presentation on automatic translation at language world 2012

Technology transforming tomorrow

Miles BerryChair, Naace

The fundamental model of school education is still a teacher talking to a group of pupils. It has barely changed over the centuries, even since Plato established the earliest “akademia” in a shady olive grove in ancient Athens.

A Victorian schoolteacher could enter a 21st century classroom and feel completely at home. Whiteboards may have eliminated chalk dust, chairs may have migrated from rows to groups, but a teacher still stands in front of the class, talking, testing and questioning.

But that model won’t be the same in twenty years’ time. It may well be extinct in ten.

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.

Siemens, 2005

Where the focus is on developing problem-solving skills in a wide range of contexts, rather than simply practising calculation skills, using a calculator allows pupils to think clearly about the strategies they are using to solve the problem without getting bogged down in the mechanics of the actual calculation itself. In other words, space for thinking about problem solving is created. It also enables pupils to work with more complex but realistic numbers than they would meet using pen-and-paper methods. The pupils need to understand what is happening within the calculation in order to interpret the answer the calculator provides; for instance the meaning of a decimal answer in questions about whole numbers of people.

What are the implications of ubiquitous fully automatic high quality machine translation for MFL curricula and pedagogies?