::A Geek in Korea::

I did a “get to know your classmates” exercise that works as an icebreaker activity. The tension before the students did this activity compared to how relaxed they were was very obvious. The students are given three different surveys with different questions on them. They have to go around the room making questions from the statements by changing the verb forms, then chatting for a few minutes afterwards. The activity went extremely well. The students all jumped at the chance to get to know one another, and I heard lots of English being spoken in class. Some of the questions weren’t entirely applicable to everyone in class, so they had to try really hard to find people to meet those requirements. Here are some of the things I learned in class:

1. No one knows anything about Cincinnati, Ohio. When I asked people if they knew a single thing about my home town, not a single student in ANY of my classes (150+ students) could answer a single thing about the city. That’s about right. I struggled to come up with a few notable things myself that would related to anyone outside of southwestern Ohio. (P&G? Cincinnati Sports teams that rarely win important things? Roller coasters? Cows? Luckily I didn’t have to bring up “race riots“.)

2. No one in Korea swims in lakes. People who asked me this question would pose it in this manner, “This is ridiculous, but have you ever gone swimming in a lake?”

3. No one goes hunting. I’ve never gone hunting, despite being on safari with my parents who do hunt for sport quite often. I was the only person that answered this question in all the classes.

4. No students travel by taxi. The question, “Do you travel to school by taxi?” was greeted by looks that were surprising to me. I know a lot of students travel by bus, or walk, but you’d think occasionally someone would run late and need a taxi. NEVER. Students walk five or more blocks from the subway stop, but would never think of taking a taxi to get to school.

5. MANY students drink alcohol to the point of blacking out or memory loss. Four students in a single class admitted that they had lost their wallets because they had drank too much, passed out, then work up without any wallet on their person. All the students claim that they simply “dropped” their wallet will passed out and didn’t remember where it was. No one thought they got mugged. Several students told me they woke up in their own bed, not knowing how their got there but lacking their wallets, so they assumed it fell out in a taxi. Both men and ladies acted like this happened a few times a year, or frequently enough not to be a big deal. Yikes.

6. When you say, “Did grow up in the country”, no one knows what the hell you are talking about. There was a paired question, “Did you grow up in the city?” which was clear, but several students thought the former question meant, “Did you grow up in THIS country, Korea, or are you a foreigner?”

7. Students that eat at the cafeteria like to drink only water with their breakfast. They don’t spend money on coffee, or drink milk in the morning. Almost no one skips breakfast. No one eats toast in the morning.

8. Nearly everyone showers before their classes, but many people admit to not washing up before class. Even in the afternoon.

9. One student a class still buys CDs.

10. 20% of the class grew up living with their grandparents.

I’m going to repeat this activity a few more times tomorrow. I wonder how the answers will change in my later classes. The class was up and talking, which was a rousing success for me! I hope I can keep the momentum going through the entire semester.

So soon people with Android phones are going to be able to download a version of Google Goggles that will use optical character recognition to be able to translate things in their environment. Scan an image with text you don’t understand, the picture is sent to Google, they analyze it, then translate and send it back to you. In a few years when this is mature, people would be able to point their phones at a menu or an item with foreign text and have a machine ready translation on their phone screen on the fly. Of course, this only works with German to English translations at the moment, but the idea is still solid. This is going to be expanded for all 53 languages that Google Translate currently covers.

Image this being widely available when I have a test in class? Most of the written work I get back reads like machine translation anyway. I can’t imagine what will happen when this starts to catch on and students will just scan books and be able to understand it all in their native tongue. Will anyone bother learning new languages when this sort of thing is around?

As an information worker that does this with people ranging from small children to adults, who makes a living on being able to teach people skills related to translation and language use because it is painstakingly time intensive to do this on your own, DAMN IT GOOGLE. You are interfering with my future potential cash flow.

Of course, I don’t spend all my time doing “Menu reading and ordering” exercises, but if Google Goggles is going to be around translating everything, how far off will some sort of universal translation device really be? 10 years? 20 years? Yes, machine translation is usually only “just enough” to get meaning across, but the massive amount of money spent on English education is going to start looking pretty strange when Koreans can travel abroad and just point their phones at everything to understand enough of what is being written to get by in most situations. How much are you willing to actually pay to understand just that much more that the machine translation doesn’t get across? You aren’t going to want to use machine translation to read Shakespeare, but who reads Shakespeare these days unless it is for some TOEIC test prep?

Eventually there will be a point where machine translation will be “good enough” for everyday use in more important tasks. What happens to the tribe of ESL when that point arrives? Become specialists working to improve the machines grasp on language acquisition? Machine ESL? I don’t know enough binary to explain English grammar rules! FUCK! I’m in a job that might not be around in 10 years time if things keep progressing this fast. I’m to young to be facing that.

For all those that think I’m off my rocker, there is push by Koreans to get robots to replace ESL teachers in the classroom. Yes. That is an actual idea put forth by policy makers. This is because the majority of people that study English in Korea aren’t learning it for conversation. They pursue it simply as a subject in a class that has rules to be mastered, not as a tool for communication. You have to get a good grade in this subject to get into a university, so they study it. They need it for a job, so they study it. Far too few people actually USE it for anything other than tests proving they can use it. They would settle for machine translation if they could make a robot good enough to handle classroom problems.*

Robotic teachers would be able to repeat, “Hello, nice to meet you, I’m fine.” 100x, which is what Korean text books expect their teachers to do in school. The subtext to this entire idea is that there are people so freaked out by studying with foreigners in Korea that they’d rather deal with machines that can’t actually understand them at all. To those “Korean robots will replace foreign teachers!” We ARE just English speaking machines but sometimes we get sick, or ask for basic human respect. They can’t handle that.

Goddamn singularity better happen soon. Then I’ll just accept that I’ll be completely obsolete and do something completely new with my nano-machinery implants and Internet backed up brain.

*with a ruler.

I  hate to take off my gloves to use my new touch screen phone when it is cold. It turns out I can use those somewhat disgusting Korean cheese sausages to fool the touch screen and skip the need to remove my gloves. The only bad thing is that cheese sausages usually have a metal clip on each end, which would scratch up my new kick ass phone. I do like the image of a thoughtful businessman wearing gloves on the street tapping at his phone with a cheese sausage complaining about the cold weather. Pretty awesome.

I fought the urge to be an iPhone early adopter for several months because I was looking to get an Android phone when they launched in Korea. The iPhone mentality doesn’t mesh well with my lifestyle, but I really did want to get a cool new phone that would let me take advantage of the WiFi networks at home and at work. I made a reservation when the Motorola Motoroi was announced for Korea a week ago. My Android phone was finally delivered today. I played around with my Brother-in-Law’s phone yesterday after he got it delivered from an online retailer. He ordered the same thing after he checked out my recommendation in December. He came over to my apartment because I have a WiFi access point for the phone to use to download applications, and he didn’t want to use his data transfer limit early in the month. I set him up with apps from Android Zoom.

The most practical application I’ve found for setting up the phone was “Bar Code Scanner“. Once you download that from the market, you can use it to scan QR codes. QR codes are blocks of black and white barcodes that can contain URLS and other personal information. You can then simply point the camera at the website that contains a QR code and download an application or go to a particular website without having to enter text. It means you can browse on a computer, then quickly import the information via camera, and then immediately download the application you were looking for online. This saves time trying to run through lots of categories in the market when you are looking for one particular application.

Google Goggles is absolutely astounding when it works. Take a picture, then let the optical character recognition do it’s work. It makes me feel like I live in the future with this magical device that can give me information about anything around me. We scanned a cup I have from Krispy Kreme. The optical scanner then found the logo online and then gave us information about the company. Sure, if I just had a computer handy I could look it up myself, but it was pretty cool to see how well it worked. If the search results continue to be accurate and grow in usefulness I’ll keep this on my phone for a while to play around with.

dPod is basically the main reason I wanted a smartphone. I listen to tons of podcasts that update on a regular schedule. If I can set up an application on my phone that can track, download, and manage all of them without the need for my Mp3 player or even a wire, I’ll be saving a lot of time. Since this works over the WiFi access point I have at home, I could have a perpetually up to date list of podcasts without having to download and sync them all the time. I will have something to listen to no matter where I go, and even when I am away from the computer I can download something if I am bored. I’m giving this application a trial run, but it seems to be working so far for my needs.

Having a phone that can access the web and download applications from developers easily to extend its functions is pretty awesome. I’m going to be carrying it around with me for a while, so I should get used to how it will fundamentally change my approach to information access. Finding good applications to try out and just enjoying access anywhere and anytime is going to take some time.

I have a phone primarily at the moment to answer SMS about things I need to do, or have done, while outside the house. In class I have no opportunity to answer the phone, so it basically acts as a device where people send me notes of 140 characters or shorter and I reply, depending on urgency, when I receive them or at the time of shortest possible convenience. In situations where real time information is called for, or when text is insufficient, I will call people to attempt conversation, but I avoid this whenever possible. I probably text message 20 times more frequently than I call someone. It just works better for me.

My phone has served me well for the past few years, but I am upgrading this week. Luckily for me this is fortuitous, as my phone has begun to act strangely. I do not receive text messages when they are written and sent. I only get text messages when I attempt to call someone and have a dial tone. If I call someone on my phone, I’ll suddenly get about five SMS messages all at once. This will cause my phone to vibrate, me to get surprised, and the person on the other end of the conversation to get very confused as I attempt to read the messages while they are talking to me.

I’ve also been unable to get incoming calls from time to time, which means if I send a text message to tell people to call me, I might not know they have unless I call them myself. Thus, when I do get a batch of SMS on my phone, they mostly consist of, “CALL ME! I need to speak to you!”

I only call people when I get a message that needs clarification. I only receive messages when I call someone. I wouldn’t know to call someone unless I had a message from them telling me to call them.

I can’t wait to get my new phone.

Stop me if I get this bad.

My mood seems to be reflected in the weather today. I had an incident that ruined my day, and it’s been rainy and overcast outside. My day at work was spent mostly looking at grades in the computer and discussing something serious that went down in one of my classes with my director. It was not a good day in the slightest. I hope this moves to a speedy resolution.

Not only that, but my plan to try to fix my computer made two steps forward and yet a step back again. Just when I thought I had solved the problem of updating my BIOS and booting from a USB stick, I find out that while I was indeed successful in booting from my USB, the system itself can’t detect anything because I have an ext4 file system on my computer. At least, that’s the problem I think I have. I could go and reformat and mess around with my partitions since I am planning to start over clean anyway, but there is no way I can test the hypothesis that I diagnosed the problem accurately at the moment.

I have a few weeks to sort out the current computer problems, but I’ve had nothing but mounting frustrations all day.

Here I was, systematically backing up all my files for the past week with my ultra-slow external USB drive. This is because a few weeks ago my regular DVD drive died and I needed to pick a replacement. I bought a USB drive because it was potentially portable. If I ever bought a notebook that lacked a DVD drive because it was ultra thin and needed to install something that still came on a physical drive, I could potentially use my external DVD drive to make it happen. I thought that if I needed a DVD it might be handy to keep around, especially if I ever wanted to reinstall an operating system. Despite the DVD writing at x 0.4x speed I wasn’t annoyed because I’d eventually be able to get to installing something new.

It turns out though that you are up a creek if you want to boot from an external USB drive at start up. I forgot to realize that the drivers to control a USB DVD drive aren’t going to be in most BIOS settings that look for bootable things when you start your computer. My internal DVD drive was bootable before, but now that is an external USB device, it only works when the Operating System is working. The operating system I want to replace isn’t going to let me to continue to run the device while I wipe it from my machine and run something on top of it. I need the operating system running to erase and install a new operating system. PARADOX.

Now I have a slow external drive that can’t be used to install any new operating system at all, and no current solution to my problem. I’ve actually got to go to the store and buy a USB stick and make it bootable with the image of the OS I am attempting to install to solve this problem unless I want to buy a second internal DVD drive. Even then, there are twenty steps just to make this work-around succeed. If I am lucky I’ll be able to boot from my USB stick, assuming I don’t need to update my BIOS on my Motherboard, which takes a few dozen steps itself.

Just when I thought I was ready to get something done, I have to do twenty more things just to do something simple. I know I can do what I need to myself to get it all accomplished as quickly as possible, but it’s so damn annoying to have to deal with all this. I hate computers SO much sometimes.

In one of my evening classes I had been forced to come up with proverbs on the spot when we got to a particular place in the book. I drew a blank when I was forced to think of specific sayings of wisdom. I hate being put on the spot and forced to come up with a series of interesting expressions on the spot unless it is in my wheelhouse of knowledge. I came back to class today prepared with a lot of cool proverbs. Where did I get proverbs? From a book that was almost 155 years old!

Google Books has recently become one of my favorite teaching resources. It’s got lots of very awesome texts that you can pull material from. They scanned this old book with lots of proverbs, then digitized it and put it on the internet. Because it was out of print and the rights to it had lapsed, I could use it with attribution in my class. That’s just what I did.

I grabbed all the best proverbs with longer descriptions and illustrations. Unfortunately I couldn’t use the .pdf file to extract the images, but I did get the characters to copy without retyping them all by hand with their archaic grammar and spelling. Then I built my lesson around identifying and explaining different proverbs.

The illustrated proverb book I chose has archaic rhyming poetry that explains proverbs! Yes! It’s so awesome to use in class that I was actually giddy finding different things for class to use. It is a gold mine of inside jokes. I got to use the word “bung hole” in proper context in class! How could I possibly pass on an opportunity like that?! I copy over the poetry as a hint, snag the proverb on the file I prepared, and separate them for my own list if I needed to hand out the hint sheet. I write the different proverbs on the board and ask for explanations of each.

The task of the student is to either identify the proverb from the old English poem hint if they didn’t know any of them, or use the hint and proverb to explain the lesson it teaches if they recognize the proverb when I write it on the board. Then if the students know any Korean language proverbs with the same lesson, we went over those translated in English as well. Almost all the English proverbs had a similar Korean idea too. Sometimes they lose a little in translation however.

This was a challenging, FUN, high level exercise that I did with a single student for an hour. I think with two or three more students it could be even more fun, as it would challenge them to explain and work together, and also interpret their opinions of the proverbs differently. I’ll be doing this in any high level class I teach in the future. I only pulled eight proverbs out of a 257 page book! I have dozens of other books to search too. Google Books has sped up my researching and my class planning considerably. I absolutely will take advantage of everything I ever need to research in the future with it first before I bother asking for a bunch of teaching materials from others. I can plan a more in depth bit of work at home, away from my teaching resources now because I never need to worry about having access to physical books anymore. That’s totally kick ass.

Ironically the lesson I’ve been teaching this week is about being a geek. It starts with a student having problems with their computer and friends giving him advice. I got to ask students about who they call for tech support, what is the first thing they turn on in the morning, and discuss lots of gadget related phrasal verbs. I think I got my lesson taught well enough, but it was three grammar heavy classes that left me drained about teaching about technology and computers.

It turns out that I’ve turned into the computer repair guy around the office without even trying. I’ve already successfully diagnosed two computer problems so far for people I work with. I repaired something driver related in the office, then helped with advising how to fix a problem without ever seeing the computer at someone’s home simply by running through the steps I would try to isolate the problem. I’m not really the “Fix the computer” type, but now I’ve got that reputation and people are asking for more help. What have I done?

It was a long day talking about gadgets, but I got to talk about the topic of fixing my computer with lots of recent anecdotes. I had a computer problems earlier in the week and had to call my tech savvy brother-in-law to get my computer fixed. We cracked open the case, cleaned out the dust, and went to work. Luckily it was only the 5 year old CD/DVD combo drive that needed to be replaced and was failing to let the BIOS find the OS to boot. It was a lot easier, and cheaper than I expected to fix.

I’m a very tired geek at the moment.