The Soapbox

Apple’s recent announcement of the iPhone has inspired me to reconsider how IT can be used to support foreign language studies. According to Apple, the iPhone will have a microphone (it’s a phone, after all), run OS X, and have 4 to 8 GB of memory. That should be a sufficient platform to load a voice activated dictionary. After training a voice recognizer, you could speak a word into the device which it would then lookup in a dictionary and display the dictionary entry on the screen, providing language students with the detail of a full sized dictionary in something that could fit in their pocket.

Could pocket Spanish-English dictionaries be a thing of the past?

As streaming video has become more commonly available, it is now plausible to discuss offering a video interface to a website. A user could connect to a site using a video client and “navigate” on-line video content using a DVD-style user interface – video menus, highlighted on-screen buttons, fast-forward, subtitles. Alternately, such an interface could augment conventional TV broadcasts, offering a nightly news program with video hyperlinks to hours of detailed coverage of events we currently see only in sound bites.

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