A throwback to my experience with educational software and attempt to make some.
I have been thinking a little about the impact of the digital technologies on education, it has been significant and with the advent pandemic ubiquitous. I am interested in NLProc (Natural Language Processing) and have been pondering it’s applications in pedagogy and education a little. These brought back some memories of what can loosely be considered my Edtech Adventures.
Around 2007, digital lessons, whether power point presentations or the interactive programs that had to be paid for started becoming part of our school’s teaching plans. I am not sure if they helped the teachers teach better, nonetheless their presence in the lesson plans increased. They were honeypot for me. The animation and the interactive nature was new and fun. They were different from the daily lessons taught by the teachers in the standard classroom setting. When teachers arranged to take us to the computer lab (Ooh, yes Laboratory), so they could show this content with a projector, it was exciting, many of us would run to get the seats of choice in front of the projection screen.
A lot of these commercial digital lessons were on CDs, loaded with interactive lessons. They would generally be about a topic, many of them from Science, but they also existed for Moral stories and even some topics of Social Science (Geography, History and Civics).
My first EdTech (labeling now) adventure was about creating digital lessons. For an inter-school exhibition(science fair) that was to be held, I proposed an idea. The idea was a suite of tools, that would allow teachers to make interactive lessons themselves. The basis of the suite was MS Power point but it had a couple of bells and whistles.
The bell was the now expired Macromedia Flash. In power point, you had power point and it had animations and even clicks and interactions that could be made available. The idea was to make Flash the default packaging. A software (have to search for its name) allowed one to convert a power point presentation into a flash program (and it did it pretty well). This meant you could convert a simple power point, into an read-only interactive program (digital lesson) with nothing but a few clicks of the button. I still have admiration for that software, it was useful and good.
The whistle was Text to Speech. These I think were the early days. Compared to the virtual assistants and speech generation right now, they were primitive but nonetheless impressive. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft still uses elements from it’s then TTS programs in Cortana. They had a couple of things right even then. They had voice packages that could read in different voices, they allowed for exporting to .wav files. You could even adjust the speed of the reading. I think Dragon was the leader in the field then, but the Microsoft freeware and some other open source tools did do the job sufficiently well. Sure the accent and the mistakes done by the TTS then, will still make me laugh, but you had something that could read text and that was useful.
TTS was still not available for the native languages of the India subcontinent. Baraha was still the main tool to help type in them (Kannada and Hindi, which were relevant at my school), and one had to use manual transliteration into English to even make the TTS work. I didn’t go down that road.
For the exhibition, the submission included two such digital lessons. The first one was a program made with the above suite (I know it’s an exaggeration ?), which was a series of lateral thinking questions straight out of a book. Each slide of the original power point had the text of the question, an associated TTS audio file embedded which would start playing when the slide came on and animations allowing you to navigate ahead. So you could start the program and go through the set of the questions.
The second one was a little different, it was an English or science quiz, where slides had a PPT version of Match the following or Fill in the blanks format questions popular at the time. TTS to read the question and then interactive actions in answering them and the standard navigation. These were things one could use as refreshers of topic or self tests and completely digital.
These were modeled after the digital lesson disks that were making their presence known, an imitation but what I remember hoping would be useful for the teachers. Sadly, after the fair, I don’t remember why and where I shelved it, but it did not move ahead to make any significant change or impact to way the teaching plans. This was few years before Khan Academy and Youtube videos became mainstream.
The second adventure was a Visual Basic program, and you can realize it is less interesting. It was wiki page like program of a historical figure. I believe I went with Leonardo Da Vinci, I had been slightly fascinated with him after learning about the Vitruvian man, in exploration about the Golden Ratio. The program had different sections and a common right side box with a picture and name. It is very likely that a big chunk of that program I had found from a senior’s program and repurposed. I have vague memory of getting waiver from an computer studies exam for completing this. It was a VB program that I may or may not have packaged as an exe. It could be run be and it would work like a micro-encyclopedia Britannica about just the one figure. Now that I think about it, it was modeled after the digital version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I had more than half a decade of exposure to computers when I had these adventures. It was a privilege most of peers did not have.
Educational applications of NLProc (and broadly AI) are important, I am yet to dive into it’s current state but eager to see what impact it is having and the direction it is heading in. Educational Applications of NLP, brings together the glamour (is it just me ??)of NLProc with the critical ground impact on Education. With great impact comes great responsibility ?. We have started recognizing and giving long due consideration the ethics of such research and applications. With the educational applications, I think wider (and equitable) Accessibility and Availability are important (myopically, I believe it means availability in widespread languages and very low economic barrier), it also has the onus of being more accurate and careful. The audience and the main stakeholders are young minds aka future leaders and deserve a lot of care from the makers of such tech.
