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Archive for the ‘service-is-learning-materials-creation’ Category
Mysterious Japanese video DVD: What I have tried
2013/04/05
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Categories: e-languages, service-is-learning-materials-creation
videos
Scraping RSS of online actualités for language learning materials production
2013/03/24
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- The capability of RSS-news feed integration of foreign language news may be standard now in most LMS, but was not in 2002 (not even having an LMS was standard, I had to build my own while it took the university a few more years to adopt Blackboard as I had recommended in 2000):

- But RSS-feed display is skin-deep and, even in extensive-reading pedagogies, not sufficient for integration into teaching and learning which requires more post-processing.
- At a recent Digital Humanities Unconference, I was asked how I had “scraped” (RSS-scraping was chosen since it easier than screen scraping, for RSS is devoid of most markup, as long as it validates) into a SQL-server database. Here are some code-snippets to get you
- from the web

- into the database:



- The scraped plain text in the database can form the foundation for post-processing for SLA-purposes, see e.g. glossing for reading comprehension facilitation or question generation with the trpQuizConverter for
- from the web
Categories: Reading, service-is-learning-materials-creation, service-is-programming
2003, c#, news, rss, SQL, vs.net
LRC offers generating audio files from your foreign language texts
2013/03/01
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- Would you like to expose your student to L2 listening materials beyond the audio learning materials that come with your textbook?
- Materials customized to the learning needs of your classes? From current affairs maybe?
- Would you prefer no to send them to internet audio that may be difficult and time consuming to integrate?
- Do you lack the time to record speaking cues, oral exam questions or reading models yourself?
- Do you need audio files that you and your students can rewind/fast forward/replay, edit and record into with voice insert?
- And would you prefer using audio in your classes that comes with aligned text, whether that audio that has been transcribed or vice versa, to create glossaries, captions, multimedia assignments?
- The LRC now offers generating audio files from your foreign language texts in many languages.
- The service is based on the quality voices of Google Translate text-to-speech (better (simpler) than its actual translation portion, let alone its naïve use).
- Unlike Google translate, the service persists longer than 100 character texts to audio files (mp3) that (and the underlying digital text) we can work with further, in your syllabus, the LMS and the digital audio lab.
- Technical background and samples.
- Languages that are available in good quality: See links under this post; other languages: please test with me..
- To request an audio file generation for your class, send the following information to the LRC
- regular reading/listening materials: plain digital text should do;
- SANAKO oral exam cues: please enter the text in this MS-Word table and add information in the additional columns for exam customization.
How to batch-produce animated-GIFs in different speeds
2013/02/14
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As a little time saver, here is a program (64bit) that automates animated-GIF production with the free UnFreez (a bit hairy to control from AutoIT, hence the mouse-moves) for a dozen or so different speeds. Decompile if you need to adjust it, otherwise no AutoIT software is needed. All other prerequisites are explained in the startup dialogue, rename the dummy output files to your liking.
Looking forward to the Digital Humanities Unconference at UNC Charlotte
2013/01/29
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- Why I come to THATCamp Piedmont:
- I am looking for practitioners of NLP in a language and literature teaching context since I am working on Using NLP tools to automate production and correction of interactive learning material (presented at Calico 2012)
- for the Learning Exercise Creation Engines (presented at EUROCALL 2007) I developed.
- A little about myself:
- My Ph.D. thesis expanded the close reading of textual variants in the German editorial schools of Hans Zäch and the use of the computer-generated textual concordances in the interpretation and selection of textual variants into a corpus linguistic-inspired approach, that traced Leitmotifs in the work (partially first digitized by myself) of the foremost Swiss-German classic as a digital corpus using Regular Expressions programming.
- I have since applied my corpus linguistic approach to
- the use of machine translation software
- the automation of learning material creation (glossing, question generation, differentiation) on the basis of natural language processing of textual (film subtitles, news) corpora.


