How high are your expectations?

or…. with the knowledge of today….

Jan Deutekom / Ineke van de Craats

”When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini “would indeed cut a sorry figure if placed upon the modern concert stage” (p. 23).

The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Romer 1993

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Het vervolg op Diglin

Foto's 2013-01-26 01.44.29 PM

Diglin of de “Digital Literacy Instructor” is software om de klank-tekenkoppeling te trainen. Om kortom de code te kraken bij het allereerste begin van het leren lezen en schrijven. Het is in samenwerking een aantal universiteiten en het Friesland College gebouwd voor 4 talen. Vooral in Nederland wordt het nu op allerlei plekken gebruikt. Dat heeft geleid tot enthousiaste reacties van docenten (zie bijvoorbeeld dit blogartikel van Nico Knoester) en studenten.

Natuurlijk is er nagedacht over het uitbouwen van Diglin. Om meer oefeningen te maken en van woorden over te gaan naar zinnen en korte verhalen waarmee studenten verder kunnen oefenen.

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Diglin – The Educated Guess

It is the last physical meeting of our Diglin project. We have been working for three years on a project for Low Educated Second Language Learners. We have developed software with automatic speech recognition for four languages. It has been exciting and very interesting to work on this. All these different aspects. The differences between the languages, the pedagogical approach in this project, the differences in teaching in the four countries. The task of building something that could make a real difference.

It has also been frustrating sometimes.  There is the difference between the four countries and the languages. And we have so many different experts working in this project. Automatic Speech Recognition experts and software developers work together with experts in the field of learning a second language and becoming literate in this new language. In some cases it is really hard to understand each other. We went through difficult periods the past three years. We have encountered numerous (technical) problems in this project.

But I think somehow we all know we are working on an important project.

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