The Magic of Optical Memories

Abstract:
Optical memory in the form of compact discs is ever increasing in popularity throughout the world. Two variations are Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (CD ROM) and Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I). CD ROM is well-suited to information storage in the form of text. CD-I is not in the production yet but will be capable of text, graphics, video still frames, and audio at three different quality levels. Education is not the target market for CD ROM or CD-I. Nevertheless, both CD ROM and CD-I can be a great boon to language education and will find their place in the education market.

KEYWORDS: American Interactive Media, compact disc, Compact Disc-Interactive, Compact Disc Read-Only Memory, Digital Video Interactive (DVI), European Interactive Media, optical memory

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001

A few years ago, at a CALICO convention, some of us were having a discussion about the presentations on new technology and about such presentations in general. We had noticed an ever-recurring pattern in them: The presenter would invariably begin by explaining what the gadget of the moment was by telling us in great detail how it worked—how it performed its particular magic. Our Prometheus would show block diagrams of the electronics, exploded-view line drawings of the mechanical assemblies, and 35mm slides of equipment aglow with light-emitting diodes and flashing laser beams. This would be followed by "an actual demonstration" of capabilities. If this part went well, we saw a vignette from a popular television show, or a list on the computer screen of all the important things that ever happened on March 15. If it went poorly, we were treated to a supplemental discussion of what can go wrong with the technology if it is entrusted to the unprepared or the unsuspecting. The presentation would wind up with a cost-comparison, showing how much cheaper the new gadget was, or a partial list of proposed applications. In either

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case, the new technology was judged "very important, with the potential to revolutionize both the art and the science of teaching."

These presentations are interesting to watch and a lot of fun to give, but they always skirt around the tough issue: if teaching is going to improve, exactly what is going to change from what we do now? The presenter (myself included--I've given more than my share of these things!) doesn't want to cloud the radiant brilliance of the state-of-the-art with a controversial discussion of the here and now. The presenter seems to want nothing less than converts to his/her fervent belief in the reality of the latest miracle, as if faith in the technology will ineluctably lead the new convert to some gnosis of how to use it.

As a remedy, I proposed that we form The Computer Magic Society, open to all those who really know how the technology works. As a condition of membership, they would have to promise to answer all inquiries about how the stuff works by saying: "I'm sorry, it's magic; and I'm sworn to secrecy. But I can talk about how it might be used. Got any ideas?" Unfortunately, the Computer Magic Society remains still-born because none of its potential members is willing to take the pledge until all of the others do. In the meantime, a lot has happened in the optical memory business; and some of it is going to rub off on language instruction. Would you like to hear about it?

Compact Discs

Our efforts to win converts have been tremendously successful. Today, everybody believes in optical memories. They see them in every department store and music shop in the form of Compact Discs. Compact Disc players cost $200 to $800, and the discs cost $12 to $18. In five years, if you want long-playing records, you'll have to order them from the Smithsonian. Three new multi-million dollar CD molding plants are being built in the United States, and many are in the planning stages around the world. Recent estimates of CD production indicate that it will triple by 1992. Compact Discs are here to stay.

CD ROM

Two new products have been developed on top of the Compact Disc substrate. The first is the digital data version known as the CD ROM; the second is the CD-I. CD ROM comes from Compact Disc Read-Only Memory, which suggests that the unit would be a plug-to-plug replacement for a 250 Megabyte memory chip—if such a chip existed. A better analogy would be a huge write-protected floppy disc that can be read thousands of times without losing the

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recorded information. Recently, a provisional standard for the data format on CD ROMs has been widely accepted, and a number of firms have begun to publish their databases on 4 1/2 inch discs. For example, the Grolier Encyclopedia (without illustrations) is available, bundled with an inquiry program that runs on Personal Computers. The program can do full-text searches as well as the usual main entry retrieval. Its ability to do comprehensive searches gives literal meaning to the idea behind the word "encyclopedia": an encircling education.

At this Spring's 2nd Annual CD ROM Conference in Seattle, a number of similar products were demonstrated. Microsoft, the conference's principal sponsor, is selling a writer's reference disc. It contains a dictionary, a thesaurus, a ZIP-code directory, a dictionary of quotations, and an almanac. Bundled with a Hitachi player, the package costs about $1,500. This product is an example of a horizontal application: a basic product that has relatively wide appeal.

A prototype of a foreign language application has been developed by Facts on File Inc. They have put 115 illustrations from The Visual Dictionary and 1,660 terms in French and English on a CD ROM. By next year, they expect to offer a product with 1,000 drawings of everyday objects and 10,000 terms in Spanish, French, and English. The disc will cost about $750, plus or minus $200. The dictionary is designed for ESL and foreign language instruction: it will use digitized speech to pronounce any of the terms in any of the languages.

For educational researchers, Dialog Information Services is offering Dialog OnDisc: ERIC. The ERIC database of research materials will be updated quarterly. Articles cataloged between 1981 and the present fit on one disc, which costs $1,950. If you want to go back to 1966, three discs are required, and the cost increased to $3,450.

These products are the stalking horses. If they touch a responsive clientele, there will be many more textual databases available. Imagine having Rouse's annotated Shakespeare available to search for the occurrence of any combination of words. Or Four translations of the Bible, accompanied by six commentaries and a Bible dictionary. The problem won't be recalling who said what; it will be figuring out whatever promoted them to say it in the first place.

Teachers will complain that their students use all the apt quotations in their essays without having the slightest idea what the opus being quoted is about. Crib sheet (Study Guide, if you prefer) publishers will have to rewrite their pamphlets to suggest fruitful keyword searches, and highlight unique

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terms, such as the names of allegorical characters, etc. Can you imagine what Dante's Inferno would look like if it were portrayed as a relational database?

CD-I

CD-I stands for Compact Disc-Interactive. At the moment, it is just a specification for an integrated Compact Disc and microprocessor, capable of text, graphics, video still-frames, and audio at three different levels of quality. In short, if you can live without full-motion (30 frames per second) video and 3-D, this will be the medium for all seasons. So far, Philips, Sony, and Hitachi say they have prototypes running, but it will be very late next year before even the earliest production units arrive here. In spite of this pronounced lack of product (one observer called it "vaporware waiting to condense") the developers have already established two umbrella organizations to assist aspiring "content providers." In the United States, there is American Interactive Media; and in Europe, it's European Interactive Media. The technology has its own monthly newsletter (CD-I News), and its First Annual Conference was held at the Moscow Center, San Francisco, May 11-13.

It is easy to scoff at all of this hoopla over a product that is still on the drawing boards, but it makes a lot of sense to veterans of the early days of interactive videodisc. The videodisc experience taught the manufacturers that the content has to be in place to sell the system and that it takes longer to develop new content than it does to develop the hardware! Instead of re-tooling a Compact Disc production line, cranking out a bunch of machines, and then waiting for the idea of using them to catch on, these guys are playing it smart: if there is no commitment to produce content, there certainly won't be any commitment to produce machines.

Education as a Market

Speaking of commitment, none of the touts and barkers are suggesting that CD-I is going to be used in the classroom. The market for CD-I will be store owners who need point-of-purchase and point-of-information displays and households that are interested in self-improvement ... you know, the folks who buy Time-Life Books and encyclopedias. Municipal libraries are viewed as more likely customers than schools. There is nothing personal in this slight, you understand. The developers realize that what CD-I does and what teachers do are too much alike to expect teachers to embrace this technology.

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Twenty-five years ago, the teaching machine was done in by similar circumstances. This time around, the result maybe a bit different. One reason is that CD-I is a much more self-contained technology. All the student has to do is turn it on and slide in the disc. For another reason, a much greater percentage of instruction occurs outside of classrooms these days, so there is a larger market. The demand is also strong because both consumer and industrial products are becoming so "smart" that very few people have the requisite experience to speak to them on their terms.

Take the latest development in hard-copy communications as an example: desk-top publishing. For less than $10,000 you can buy a system that has as much capability as a medium-sized printing company had 20 years ago. That company had a skilled staff of 20: layout artists, typesetters, photographers, and printers. Their waking hours were filled with decisions about multi-page, multi-column paste-ups and dummies, cropping, scaling, typography, ink and paper. Technique aside, how do you condense that much experience about what works visually and what doesn't, so that a secretary can produce a polished sales piece without spending three or four years "learning the trade"? Enter CD ROM with typefaces, fonts, and stylesheets, and CD-I with the short course on how to want what you need and how to get what you want.

Teaching Languages the Optical Way

For language teachers, there are the usual options that all teachers have, but there are also some unique opportunities. Under the "usual options" category, the standard move is to "Wait and See." If somebody develops something interesting for some other market, convince the developer that there would be a huge educational market, if only the price were lower. Sometimes this is true, but true or not, the minor premise in the syllogism is always: make a few copies available to us, and we will evaluate its educational potential. In the case of CD ROM, this may be a very good strategy. There is a broad market developing for computer-based writer's aids, and they will be selling at very attractive prices five years from now when the primary market is thoroughly saturated.

The "unique opportunities" for language teachers exist because speaking and writing are performance skills, like playing a musical instrument or painting a picture. For students to become skilled in the art, much practice is required—much more than any classroom can provide. There is an opportunity for a homework machine, a machine that will encourage the student to listen, to

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write, to read, and to speak the language. If this practice is to be sustained, it must be intrinsically rewarding. In a word, interesting. But interesting isn't easy. Students need to be able to select exciting, fascinating material from a very large and diverse collection. There are some very reasonable first steps being made. For all of the major languages, intrepid American educators are braving the snarling red tape of distribution rights and residuals, to mine the gems of foreign language television (well, let's just say the most appealing of what has been made available). The more technologically oriented know the locations of all of the communications satellites and use their 12 meter parabolic microwave antennas to "downlink" hours and hours of stuff that is marred only by the fact that its half-life is less than 36 hours, and they don't have time to work it up into "a really sound lesson" before something else comes down and they need to re-use the tape.

We are drowning in an ocean of information that we know is valuable for exposure to languages but that isn't automatically or inherently instructional. We may be able to get our students to watch portions of it, but it's a very hard way to learn—a bit like learning the Moonlight Sonata by throwing out the sheet music and watching a videotape of Vladimir Horowitz's hands floating over the keys over and over and over. If we can only add something to these programs, or take something away, whatever it takes to make them intelligible to neophytes without making them textbook-dull, we have the storage technology to make thousands of durable copies available to anybody who is even mildly interested.

With every new technological advance, it becomes clearer that technological limitations have never been the real problem. The real problem is the way we structure the learning worlds that we build for our students. There is a huge chasm between the very simple things we develop and the complexity of the real world. When we have a representation of the real world (i.e., television programs that native speakers find entertaining) to manipulate electronically in any way imaginable, we don't know how to begin to take it apart so that students can figure out what is going on.

Suppose we concede defeat on this front, and look at the remaining option: to build something from scratch, something that goes beyond our simple classroom ditties. We've had some successes in this direction, but what progress we have made has been very expensive, both in production dollars and in the minuscule number of students who have benefited from them. Admittedly, these interactive video projects are experiments, not comprehensive solutions. It is understandable that teachers are sticking with the "Wait and See" option, but the

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lack of acceptance makes it harder to fund subsequent research, because the funders have no guarantee that the next step will be any more acceptable than the last one. It's a vicious circle. To make it more interesting, we make it more realistic by making it more interactive—which makes it more complicated to use, which makes it harder to integrate into existing instruction, which makes it more expensive to implement, which drives it out of the reach of most educational institutions, which makes it not at all interesting to practitioners.

We'll Lick This Thing Yet!

Don't give up hope! The problem can't remain intractable forever. Some day . . . say, I forgot to tell you about RCA. You remember that CD ROM conference I mentioned earlier? Well, RCA really blew the CD-1 folks out of the water. According to the CD-1 camp, only very limited amounts of motion video probably with reduced frame rate and reduced screen size, will be available on CD-1. They have told us repeatedly that the CD data rate was too slow to support full-motion video. So RCA announced a set of microchips that can pack 72 minutes of full-screen video on to one CD. They call it DVI, for Digital Video Interactive. The RCA engineers have found a way of compressing the information in a series of television frames so that the limited CD ROM data rate isn't a problem. Just think of it! If you can put 120 minutes on a tiny CD, you should be able to put 24 hours of video on a regular-sized videodisc. Talk about capacity! This means we can have closed-circuit television systems where the technician comes in once a day to change all of the programming. Fantastic! And Eastman Kodak has just announced a WORM disc system that can store a Terabyte (I x 10 to the 12th) on 150 14-inch platters. Wonders never cease!