 6 Norwegian lessons a few years ago, as well as many years of exposure to the language when I was a child. Memrise has helped me to remember all the vocabulary I'd passively absorbed over the years.)

I also downloaded the Collins Norwegian/English dictionary, which I find I seldom use because Google Translate is so good now. I must use Google Translate more than any other app now I think. There is very little that it can't translate - just some idiomatic expressions.

Twitter has also been hugely helpful. I've made sure to follow lots of Norwegian (and Danish) people who work in my field, and, particularly when they tweet about educational technology, I am motivated to try and understand what they are saying and (sometimes) to respond. As usual though, most Scandinavians prefer to converse in their excellent English, which makes learning any Scandinavian language extra hard. Fortunately I have several Norwegian cousins as friends on Facebook, and so I can practise my reading and writing with them.

Other digital tools that I've experimented with include YouTube, where I watch snippets from Norwegian TV interviews and the comedy show I Kveld Med Ylvis (even that has English subtitles though, which I try to ignore). I also have a Norwegian radio app, but find that, unless the children's shows are on, the language level is too high for me to benefit from it. I have downloaded a couple of kids apps in Norwegian, which are fun, but too low level.

I also dug out my old textbook and audio CD and did a few more units in that. I find the textbook quite dull, and not being able to practise the language with real people was frustrating.

After a few months of trying these varying methods I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for italki.com, a service which helps you find language teachers and partners. I met a teacher on there who I now have a Skype lesson with once a week. These have been absolutely excellent, against my blinkered expectations. For a start we can negotiate a time that suits both of us (we are both very busy) and there is no travel involved, which keeps the costs low. There are seldom any technical problems with Skype, and she can type in Norwegian as we are speaking to show me new words or explain new grammar. Although she doesn't have a teaching qualification, she has been teaching online for several years, and I find her non-pedagogic approach to teaching quite refreshing. At the moment we are speaking in a mixture of Norwegian and English, whereas with my last teacher we spoke only in Norwegian. I find that I prefer the mixed approach, as it makes me less tired and allows me to ask questions. Nevertheless we speak most of the time in Norwegian, and I find that I've improved hugely in just four lessons.

My plan now is to continue with Skype lessons and with Memrise and Twitter/Facebook. I'll probably dip into my textbook, but only as back up. One thing I'm sure of though - I will never return to fully traditional methods of language learning, and I can't believe I stayed stuck in the mud for so long!