03/07 Workshop with Amy Ogan from HCII

Today I visited Amy’s office to do generative design workshop with her. Since Amy is an expert in learning experiences and education technology, we thought that doing workshop with her would be very valuable for our project.

She focused on her own language learning experience, which is Spanish.

Her timeline looks like this:

1. She first began learning Spanish since her high school. She was very interested in learning Spanish and enjoyed her learning Spanish with the teacher, but the majority of her friends in her class were dumb, she thinks, because they were not really proactive learners since Spanish class was required for every student. Learning environment with these dumb students made her feel lonely.
2. Then she went to college where she met very supportive Spanish professor. Learning was hard but fun. Her learning Spanish in college was focused on Spanish literature, so she did a lot of readings and writings. She really enjoyed making arguments in Spanish, which has something to do with expressing her own ideas.
3. And she got an opportunity of studying abroad as an exchange student. This is the point where she actually began speaking actively. She made lots of Spanish friends, it was delightful but also scared because every time she couldn’t understand their slang, she felt that she was not part of them. But she said this time was when her language ability was the highest, she had a lot of casual conversation with natives and group conversation with her friends. She also traveled a lot.
4. Then she came back home and began worrying that she might lose her language ability because there are not many places or tools that encourage Amy to practice on regular basis. Also she really missed the place and her studying abroad experience.
5. She then worked/did research with colleagues who speak Spanish. She could not only speak/practice Spanish a lot but also build relationship with them, which is very delightful experience for her. But at the same time, it was hard to learn new jargons for her thesis, she sometimes had to pretend to understand perfectly.
6. Now, for the final part of her timeline, she tries her best not to lose her language skills: she sometimes reads and uses duolingo to not forget subjunctive which is not widely used in US, but is very critical part in Spanish. But she stressed out that there are not enough resources that allows her to keep motivation and to keep practicing.

For the second exercise, I asked her to make props or scenes that might be helpful/supportive for her language acquisition when thinking about her past experience, especially pain points.

First she said it would be great to have a magic wand that transforms dumb and not supportive learners around her to very supportive people who are willing to practice language actively with her.

Second she said she wants to have a magic translator that gives her real time feedback and translates slangs so that she can finally feel secure.

Finally she talked about magic tutor and magic accent support. She said having local accent is important for her, because if she doesn’t have local accent, other people would view her as a stranger. She really wants to be part of people, groups, and community.