XplanaZine

I’m sitting in a cool presentation watching convergence in Tech Ed happen right before my eyes. For decades, students have been taking language placement exams.

In the old days, this meant a multiple-choice exam on grammar and reading comprehension, accompanied by a listening comprehension section administered via tape recorder. In recent years, universities have migrated to Web based exams but with uneasiness. These options generally abandon listening comprehension sections and have been unable to handle speaking assessments.

Professors and programmers at Rice are changing that with exTemplate, a very nice placement exam program designed to make placement tests work for language teachers. exTemplate is successful, more than anything, because its developers followed a path of natural integration involving UTF-8 encoding, streaming audio improvements, recording applets, and Web services. The program is adaptable to any Unicode supported language, handles voice recording and audio streaming well at a variety of connection speeds, and permits (even encourages) collaborative writing and grading.

Letting things happen naturally. It sounds easy but requires vision and patience. As humans, we tend to “force” things, try to speed evolution and, on occasion, play “God.” Our other major shortcoming, of course, is that we often lack perspective and vision. We buy an office-full of Wang computers a month before the company disappears (my father’s associate did this).

exTemplate is the beginning of a solution. Their excellent work in language support and effective use of audio for assessment, should now be incorporated into other developing projects so that the technology and its uses can be allowed to continue evolving naturally. We’ll keep and eye on things to see how they develop.