lang activity proposition

Tue Oct 4 08:24:01 UTC 2016

Hello everybody!

I got a new idea how to approach it: since videos are usually container files that may contain multiple streams, if we had the video stream, the audio parts could be embedded into the container. This way, everybody would see the the same video, but hear the desired audio stream. Since YouTube has options for multiple audio streams, I guess there are other (free) video players that can do the same.
There would be plenty of free videos to choose from, the only concern would be to have good audio recordings.
If we’ll ever implement this idea, I volunteer to do the processing/editing/mixing/producing. If...
If not, then the idea of audio-only examples looks like a good implementation, too! We could create simple sentences about the displayed images, combining as many words from the list as possible (i.e. “The girl has blond hair and a nice dress”). How about that?

Have a nice day and thank you for your feedback!
Horia

From: Siddhesh Suthar 
Sent: Tuesday, 04 October, 2016 8:59
To: Horia PELLE 
Cc: JAZEIX Johnny ; gcompris-devel at kde.org 
Subject: Re: lang activity proposition

Hello,

The idea of adding value for real life communication is nice. But seems like It is not feasible because of limitations mentioned by Johnny, Emmanuel and Bruno. 

I will like to suggest that instead of adding a video, we can add an example sentence containing that word. It will server the purpose of relating it to real life conversation. However this will need a lot of resources in terms of composing or finding such sentences and translating them. Still I think It can be done. 

Regards
Siddhesh

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 10:43 AM, Horia PELLE <horricane at gmail.com> wrote:

  I see. The idea would be then much more difficult to implement, yet still viable: in a comma, but viable. 
  The way I see it moving forward to life is „fishing” for volunteers involved in working with children: preschool teachers, psychology students working with children, etc.
  Is it OK to try to contact and persuade a few american organizations to produce some sample video clips?

  Horia

  From: JAZEIX Johnny 
  Sent: Monday, 03 October, 2016 10:08
  To: gcompris-devel at kde.org 
  Subject: Re: lang activity proposition

  Hi,

  On 10/02/16 18:00, Horia PELLE wrote:

    Hello,

    In my opinion, the programming effort wouldn’t be huge: it would only suppose an extra button/control to open an existing clip or not. This extra button could be set to have a boolean behavior, i.e., to appear or not, depending if the clip exists (is defined) or not. The children would certainly love any extra information presented in a video clip, and the retention of that word would certainly be better.
    Selecting/trimming 564 clips in national languages of the countries that don’t have a developed film industry – yes – that would certainly be a difficult task. However, I believe that the users from these countries would be more interested in the english-french-german-spanish lang activities than in their mother tongue lang activity. Besides, if the implementation would be “boolean”, there won’t be any frustration: a clip either exists and then there is an extra button, or it doesn’t exist, in which case there isn’t any extra button.

    About the age pool you have mentioned, it depends very much of the parent and the kid: some would prefer animations, others (like my son) would go for the Hollywood celebrities’ acting. This is why it would be very useful to give the user the possibility to customize the clip.

  For me, we shouldn't let the user choose which clip it should look at. There was a discussion about allowing external links in GCompris a few times ago (https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/gcompris-devel/2016-February/004529.html, https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/gcompris-devel/2016-February/004535.html and following ones). We could think of doing like we do for the voices, download an external dataset containing all the videos.
  Doing like this, we won't have any issue with the potential disappearing links and we can embed free licensed videos (the main issue being to find/create them).
  For the programming effort, I don't know if Qt provides a media player (there is phonon or QtMultimedia but I don't know if it is enough) and if there is a format that could be played everywhere without codecs or if the format will depend on the OS (like for audio).

    I am not informed about copyrights, but I know that a videoclip wouldn’t exceed more than 30 seconds, so couldn’t it be possible to just obtain the copyright for free, eventually mentioning in a watermark the title, the year and the owning company? I mean come on, there is a good chance that some of these movies would be bought in the future by some of the users, isn’t it?

  A solution would be to not use existing part of movies but finding/creating ones with the good license. But, if we go this way, I'm not sure we'll have enough people to provide us the necessary resources.

    All in all, I still believe that my idea is viable. I hope I’m not the only one... 
  The idea for sure is interesting but the issues are more with the lack of resources and with the licenses as said by Emmanuel and Bruno.

  Johnny

    Horia

    From: Emmanuel Charruau 
    Sent: Sunday, 02 October, 2016 15:32
    To: Horia PELLE ; GCompris Devel 
    Subject: Re: lang activity proposition

    Hi,

    Is this not a too huge task? 
    GCompris is translated in many languages, I doubt that this idea if implemented in english will be maintained in an other language.

    Then we have to think that this is for children from 2 to 10, we would have to find the words in kids animation movies mostly, which norrows the source of vocables.

    Then there is this copyright problem. If we solve it with links, who would do the tests to see if the links are still relevant?

    This is a really huge quantity of situation to solve for only one activity :( and we have little ressources :(

    But this is just my opinion :)

    Emmanuel

    2016-10-02 13:46 GMT+02:00 Horia PELLE <horricane at gmail.com>:

      I have a proposition for the lang activity. Although this activity is complex, very instructive and useful for vocabulary and writing purposes, I think it misses the liveliness of normal/everyday human language. The reason for this inert/still feature is the “atomization” of language in 564 small basic words. They can be learnt individually, but in this case they will only remain 564 pieces of a puzzle, with little value in real life communication. In my opinion, all these 564 small blocks of language would exponentially increase their learning value if they could be individually exemplified with everyday human speech.

      My idea is to place a button/link near each word image, and when it is clicked, it would open a popup window with an external video clip in which one (or more) persons say a phrase containing that word. Ideally, that phrase should be a clip from a good movie, so that pronunciation and emotion could reach maximum levels.
      In this way, the kids would learn two things: (1) to use all those 564 small pieces of language in real verbal communication and (2) the emotional intelligence of human speech, which is a big lack in most computer-assisted learning programs.

      I began to test short video clips a long time ago, on my little boy, and they all proved very successful (he easily remembers them, and he likes to recite/interprete these clips very often). I provided here four examples, for the words coin (youtu.be/fYJA26EjPEg), cute (youtu.be/CCOSZxD7gtI), dog (youtu.be/4PjHe2xPwa8) and huge (youtu.be/bfV3oGZozkY) → please take a look at them. Maybe they aren't the best examples or format, but you can feel the fluent everyday language and the broad spectrum of human emotions + body language of these short clips.

      Of course, the copyrights would certainly raise serious concerns, but if this problem could not be solved by GCompris team, then it could be easily overcome by the individual user. What I mean is that GCompris could provide by default a link of a clip without copyright problems, but the user could be given permission to customize the link and place his/her own link, with the preferred video clip.

      What do you think?

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