Thought I'd try the new stuff from the BBC as I have kids at the right age. Confused from the start. Menus that bounce up and down on the screen may look good but the designers need some serious help on interface design. Basic design errors abound. For example an icon with a tick on it is the confirm button, yet the meaning seems to be ‘you got it right’. You have to press exit twice from each section, one would have sufficed. There’s also too much loading time, this was disruptive with endless countdowns and waits. Some just didn’t load at all, with no explanation.First episode is a few cartoons – linear and next to zero learning. The second is video broken down into phrases, but some edit points are in the middle of words! Identifying the parts of the car was fine, although the vocabulary (windscreen wipers, licence plate, gears etc) seems a little advanced for this age. In another you have to identify words as you hear them, but this is just identifying what’s said, divorced from the meaning of what’s said. In some interactive exercises when you get things wrong there’s no formative feedback to tell you why or what the right answer is. The ‘make your own comic’ is fine, but is an exercise in sorting sentences and takes too long to navigate and complete. The DJ game is simply to identify masculine, feminine and plural, this is OK, but the vocabulary is too complex at this stage.
Nothing changes, this was a problem with ‘A Vous la France’ (BBC), where a crew seems to have simply gone out to film, then someone had to build a language programme around what was shot. It was, in fact, impossible to learn French from that package.
The whole thing is VERY clunky and clumsy in navigation, style, interaction, vocabulary and learning. “I was fiddling around with it for ages and nothing happened. It was just a movie. It was crap. It’s confusing. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like it was, like, I should have been getting involved more as I was getting a bit bored. I thought it’d be better cause it’s BBC.” Carl (12 years old). Oh dear!
36 comments:
nest to zero learning?
I'm married to an amazing woman who speaks five European languages and a smattering of several others. Across our 35 years together we've had quite a few conversations about how best to learn languages. In the end there's no substitute for choosing the approach that most closely mimics how we learn our own native tongue - trial and error in a rich language environment with emotional engagement and plenty of feedback from people who want to communicate too. That doesn't sound too much like either e-learning or conventional classroom teaching. My French (no- qual) is better than my Spanish (proud possessor of an O Level here... a modest success from conventional secondary school teaching)
I learned my French from:
(i) a Jacques Prevert dual-language Penguin poetry book
(ii) listening to my wife telling other people [in French] stories I already knew [in English]
(iii) reading Agatha Christie novels in French on French soil [vital ingredient=wine?]
(iv) bravely buying stuff in French shops, dictionary in hand
(v) talking with French people about anything and everything whenever I could, whether I had the words for it or not [they've always been so forgiving
In the midst of it all I took a BBC French intermediate radio/book course called 'Viens de Paraitre' which I stuck with for 60% of the course - it helped a bit. But in fact, nothing substitutes for immersion in your chosen tongue (if you'll pardon the expression).
My wife learned two of her languages (Swedish and Spanish) backwards according to most teaching methods - i.e. she spoke it for a few months and picked up vocabulary and idioms - only getting to the formal structure of the language some time later and consolidating her practical learning in the process. Which is rather close to how English kids learn English.
A lesson here I think for all who aspire to learn (or teach) a language.
You've set me thinking - we may be getting closer to this with synthetic environments. If we let learners free in an environment like Habbo Hotel, then picking up conversational French would be possible. This kinda happens with the hybrid English in these worlds. There is in fact an existing French Habbo Hotel but as we're off to Paris tomorrow, we'll give it a try when we get back.
http://www.habbohotel.fr/habbo/fr/
"BBC won the right to spend your money in this way"...of course they did, as a public service organisation that is what they are there for. Free from the money grabbing weasel ethos that drives (by necessity) every private company, they can make what is actually superb content. Private companies have been making the stuff that not made in house.
'Superb content' - see my post on BBC Bitesize - the content is inaccurate, badly designed with no quality control and an absolute disgrace in educational terms.
Why are all the supportive BBC posts anonymous? Doesn't take much to figure out they work for the BBC. And how many people work for the BBC? About half!
I like it.
Regards,
Komail Noori
Web Site Design - SEO Expert
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