DEVEC ASSESSMENT (JUNE 11, 2004)
Dear Friends,
This semester, we've spent a lot of time and energy developing the foundations of the DISTANCE ENGLISH VIRTUAL ENGLISH CLASSROOM. Please post a comment to this post regarding the following FIVE topics:
Please try to describe your experiences working with, helping develop, and using the DEVEC this and last semester.
How has working with the DEVEC (if at all) helped you as a learner of English and of interpretation?
What are (if any) the benefits and contributions of the DEVEC to NDHU and the teaching of English in Taiwan?
What are possible areas that we should work on to improve the DEVEC?
Please add any other comments you might have regarding the DEVEC, etc.
Thank you very much for your hard work this semester, and I wish you the best.
Robert J.
posted by Robert E. Johanson @ 6/11/2004 07:59:00 a.m.
11 comments
11 Comments:
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I'm Vivi.
Here's my photo album:
http://www.wretch.twbbs.org/album/chienweistar
Here's my wib site:
http://tns.ndhu.edu.tw/~u9002016
My BLOG is still under construction, I'll do it when I finish my final.
1. I like to work with the DEVEC stuff not only because I feel I am like a stat when filming but also because that it can help me improve my reaction and ability. I must response immediately when filming, so I must think as fast as possible. Therefore, I feel my speaking and thinking ability improve a lot. Shortly speaking, I like the DEVEC stuff, and I "hope" I can do it more in the future.
2. Nowadays, CALL is so important; so, the DEVEC can let teachers teach more efficiently. i think all students will like to see our DEVEC because it is so interesting and funny. unlike those TOFEL or Times For Students, our DEVEC is easy enough for students to understand; moreover, our DEVEC is so fun. We talk about lots of things about NDHU, so students who watch our DEVEC will fall in love with NDHU. Then, we will have more students who are willing to come here. To sum up, our DEVEC can attract students not only around Taiwan but also around the world.
3. I think we should do more interesting DEVEC. For example, we can write some short and funny story, or choose one scene from a movie to act. We can probably stop talking about NDHU and start to talk about other interesting stuff outside the school.
4. Somehow I can not download the DEVEC to my computer; in other words, I can only watch it "on line." It is not convenient because sometimes the speed of my internet is slow. Moreover, some of the DEVEC will lag when I watch it. I think we can find some people who are professional at these things (format, computer) to help us. We can try to fix the site so everyone can download our DEVEC, then they can watch it regardless of the speed of the internet.
Dear Robert:
Hi, I am Verina.
1. The experience of working on the DEVEC was great.First, I love to see the funny and lively film, which was shot and edited by our teacher, Robert. I enjoy the interesting dialogue and lovely characters on the flim. Of course, I have to see the film many times, then I could write down the transcriptions, translation and create edifying questions. There is no denying that the DEVEC is a good teaching material for many students, who want to learn English from the Internet.
2.I learned a lot by working on the DEVEC. Because if I
want to be a good interpretater, the excellent listening ability is absolutely very important. I must practice very often. Working on the DEVEC is a great way to imporve my listening ability; besides, I have to think how to translate English to Chinese appropriately.
3.Using the muti-media to learn English has became a trend nowadays. It's no doubt that more and more students will find the interesting DEVEC made by us on the Internet, then more people will gradually to know there is a beautiful and wonderful college in Hwa-lian.
People will know there are brilliant professors and hard working students in this college. It's great to let people understand the unique style of Dong Hwa Universsity.
4. As for the possible areas to improve the DEVEC, I think we may dub the Chinese translation after students seeing the whole film and the DEVEC; therefore, they can be impressed very much.
5. I really enjoy working on the DEVEC! Please let students keep practiceing that.
1. I've help out Devec this semesterand it really takes time and energy to compile the content.Especially, Devec project came in during the final exam.However, when i imagine that people will use Devec that i'd done , it's worthy of the efforts.
2. As for a english learner, i can improve my listening ability from different episodes of Devec. For interpretation,Devec helped me a lot because it forced me to practice in classes.
3.I think the devec means a lot to NDHU because this device can offer practical exercise for english learners. For the teaching of english in Taiwan, Devec can also offer easy and efficient method of attaining teaching materials.
4. In my opinion, Devec will be better if it can be sorted into categories, such as "Devec about campus life", "Devec about dormitory", etc. Thus, it will be more convient for people to use.
5. This semester, I've many chance to practice my English in public. It not only improving my english ability but also enhance my guts and reactions.
hi Robert, this is Fanny wang
1.Last semester was the first time I got approach to DEVEC. At first, I could hardly get used to the way DEVEC works. Now, I am more accustomed to it. See if I made a huge improvement on my performance of DEVEC!:)
2.I, personally think learing English interpretation requires confidence on oneself. And DEVEC could see how a person turn from shy to confident.
3.DEVEC could be applied to long distance English learing. It will make people at any corner around the world get chances to learn English as well.In addition, DEVEC could store lots of imformation without accupy spaces at all.
4.Topics, i think the topics should cover more than just those trivials. The topic should be more attacting anyway.
5.I think our annual performance could be also published not only to tell other people how great our department is but is a good way to get some English training.
this is Winnie (junior)
1. I still remember how nervous I was when I had my first DEVEC recording. I was so nervous that I can not express myself well. As time goes by, it’s getting better to be use to the camera, and I believe everyone has the same feeling: we all can be super stars someday :P
2. I do have a good time with the DEVEC. I don’t think that DEVEC help me to improve my vocabuaries or grammar, but it does help me more to earn confident and interests in English interpretation. I think to have confident and interests in English interpretation is much more important than to have good improvement on vocabuaries or grammar. And it is confidnet and interests that push me to have the disire to know more about English interpretation. I do think it help me a looooot! (not in the reality part, but in the mental part. And I do mean it.)
3. It is a new idea for our Taiwanese students to have new experiences that tests are taken not only by pencils, but also by some interesting ideas. Instead of being the same, to have new ideas are much more interesting and helpful (at least, it works to me). I believe this new practice would be popular if it spreads to all schools in Taiwan.
4. I think it is good enough for using by ourselves. But if we want to make it as the glory of Taiwan, there are some places that we can make them better. First, the sound of the DEVEC is sometimes not loud enough because of the speakers’ sound and the outside effects like wind. Using a microphone must have good improvement. Second, the light is sometimes not strong enough (we do have big improvement on this one). Third, to have some interesting topics which can attract people’s notice, like movies, stars, some issues that everyone could have the possibilities to face, etc. The last one is subtitle and background music. It is not necessary, but if we do that, it would be much more interesting to watch (I know it is really hard, though).
5. Please keep going with this interesting project. I do wish that I can see the younger generation and how well it can do in the future through the internet after I graduate from NDHU. Even though I might be jealous to them :). I can still have good memories of those days, and tell all my friends that I involved in this project proudly.
Hi Robert
This is Anita :)
1.The video taking part helps me to have more courage to speak in front of the camera, and frankly speaking, for me, video taking makes me more nervous than speaking in front of the crowd. For there are something that the crowd may not see immediately, but you’ll see a lot of things, like grammar, posture, facial expression and so on, needed to be improved when you watch yourself on the video. I have a lot of fun and have learned what I have to improve as an interpreter from the video taking activity.
The transcription part is my favorite homework. Besides the interesting content itself, I enjoy listening and typing it down on the same time. It’s such an exiting game that I practice not only my listening but also English typing speed and reaction ability. Besides, after listening so many times, I have memorized some English speaking expression and the way of describing a thing that I am not used to say. The English-Chinese translation part enables me to think about how to translate English into more precise and delicate Chinese when facing certain kind of sentence structure. This can help a lot in my interpretation ability. To sum up, working with DEVEC offers me a chance to learn English in a more relax and interesting way. I loooove it!!
2. From Professor Chen in the conference, there are few universities offer this kind of special tool. If we develop it well, it can be our niche to be different from other common universities and then be the glory of Eastern Taiwan. Hahaha !! The students in the Eastern Taiwan have little chance to expose themselves to an English environment. DEVEC with the Haulien information that is more close to the local people can be a very good tool for them to learn English. Furthermore, it’s not hard and that can help students to have a sense of achievement.
3.It takes tremendous time and energy to set up and organize the DEVEC. It’s already wonderful but if we want to be the glory of Eastern Taiwan, we may need to do more things. Below are some of my humble opinions.
a. In DEVEC homepage, there are a lot of different kinds of clips. Some are super easy but some are hard. Therefore, I can’t help but wonder who is our target? Junior, senior high school students? University students? Different English levels need to have different offerings. For a junior high student, if they happen to click on the academic writing part, they may be freak out. Therefore, if possible, it would be great if we could divide the clips into different levels.
b. The last mile problem. I don’t know why sometimes I can’t watch the clips at my place (ADSL: 512k) and I have to go to the dorm in the campus to see that. For many families, ADSL may be the most common Internet tool. If we could solve this problem, to minimize the clips space itself or whatever, there would be millions of family benefit from the DEVEC project. :P
c. For some English learning beginner, on the DEVEC interface, they may need some Chinese description to make them feel more comfortable. One time, I was in my friend’s dorm watching the clips. At first, when I open the DEVEC homepage with all English description, he was so afraid and kept saying that my homework must be very very difficult. When he saw the clips, he realized that they were easy and interesting. He told me that he would watch that by himself in his free time. Therefore, if we would make the interface more user- friendly that would be great.
d. We have so much abundant and interesting materials on DEVEC, however, it’s a big pity that not many people are aware of this website. After the well construction, we may need to promote and let more people to use that. (Inform English teachers; increase the links toward DEVEC on other ESL websites and so on.)
4.It’s my honor to have to chance to work in part of the DEVEC. I like that and I am looking forward to seeing more of it !!
Hello, Robert.
This's Cathy.
1.I attended two semesters of this class. This semester, Robert usually asked us to think about a topic and then film us. These experiences made me not to be shy and nervous in front of the camera. At least, I have improved a lot in this part. As a menber who help to develop DEVEC, I can have the strong sence of achievement.
2.
The most important of all, helping developing DEVEC helped me improve the ability of listening. What’s more, I can concentrate on it more when I help to interprete the DEVEC.
3.
DEVEC makes students to have the different kind of teaching in Taiwan. It is more interesting than just sit in the classroom and listen a lecture from a teacher.
4.
Some of the DEVEC have the long conversations, if students from other departments take a look at it, they might lose their patient. I suggest that every DEVEC could be about 2 minutes or even shoter.
5.
As far as I am concerned, I can tell that our teachers and classmates spent lots of time on doing DEVEC. We can give publicity to our students more often, so that it won’t be a waste for this wonderful resource.
I’ve been in your simultaneous interpretation class for two semesters. And the big difference is using the DEVEC in class. The first simester, mostly we were reading and learning from the text book; however I found it very boring. But now, with working and developing the DEVEC, we really got the chance to practice and see how much we’ve improved.
The topics of the DEVEC were mostly surrounded on NDHU. I think it’s great chance for others to know about our school, and for me, my brain have been trained to think faster and more accurate.
One thing that we could improve is the choice of the topic. Maybe we could talk about the world- wide news or something, instead of only on our campus. That way we might know more, learn deeper, and our views broader.
I’ve been in your simultaneous interpretation class for two semesters. And the big difference is using the DEVEC in class. The first simester, mostly we were reading and learning from the text book; however I found it very boring. But now, with working and developing the DEVEC, we really got the chance to practice and see how much we’ve improved.
The topics of the DEVEC were mostly surrounded on NDHU. I think it’s great chance for others to know about our school, and for me, my brain have been trained to think faster and more accurate.
One thing that we could improve is the choice of the topic. Maybe we could talk about the world- wide news or something, instead of only on our campus. That way we might know more, learn deeper, and our views broader.
Frank
Hello, Robert
This is Penny.
1. DEVEC is an interesting thing. This is my first time to touch DEVEC and to be the speaker in a DEVEC. When I saw some parts of DEVEC that you had made, I really enjoyed it. It is really interesting to see how the speaker spoke in the DEVEC and what the speaker spoke about Dong Hwa. I also enjoyed being filming as a speaker in DEVEC although I was really nervous actually. I really like DEVEC to be a way of learning interpretation. It is good!
2. Through the DEVEC I can find different people and different accents. In fact, I cannot get used to all of the accents in the DEVEC at first. However, after I listen to them for many times, I can understand what they want to talk about. In addition, I think DEVEC can help me a lot in interpretation because I can practice my interpretation when I see the DEVEC. DEVEC is a quite interesting thing.
3. I think DEVEC really can help English learners in Taiwan. Some Englsh teaching materials, such as magazines, are by broadcasts and we can learn English only by listening. However, DEVEC can be made more interesting than that. Not only speakers perform in DEVEC but also some funny and cool stories can be made in it. It can increase the interests of English learners. DEVEC is COOL!!!
4. I think most of the topics in the DEVEC are about Dong Hwa. Some things about Dong Hwa may be repeated again and again. It may make the viewers of DEVEC think it strange or feel a ittle bit bored. Therefore, I think it is important to increase different topics in the DEVEC. But to me those DEVECs that hve been made so far are really good.
5. I think something that should be improved is to make DEVEC well-known. If I did not take this class, I did not know there is DEVEC on the website of language center. It is important to make more people know DEVEC. In this way, more and more people would get benefits from DEVEC.
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