I’m a regular reader of Future Perfect, a Vox column that had its start with the Effective Altruism movement. I know Sam Bankman Fried took a lot of people’s money using EA as a mask for his intentions, but I think Vox and Future Perfect have recovered.
A good place to start is the 10 most popular stories from 2024.
Open Source, too!
Carol Chapelle at Iowa State has morphed her focus from tech to AI and language learning. A logical change. She is leading up a team with a new journal, Exploring AI in Applied Linguistics.
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/plugins/books/154/
As a slow learner of written Japanese I am at Wanikani Level 20/60 after about a year. I like to check out how others are going about it. So I create a feed for Reddit’s LearnJapanese. Here is someone who finished up all 60 levels of Wanikani (a kanji learning program, $100 off this week for a lifetime license) after only a year and a half, and has now gone beyond Wanikani for a year.
Another interesting student is a German software developer and how he approaches the language.
From that we can learn about new tools. An old one that has been updated recently is Yomitan, whose browser extension allows you to research meaning, readings, and more while on the web. Another new one for me is the jpdb, a database of kanji you can customize to a great extent.
Huge (600 pp) trove of research on children’s (toddler to adolescent) use of digital screens. Open Source (free to download) too. From Springer. Handbook of Children on Screens.
I polled my students and the ONLY AI they used was ChatGPT. It felt like the iPhone phenomenon, but even worse. They were unaware of any others. I am set to remedy that in the next couple of weeks with a 3-week intro to “Using AI for Language Learning”, the final module of three of my classes.
It seems that AI researchers use different AIs for different purposes. The new favorite in Silicon Valley is Anthropic’s Claude AI. Here is Kevin Roose from the NYTimes on this. (Gift article)
I’m curious about what you use for yourself and for students. I’ve been playing around with TalkPal to improve my Japanese. It seems to work. I do get a flavor of how nervous my students are using AI for learning. I hope to teach them to feel more in control. I’m beta testing IDoRecall where you can add spaced repetition learning to almost anything you encounter, and link back to it if you don’t remember the flash cards. I’ve signed up for a similar site at YouLearn. Still looking into both.