How langolab is supposed to work

The way it's supposed to work is that you watch a video or read a text. The video or text may have been posted by another user or a teacher. If there's a word in the text or video caption that you don't understand, just click on it to look it up in the dictionary:


By clicking on the "Add to flash cards" link, you can also add words to your set of flash cards, which you can save, share, or test yourself on.

Note: I've put more information about the "Show options" link at the bottom, for those of you who are curious.

Now suppose there is a phrase or sentence you don't understand. If you see the "Notes" link at the right of the text or video caption, you can click on it and mouse over the notes to see which parts of the text or video caption they correspond to:



Click on one of the notes to read it:


The notes contain useful information about phrases and sentences in langolab. But, suppose there are no notes. Then you must ask a question and throw yourself at the question-answering mercy of the langolab community. Do this by selecting the text for which you want to ask the question. As soon as you select the text, a dialog box appears. Click "Ask question" in the dialog to ask your question:



Teachers or native speakers can answer questions by clicking on the "Questions" tab for Text or Videos:

Or by clicking the "MORE" link at the Langolab nav bar:


Once the question is answered, the answer becomes a note for the text that anybody can read! The question-asking system clearly needs further refinement, so please speak up if you have suggestions!

A few other notes

Suppose you click on a word that is not in the langolab dictionaries, or you just want to add a new definition because you think the existing ones aren't good enough. You can add a custom definition:



Furthermore, suppose that you want to make a note without asking a question. You can do this too. Just select the text you want to make the note on and click "Add Note":



Now just type in your note and, voila, you've created a new note that will help anyone who reads the text or video caption in the future!

Of course we would always love to hear about any feedback, comments, criticisms, or visions. We are also looking for entrepreneurial collaborators who might want to work on langolab with us. Right now we especially need a usability/UI engineering/graphic design/branding guru. If this describes you, PLEASE contact me!

Seeking graphic designer

We are looking for a Chicago-based graphic designer to be a co-founder at langolab. We need someone who is a real graphic design ninja. If you have a deep and uncanny connection with branding, usability, and web graphic design, if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and if you would like to conspire with us to make the site a success then this might be the perfect opportunity for you. Please contact us if this sounds interesting: join("adam", "@", "8planes", ".com"). You must be located in Chicago.

Video Upload Tutorial

Langolab allows users to post and caption videos from Youtube or straight from a webcam or video file. Once videos are captioned, foreign language learners can watch the video and click on words in the captions for instant dictionary lookup. Notes can also be added to the captions. Many of you have asked how to upload and caption videos on langolab. Here's How!

Uploading

To get started, go to the Video page and click on "Add New Video". This will open the upload dialog popup as shown below:




For the purposes of this demonstration, we'll use the youtube upload option, but you can also upload a video from your computer or record directly to langolab from your webcam. This last option may be especially useful for teachers wanting to give their students a video featuring the words from their next vocab test.

With my youtube url on hand, I enter a title, description and other info for the video (these can always be changed later, so don't worry too much about it).

After clicking "Youtube" on the right side of the upload dialog, a second popup appears. I enter the URL of the youtube video, and click "OK".



Now the video shows up on my video list page.

Captioning

I'll need to edit the video to provide the captions. I click "EDIT"...



...and the edit dialog opens. The edit dialog contains the tools to add captions to the video and the ability to edit the title, description, and so on. It looks something like this:


Captions flow through three parts: from the CAPTION ENTRY section at the top left, to the CAPTIONS ON DECK section at the lower left, and finally to the CAPTIONS section just below the video display.

Under CAPTION ENTRY, select the Import tab and then click "Upload":

You'll need to copy & paste the captions in now. Individual captions can be separated by a newline or just by a period. You'll see all the captions appear in the CAPTIONS ON DECK section. If you don't have the transcript for the video you can enter captions one-by-one under the Enter tab also, but be forewarned: this is a PITA.

Now play the video. As you play the video, add captions from the CAPTIONS ON DECK section to match what is being said in the video by clicking "Add".

I usually just hold my mouse over the Add button of the top caption and click it right before each caption comes up in the video. So long as you imported the captions and are not entering them one-by-one, it's easy to caption and should take only as much time as the length of the video.

Finishing touches

From the edit dialog, you can watch the video all the way through. Check that the CURRENT CAPTION matches what you are hearing in the video. If you were slightly off in assigning a caption, you can adjust the time using the time controls to the left of the captions in the CAPTIONS section. If you need to edit the caption itself, you can edit it directly. You can also remove captions, and add missing captions. You will always be able to go back and change the timing and content of captions through this same interface.


Finally...

Remember to publish your video!
Click "PUBLISH" at the upper right corner of the edit dialog when you are done.

Give it a try and please leave a comment if you have any questions or if we could do something better. Happy posting!

Spanish, French, and Italian

Previously the langolab dictionaries for Spanish, French, and Italian were totally laughable. But now, like some other tools out there, langolab grabs Spanish, French, and Italian definitions from babylon:


(This picture taken from Baudelaire's L'Albatros). So now one can upload and caption Spanish and French videos and text to langolab, for their own use or for others. Bon appétit!

The Picture Game

"In the real world, conversations with sympathetic native speakers who are willing to help the acquirer understand are very helpful." - Stephen Krashen

I know from introspection and from conversations with other German students that we want to be able to talk and interact in an educational way with native speakers. Games with our classmates are fun but, to really learn the language, games are best played with native speakers. The internet provides unprecedented opportunity for this to happen.

I want to come up with games for langolab that are intense, addictive, and that force the players to learn each others' language. Here is my first attempt. The majority of construction work is already finished for this game.

The Game

Without loss of generality, I arrive at the langolab site (recall I am an English speaker learning German), and I'm paired with a German speaker learning English. We're both shown a picture and a question. I have to answer the question in English and do my best to answer the question in German:

Meanwhile, my partner Klaus in Germany is answering the same question in German and doing his best to answer the question in English. We each hit the SUBMIT button, and now we are looking at each others' responses. I am required to read Klaus' German response and correct his imperfect English:

Meanwhile, Klaus is correcting my imperfect German after reading my English answer. Of course, his German text is like all other foreign language text (including video captions) on langolab -- I can click on the words to get instant definitions in English and add any words to my set of flash cards:

This ensures that, no matter how bad Klaus' English is, I'm able to determine what he's trying to say because I can read his German. Of course Klaus can also click on my English words to get definitions in German, so he's also able to determine what I'm trying to say in spite of my terrible German.

As soon as Klaus and I finish correcting each others' text, we both hit the submit button again and now we can view each others' corrections:

Note that I can click on unfamiliar words in Klaus' correction, just like I could click on words in his original German response. After we feel like we've studied each others' corrections enough, we move on to the next picture/question combination.

We can add an interactive chat (which can also have the click-on-words feature) and also save responses, so that they can later be inspected and graded by a teacher or mentor, or so that Klaus and I can reminisce over our meeting and the German and English we respectively learned while trying to communicate with each other. Maybe this way, again WLOG, I could browse through the native German responses on the site and my curiosity about people's responses would thereby drive me to learn more German.

I Need Your Help and Feedback

Is there any way I could make this more useful to German teachers? Are there enough Germans learning English to make the game useful? My understanding is that most Germans can speak English fluently at a very young age. Hopefully there will be enough who at least want to improve their English skills to make the game tenable. What about the time zone difference between the US and Germany? Does anyone think that kills the idea? Finally, does something similar or identical to this already exist?

I would be totally overjoyed if anyone wants to partner together with me and go through the wireframes in a more detailed way. I'm not sure if I understand the teacher's world of language labs and partner teachers well enough. Please contact me through email or by leaving a comment if you would like to partner together. Anyone here in Chicago is invited with especial enthusiasm!

Things foreign language teachers can currently do with langolab

1. Post text for your students to read. When students encounter words they don't know, they can just click on the words to get definitions. They can also add the words to a set of flash cards to test themselves on later. This saves students innumerable hours of flipping through a dictionary, and each minute of dictionary-flipping is one that could be better spent learning. For a German text example, please see the first paragraph of Kafka's Die Verwandlung on langolab.
   
   You can also add notes to text -- just select the word, phrase, or sentence and click "Add Note" in the dialog box that appears. The notes are useful when there are phrases or sentences that are difficult to understand. The aforementioned text contains a few notes that you can check out (just click on the "4 Notes" link at the upper right corner of the text, then mouse over and click notes).
   
   
2. If you see a video on Youtube that you'd like your students to watch, you can post it on langolab. Just go to the video page and click on "Add new video". You can add captions to the video using langolab. Langolab treats the captions just like any other text, meaning that your students can click on words in the captions to get definitions as they're watching the video. Like regular text, you can also add notes to the captions, and students can ask questions on them. For an example, please see Loki und Smoky: Wer ist der Kaiser? or the Die Prinzen music video for Küssen Verboten.
   
   
3. Need a great way to give your students the vocabulary list for their next test? Get together with another teacher and then get creative and record a short skit using the vocab words. You can either record the skit directly on langolab using your webcam, or you can upload the video file to langolab. Once the video is captioned, your students can watch it and build up a list of flash cards for the vocab.

Once again, if you have recommendations, advice, complaints, or a vision that you would like to share, please leave a comment.

A few words about langolab.com

langolab.com is a rather humble project, at least insofar as there are just a couple of people behind it. We're trying to make a tool that will be useful to foreign language teachers and anyone trying to study a foreign language. The project started out as my attempt to learn German. I saw that there were very few opportunities to immerse myself in German here in the US, but I realized that the internet contained a lot of German media and lots of native German speakers. I began creating a tool that would help leverage the abundance of media and people on the internet for learning German, and langolab.com is the result.

Right now we would really love to connect with foreign language teachers who might be interested in trying out langolab. If you see something that could be improved, or you have a vision for part or all of the site, please leave a comment on the blog. It will be as if you have a smart expert programmer (me) at your disposal, whose main goal in life currently is to make a superior foreign language learning tool. I will read and personally respond to all comments, and I have no problem with staying up for nights on end and working like a maniac to make your life easier with langolab. My dream is to post my plans for langolab on this blog, and then to get feedback from the foreign language teaching community on the ideas. When the ideas are implemented, they'll benefit everyone.