Metamedia

Is YackPack Dead? Get Ready for a Surprise!

Yackpack, the well known and highly inventive group audio application, has been down for TWO WEEKS!

I first got a call from one of my foreign language faculty about it two weeks ago today. For nearly a week we received no response to our email inquiry. When we did finally get one, it said there were some "problems with servers" and that it would be up shortly. That was a week ago.

Clearly something has seriously gone wrong. Two weeks is an eternity in the fast-moving world of Web 2.0 applications.

And this is only the latest in a series of missteps that YackPack has made.

Last July, YackPack announced a pay model while the vast bulk of its educational customers were away for the summer vacation. When they came back to start the new school year, they were surprised.  As I blogged at the time, we were one of them.

Now, we are perfectly happy to pay for YackPack, because it is a great application designed by teachers for teachers, and there is nothing else quite like it. But we wish we would have had notice to prepare our budgets, and we wish could get a site license. But we jumped through some bureaucratic hoops and got our funding for it.

Suddenly in January however, we found we couldn't give our money away to YackPack?! They changed their mind about the pay model, and told us to hang onto our payments for a while. Okay by us, we said.

Then at the very end of February, YackPack went off line and has been down since.

Our foreign language teachers can't get their work done. We are resorting to the old fashioned method of recording files and uploading them one by one, and teachers responding by making new recordings, one by one - very inefficient. We are now scrambling to find an alternative for a product we have come to depend on for the last two years.

And if we find an alternative, we will be happy to give them our money instead.

YackPack is a product and company founded and run by educators - one reason the product is so great for education. They are obviously very smart and dedicated people.

But as a business it appears to be in very serious trouble.

Warning: YackPack Pricing Ahead

Once upon a time, beta in computer jargon meant the version of the software not yet ready for public use, but only for testing.

In Web 2.0 online apps, beta is often used to mean, "free at the moment, but if we get enough people using it so we can make money, we will start charging for it."

The good thing about this is that it forces a decision: is the thing I was using for free really worth paying for?  For instance, I used Vitalist for some time last summer and it was fine for what I wanted. When they recently decided to charge, I decided it was not worth the money for me: the interface had not improved at all and did not do certain things I wanted. I switched to using MonkeyGTD (alpha of version 2) based on TiddleyWiki hosted over at Tiddlyspot.

Which brings us to:

YackPack

If you or your foreign language or other faculty having been using YackPack, you should be aware -- or may have just found out -- that Yackpack has moved from a free to a pay service model. It is unfortunate that YP announced this over the summer, and then only on their web site without sending emails to its users.

Last week some faculty at my school and I had a conference call with B.J. Fogg, the CEO of YackPack, to get information about YP's rather sudden switch to a pay model.  What we learned:

YP has been free till now, but starting last August 1st it became a pay service.

Educators, however, can extend their free accounts until October 10th.

See http://www.yackpack.com/educators.html.

BJ said on the phone to us that they MAY consider extending this free period to December for all educators. MAY or may not.

So if you are planning on using it in your courses this term, be sure to go to Yackpack right away and apply for your Education Free Extension.

There continues to be a free version, but it can only record 10 seconds of sound per message, which is not useful in the real world.

The new cost is $5 per month or $34.95 per year, per account.

Per account means each separate YP account - so every student and every instructor have to have paid accounts.

There are unlimited Packs and storage as before, so an Instructor can have as many packs / courses as they want on their one account, but all the students will have to have a paid account too, though they can belong to as many packs as they like, as before. 

By account is the only way to pay: there are no other pay models, such as per course, and they do not have any site license deals yet, either.

You can buy a specific number of accounts and swap the student names in and out of them.

They will allow colleges to buy accounts in bulk on a yearly PO. So, say you buy 50 accounts yearly for a faculty member to use. They can assign them to any 50 (or less) students at a time in any courses they want during that year, adding or removing student names with an management interface tool that YP has that could be used for this.

Moodle Audio Overview

This is an overview of what I know about the situation with audio support in Moodle which I compiled for a faculty member who is interested in having his Comp Sci students do a project with Moodle.

I should add that our main interest is in the use of audio for foreign language teaching, both conversation practice and homework assignments. Your interests may be different.

1) Moodlespeex

Moodlespeex is a simple java client, used for recording and playing. It hooks into both the Files area and Forums. It was first developed for Moodle 1.6 by an individual developer named Dan Stowell.

It is abandonware. It hasn't been developed since about August of 2006.

I got this to work in Moodle 1.6 on files, but not forums; but both worked in Moodle 1.7.  Other people have had the opposite experience. But both are clearly broken for everyone in Moodle 1.8. It does not use the standard block api, but was directly hooking into the Moodle forum code, so it is no surprise it does not upgrade well.

When it worked, it got good reviews from faculty, mainly because it is ultra simple and the quality of the speex format is very good for what foreign language teachers need.

Here is the Moodle plugin page: http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=418
Here is the main discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50265

2) Covcell

Covcell is a 2 year project funded by the EU, sponsored at several universities. If you ever wanted to go to Iceland, the next Covcell conference is in Reykjavik this fall.

Covcell is actually a suite of applications mostly in Java that will run off the Red5 open source Flash server project (http://osflash.org/red5) also being done in Europe. 

It is still somewhere between alpha and early beta in progress. I tested the online demo site a couple of months ago and liked it, but I could never get the streaming server installation to work. For one thing, it was completely undocumented.

Also, Covcell has a rather different priority set (chat is first on the list) than our faculty who are mostly interested in conversation practice / recording homework.

Main site: http://covcell.org/
The main audio recording software: http://covcell.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83
Covcell Moodle discussion forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=5368

3) Gong

Gong is a fully mature Java server (Linux or Windows) based application out of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (http://www.ust.hk/en/index.html).

It can run as a standalone application or as a Moodle plugin. It is essentially a discussion forum application that is fully voice enabled. It has a very nice interface.

I tested this in Spring 2006 with a faculty member in Foreign Languages but she complained about the poor quality of the audio.

Back in June, I installed the new version, now up to version 5, but had the same issues with audio recording quality. 

They have switched to a speex format for their chat module, but the main boards still use wav. The main problem seems to be the codec is too good and picks up a lot of extraneous noise at the high end of the frequency range, which is not needed for voice applications.

The result is a sound quality that is tinny, thin, and background noisy.

So one of the issues with audio will be the acceptability of the sound quality to your customers: the foreign language faculty. Gong would be the clear winner if only the sound quality were better.

Gong plugs into Moodle in the cleanest way: it uses the official block api and is just that: its own block. As a result, it is usually not an issue when upgrading Moodle, which is very nice.

Main Gong site: http://gong.ust.hk/index.html
Main Gong Moodle forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50418

The Gong developers are very active in Moodle & very helpful.

4) DimDim

There is a piece of web conferencing software called DimDim which is being integrated with Moodle. I looked at it once last year, but it seems very different from what foreign language faculty are interested in at the moment, but it could be very useful down the road.

Main site http://www.dimdim.com/
Moodle Forum http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50760

5) MoodleVox proposal for Moodle 2.0

There is a proposal to bring something called VoiceXML to Moodle 2.0: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Voice

Moodle 1.9 is about to ship, and will be the last of the 1.x series. Moodle 2.0 will be a big leap and take much longer to ship (nearly a year) than the usual 3-4 month point release. 

See the development roadmap here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap where the Voice project is listed as "Hopefully."

6) Other useful links:

The foreign language teaching forum: http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

and especially see the Voice Application forum at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=1868

The Extended LMS: Still Deaf and Dumb

Here's a thought experiment about communication.

Imagine a world in which half the people can only speak and hear, and the other half can only read and write.

Imagine how difficult communication would be in such a world.

That's pretty much how it is with personal computers. Oh, things are a little better than on my first IBM PC in 1981; but not much. With some wrangling and crossed fingers, I can play sounds and little 6 inch square movies. Woo-hoo.

Let's face it, PC and Mac both still speak QWERTY as their native language.

And that is still pretty much how today's Learning Management Systems, even the new so-called Extended LMS with their batch of goodies that plug in, still are. They speak QWERTY as their native language; Unicode is their babblefish.

Considering how important the Foreign Language curriculum is to higher education, you would think at least that today's Learning Management Systems would have integrated audio and video. But they don't.

Oh, I can use audio and video blogs and then... then what ? Paste in embed code ? I don't call that "audio enabled."

What we want in an LMS is simply this:

• any place I can type, I can record audio
  
• any place I can read, I can play audio & video
• this is not just possible or doable, but EASY to do

And from a systems point of view, this means that audio and video in an LMS should be a CORE central component of the architecture, not some block or plugin or add on.

And until it is, the LMS will not serve the most basic needs of Foreign Language teachers. Or students, and at good colleges that means all students.

It will remain deaf and dumb.

TeacherTube: YouTube for Teachers

Link: TeacherTube - "Teach the World".

A site with a YouTube like interface familiarity, but specifically designed for teachers to share videos used in their curricular material.  But unlike Youtube, there are content safeguards and guidelines that ensure the content will be much more likely to be appropriate for general classroom use.

The uploaded videos are divided into various "channels" along subject line (Fine Arts, Social Science), but of course, everything can be tagged, too, and you have groups and friends just like in YouTube and Flckr.

And of course groups can be private so you can restrict them to a specific class.

TeacherTube is just getting started, so it doesn't have the content of course that YouTube does, and much of the content is K-12 oriented, but has a definite world flavor and definite promise.

Let me know what you think of the material, and whether it is an appropriate place to deposit and share materials both by teachers and also by students. It might be a good place to put portfolio quality videos for sharing.

Here's a fun example: a wonderful claymation homage to René Magritte. (It's still not a pipe!)

(This embed sometimes works, sometimes not. If not, use the link instead.)

Simulation Pedagogy, or A Tale of Tainted Love

Here's an interesting quote from Kevin Alderman, a pioneering entrepreneur in Second Life, who recently sold one of his popular virtual sites for $50,000 (yes, 50 thousand dollars) to a group of investors:

Static web pages were great for information connectivity. But (in virtual worlds) you make the paradigm leap away from something that is projected to you and toward something you create that represents yourself. You impress your own psyche, motivations, creativity onto a group of pixels and become quite attached to it.

I think we have all had similar experiences not just online, but in many captivating activities in which we invest self. The various forms of telepersona are expanding to be more interactive that ever before: daybooks, scrapbooks, journals, photo collections and other physical methods of self re-creation are being extended even more powerfully into the virtual realm.

I think that is an important psychological clue as to why simulation software is the future of foreign language learning.  It is not just the ability to automate in a very sophisticated way the old fashioned drill and repetition, but that with a telepersona involved there is a much higher level of personality and personal involvement. 

And that addresses one of the most important factors in adult second language learning: overcoming the social and self inhibitions that impeded the motivation to learn, to get beyond the specific task oriented model of simpler simulations and become open to more sophisticated life like interactions.

BUT, getting virtual environments like Second Life to work for teaching will mean not just using them to replace current practices, but instead to start to build a simulation like pedagogy of practices, such as James Paul Gee advocates.