In the age of instant publishing we have cut out the middleman. Publishing houses are routinely avoided and replaced with the process of self-publishing. Agents and editors are left standing aside, and while quick earnings of self published authors caused a sensation at first, an old problem is coming to the fore again: the typo.

A Brief History Of The Typo From Scribes To Lolcats

Historically, the term typo refers to mistakes in manual type-setting. And yet, even before the printing press, the typo was well known in the form of the “copyist’s mistake” or “scribal error”. As Wikipedia notes: “the term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors.”

In the Internet age the typo has gained new meanings and functions. Besides the common usage of voluntary typos in LOLCat text, such as “teh”, “pwned”, etc. people have found ways to exploit the typo for profit, for example in online auctions such as eBay.

When someone submits a pair of “Nike” shoes, for example and a typo slips into his product description, such as “Nkie” or “Niek” not many people will find these auctions by searching for “Nike”, except those that have specialized on browsing auctions with typos in order to decrease their bidding competition.

Another phenomenon is “typosquatting”, in which a well-known domain name is registered with a common typo in order to scrape off traffic, i.e. registering “facebool.com”, etc.

Beta-Readers and Bugs

Apart from the above examples in which typos are intentionally exploited, in most cases typos are simply a nuisance and battled wherever we find written text. In the age of the type-writer correction fluid was used to cover the typo, nowadays we quickly correct typos in instant messages by sending another message containing the correct spelling. Due to modern technology we can fix typos almost as quickly as we make them.

In the field of digital self publishing where authors often don’t have the luxury of professional editors or proof-readers, there is a new tendency to recruit “beta-readers” on blogs and Social Media. The term “beta-readers” is a term borrowed from the language of the software release life cycle. A “beta-tester” is a person who tests new software.

Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss. wiki

It’s not surprising that authors talk about “beta-readers”, since their books are released as software. An ebook is nothing but a very simple piece of software, built to run on a certain set of hardware. And just like the beta-tester, the beta-reader’s role is to find and report bugs in order to improve usability. These kind of “bugs” might be found in erroneous formatting or missing links, but the most common bug is still the typo.

Irreversibility And Instant Updates

Decades of using software has taught us that bugs are an annoying but unavoidable ingredient of computing. There is no software that doesn’t need to be updated. Even big companies like Microsoft continue to fight bugs in the ever-sprawling code of Windows.

However, it seems to me — and I might be wrong — that the typo is still considered a much graver “sin” than its younger brother, the bug. The Guardian, for example, has a long tradition of being ridiculed for its typos in the print-era, earning it the mock name The Grauniad. And when I see the vehemence with which commenters attack authors of online newspapers over typos, I wonder what makes the typo so much worse than a bug?

One reason might be that we have been conditioned to think of the typo as irreversible, because once a typo was discovered in a printed book there was often nothing one could do. On top of that, writing is personal. Everyone of us has been in a situation of being reprimanded in school for bad spelling. Typos seem to be connected to a sense of incompetence and shame.

We have come to accept bugs in our software because we know they can be easily fixed. If there is a problem in an app, we just need to wait for the update and download it. Developers sometimes take a risk of releasing something quickly, and even if there are bugs in it, they can still be fixed later.

Will we eventually reach a similar attitude in book design and publishing, or is there something fundamentally different about the nature of the written word that leads us to demand perfection right from the start?

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img:  Some rights reserved by Thomas Tolkien

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

There are two kinds of people: those who complain about disruption and those who celebrate it. The former are the dying indie bookstores, music labels, film industry, little publishing houses unhappy with Amazon’s ToS – the latter are the start-up generation, VC investors, code monkeys and serial entrepreneurs.

To those who preach the gospel of the “new” economy (which really isn’t new anymore, by the way) disruption is the Holy Grail. In a sense, the term is being used so much that it has become an empty buzzword.  But what does it actually mean? Merriam-Webster defines disruption as follows:

1 a : to break apart

   b : to throw into disorder <agitators trying to disrupt the meeting>

2: to interrupt the normal course or unity of

“Now, wait a second — that’s not what I think disruption means”, many tech people will say. Isn’t disruption about a fundamental digital revolution in which gatekeepers are scrapped, information flows freely and everything gets better and better? Maybe. But as Bruce Sterling said both in his SXSW2013 closing talk and at NEXT Berlin: “Those who live by disruption die by disruption.”

Machines In Your Office

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the MIT Center for Digital Business wanted to research the last few years of technology-related changes and explain in a new book the benefits of the digital revolution for our economy as a whole. So much for the thesis — their findings proved the opposite. The book is called Race Against The Machine and one of its conclusions is that the digital revolution kills jobs faster than it creates new ones.

The list of jobs in which humans are better than machines is shrinking. The more structural a task is, the more likely it will eventually be replaced by computers. Workers in call-centers are already replaced by voice-activated menus, tax consultants can’t scan documents as quickly as software — almost any office-related job that deals with “information processing” is a dying breed.

It’s true that digital technology companies have also created millions of jobs around the planet, McAfee admits — more than in any other field — but the disruptions caused in other branches “will be bigger, in the end”.

I have seen disruption in music, literature, the arts, entertainment publishing, the fourth estate, the military, political parties, manufacturing — pretty much everywhere except finance, health, the law, and the prison/military industry. Which is why they’ve got all the money now and the rest of us are pretty much reduced to disrupted global peons. – Sterling, SXSW2013

Already in 1930 John Maynard Keynes warned about a new disease which he called “technological unemployment”. As long as technology was slow and unwieldy, the disruptions were balanced. But since technology has become continuously cheaper and faster, the disruptions threw the whole system into disorder. It’s at that point when manual labor in China is replaced by robots because they are cheaper that we should begin to wonder. Foxconn, the infamous company who produces our iPhones and iPads for example is already planning to install one million robots in the future.

People like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution. They put a foot wrong. What really happened is that the digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. Everybody — not just us bohemian creatives, but the military, political parties, the anchor stores in retail malls, academics subjected to massive open online courses. - Sterling

Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger

In the hunt for the “next big thing”, building “game-changing” start-ups and wooing potential investors, we seem to believe that the harder we push forward, the faster the world as a whole will improve. It’s that moment when shiny sales copy starts to be mistaken for reality. Plus, there’s a good dose of wishful thinking. Because if we aren’t “making the world better”, then why do it, at all? A good salary alone doesn’t seem to be enough. We want to be successful and feel like philantropists.

[T]here’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. [...] The world has a tragic dimension. This world does not always get better. The world has deserts. Deserts aren’t better. People don’t always get better. – Sterling

Personally, I have benefited from disruption. Thanks to the digital publishing revolution and its disintermediation of publishers, my life as a writer has become a lot easier. I don’t need to send out my stories and book concepts to publishing houses and magazines anymore, only to be waiting for an answer which may never come — I can just do the publishing myself.

Am I helping to “kill” jobs, stealing the wages of editors, secretaries and printing houses? Maybe. On the other hand, I think the concept of work in general needs an update. The digital revolution may have killed more jobs than it created, but a lot of people in my generation aren’t really looking for jobs in the 20th century meaning of the word. We’re not looking for a fixed job description that we can fill for the next few decades. We’re looking for challenges, opportunities to create, moments of innovation.

And the vacuum left behind by 9-5 jobs, office careers and regulated holidays is filled by a landscape of opportunity. Can everyone become an entrepreneur, a self publisher or start-up founder? No. But for those willing to take a risk, the conditions have never been better.

Another way to put it is this:

(video link)

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img: vintageprintable

source: SXSW2013, Spiegel 18/2013

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Isn’t the internet awesome? We use it for work, entertainment, socializing and as a scapegoat for all our problems. Not only does the web prevent us from getting any serious work done, it also kills our social lives and replaces it with likes and shares.

My father in-law recently started using the internet. He has spent almost six decades of his live happily offline and now, after just three weeks of having high speed broadband he’s already complaining that he doesn’t read books anymore. Blaming the internet has become a popular sport for both young and old, not just relating to our media consumption, but especially when it comes to our social lives.

In May 2010, the Mental Health Foundation released a report called The Lonely Society. They found that 53% of 18-34-year-olds had experienced depressions due to loneliness. Nearly a third of the young people also said they spent far too much time communicating online and not enough face to face.

Most of us make the connection without being prompted: it must be the net and Social Media which makes people lonely. Platforms like Facebook make people depressed because they can’t keep up with the “popularity contest”. Looking at photos of other people’s holidays, cars and kids may make less fortunate people feel like underachievers and failures.

According to psychologist Dr Aric Sigman, online communication in general and smartphones in particular are among “the most significant contributing factor to society’s growing physical estrangement”. People are less physically and socially present. Everyone’s zoned out in their own private space with ear-buds and their private glowing rectangle.

Add to this the findings of another study that “loneliness is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day”, and you start to wonder whether to leave the internet and never look back.

Loneliness Is Not A Matter Of Exterior Conditions

For many years psychologists have tried to pin down the factors that create loneliness, but they all only apply temporarily and under certain circumstances. For example, people who are married are generally less lonely than non-married people, but only if their spouses are confidants. If the spouse is not considered a confidant, marriage can even increase loneliness.

Similarly, a 1990 German study tried to link people’s religious feelings to symptoms of loneliness. Some people who believed in God were less lonely than others, but it depended on whether their idea of God was positive enough. The mere belief in God, however, was found to be relatively independent of loneliness.

John Cacioppo, considered by some the world’s expert on loneliness, wrote in his landmark 2008 book Loneliness:

Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need [...] but surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.

While it’s interesting enough that he links instant messaging to whispering prayers, Cacioppo also admits that Social Media can both lead to more integration and isolation, depending on how we use it. Are we passively consuming or are we actively contributing? Does our social engagement consist of simply clicking a button, or do we use these tools to organize meetings and collaborate creatively?

Loneliness In Outer Space

While for each study which claims that Facebook makes people more lonely, there is one that states the opposite — the real problem here is one of coming to terms with the social aspects of digital dualism. It’s not by definition less “real” to engage in meaningful conversation online. People do not always automatically feel more connected just by literally rubbing shoulders with a big crowd of people.

There’s probably no better way to illustrate this than to look at the behavior of astronauts. They live and work together, far away from home and their families in a tiny cramped space for months on end. This can make them feel both crowded and lonely at the same time. Chris Hadfield, astronaut on the International Space Station and prolific tweeter puts it like this:

In the centre of every big city in the world, surrounded by noise and teeming millions of people, are lonely people. Loneliness is not so much where you are, but instead is your state of mind. On Station with the world in our window, people on the radio, family just a phone call away, and other crew members to chat with, plus a full plate of experiments and work to do, loneliness is no more of a problem than it is everywhere else.

It’s no secret that in modern society, we often use technology to physically isolate ourselves. Whether it’s the ear-buds, the smartphone or even the time-tested method of reading a book on a subway, aren’t we all a little bit like astronauts, orbiting in our own private space stations around our daily schedules?

In other words, if someone who sits in a tiny space crammed with technology, circling the earth every 90 minutes 350km above our heads doesn’t feel disconnected and lonely, how can we blame gadgets and software for our loneliness?

Maybe we should not give up on ourselves that easily, and instead of looking for reasons why we aren’t happy just start living the life we want to live, one step at a time.

UPDATE:

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img:  Some rights reserved by william.n

sources: Guardian, Atlantic, CSA

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

When toddlers are getting addicted to iPads, parents spy on their kids on Facebook and teenagers can’t survive 24 hours offline without experiencing withdrawal symptoms it’s hard not to blame technology.

After all, we wouldn’t be experiencing these problems without technology, so it must be technology which causes them, right?

“Fitter, Happier, More Productive”

While the symptoms can be very real, we need to reevaluate the way the understand connected computing in general and Social Media in particular. Many people still frame their online experiences in terms of pre-online existence. For example, we tend to see ourselves as separate from the media we use. When we’re reading a newspaper we’re not not reading a newspaper. When we’re watching television, we’re not not watching television. And when we’re online, we’re not offline, or are we?

Digital Dualism is a term coined by Nathan Jurgenson, founder of the Cyborgology blog and is defined as follows:

Digital dualism is the belief that the on and offline are largely separate and distinct realities. Digital dualists view digital content as part of a “virtual” world separate from a “real” world found in physical space.

Digital dualism is the idea that if only we could detach ourselves from our screens and newsfeeds, we would be fitter, happier, more productive, in short: more human, more real.

The Offline Garden Of Eden

Last year, tech writer Paul Miller decided to test this asssumption by disconnecting one year from the internet and document his experience. According to his own words, he felt that the internet was an “unnatural state” and he “wanted a break from modern life”. So he pulled the plug.

the hamster wheel of an email inbox, the constant flood of WWW information which drowned out my sanity. I wanted to escape.”

At first he felt exhilarated, eager to read more books, meet more people face to face and write more. But when he started receiving readers’ comments by snail mail, dozens per week, he suddenly felt the same stress like when dealing with his email inbox. And it wasn’t much longer before the paradise of an internet-free existence unraveled:

“I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat”

Instead of wasting time online, he learned to be unproductive offline by watching movies, playing video games, sleeping.

Head-On Collisions With The Man in The Mirror

Since the symptoms always appear alongside technology, we tend to confuse cause and context. We like the idea of “Digital Sabbaticals”, of offline living, of “digital detox”, not because offline life is so spectacular (it’s actually rather bland); we only fantasize about being disconnected because we are so connected.

The great media theorist Marshall Mcluhan prophesized all of this already in the early 60s. He was a popular guest in talk shows and widely discussed, but rarely understood.

Personally, I have been observing my technology and media usage with a critical eye since I started working online full-time. I noticed the stress of Social Media and email, of bad habits and effects on my health such as sitting too long and strained eyes. I experimented with unplugging for one or two days during the weekend. Ultimately, I had to admit, though, just like Paul Miller that “there’s a lot of ‘reality’ in the virtual, and a lot of ‘virtual’ in our reality”.

It’s not possible to make a neat split between being offline and online. When we are online we think about our offline lives and vice versa. Binge watching a new TV series on Netflix is not caused by Netflix. Wasting time on Facebook is not the fault of Mark Zuckerberg. Technology is like a mirror. It just reveals our human nature, and there is nothing more surprising, more humbling than when who we think we are collides with who we really are. Yes, we are often lazier, greedier, angrier and less social than we like to admit – and yes, we are also more ambitious, modest, peaceful and more talkative than we might think.

On a more practical note, the real issue here is not one of offline vs. online, of connected vs. disconnected. It’s simply one of time-management, discipline and practice (sounds fun, right?). There are tons of books and blogs about it. In the end, though, it’s about actually doing something.

UPDATE: see also this short documentary about Paul Miller’s offline year:

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img:  Some rights reserved by Palagret

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Once upon a time we spoke of songs, albums, images and articles. Nowadays, it’s called content: the stuff that makes the world go round.

The Waterfall Of ‘Content’

It’s like this huge frickin’ waterfall and you’re just throwing your pebble in and it carries on down the waterfall and that’s that. Right, okay, next. – Thom Yorke

In a world of retweeting and reblogging we find ourselves constantly looking for new stuff. Whether we’re private individuals or manning the treadmills of corporate Facebook accounts we all need a constant supply of content to woo potential customers, fans or just entertain our friends.

Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are focused solely on the recycling of stuff. They call it “curating”, i.e. scouring the webs for interesting videos, pictures, articles and categorizing it. These curators have become an important force in dealing with the daily onslaught of new stuff.

For example, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Bazillions of words are published every second. Most of it is quite probably irrelevant to you and me. This is why we’ve become increasingly reliant on the curators, the data consuming power users that wade through the dirt, always looking for that rare gem.

Fishing Upstream

But also the curators are just human. When you study the setup of power users, how they aggregate feeds, favorite, comment, tag and automatically redistribute items of interest across increasingly complex schedules – it seems the curators are simply reacting to other curators’ feeds.

Each blogger and publisher knows the feeling of needing something new to publish. There’s the option of hunkering down for hours and trying to come up with something unique that only a handful of people might ever read, or you could just share the viral “content” item of the day. If you have your feeds set up smartly you can find out about that new cat video or autotune parody before the big blogs publish it. In other words, if you fish for content upstream, you can “sell” it to the waiting masses below, earning thousands of views, comments and shares which can be translated into advertising clicks and cold hard cash.

But do we really need another content mill for cute animals and fail videos? How many memes can a person consume a day before their synapses backfire?

The Overestimated Value Of Virality

Virality is [the] quintessential product of communicative capitalism – Rob Horning

Over the last few years I have become increasingly wary of the viral. I’ve had my own moments of seeing posts rack up hundreds of thousands of views due to Reddit and StumbleUpon, but as exciting as it may be to watch that counter spinning and spinning, ultimately I wonder what has been accomplished.

Since I don’t display advertising on any of my web projects (by the way…), big traffic doesn’t translate into cash for me. In that sense, at least, I’m not forced to pander to the mainstream. Nevertheless, it’s always good to remind oneself:

• the quality of creative work is not determined by its quantitative spread

Just as many good writings are not discovered due to the ubiquitous TL;DR, the viral hit of today will be forgotten tomorrow.

• just because something doesn’t get picked up immediately it doesn’t mean it’s not worth sharing

The internet and accelerated tech culture has generated an expectation of immediate gratification. Everything is always already available, only one click away. As with all things in life, the really good stuff, however, doesn’t work like that. An essay which is still worth reading in 10 years doesn’t magically appear by clicking “like”. Just as it takes time to create great things, it takes time for people to discover them.

So if you need to “generate traffic” to survive, go ahead and do a repost or reaction once in a while, but please – don’t become just another curator curating the curators.

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photo:  Some rights reserved by Jesse Draper

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

After writing three detective stories for German learners in 2012 and seeing people embrace the format, I wanted to do something different and yet very similar in 2013. So, I decided to create an interactive fantasy ebook for German learners which would not just work on fancy tablets and smartphones but even on the fabulous e-ink readers. Little did I know that it would take me six months to complete only the basic framework and first part of what is eventually going to be a trilogy.

This first part, titled Genowrin is now finally published and available on the Amazon Kindle store ( US | UK | DE | FR | ES | IT). A paperback version and other ebook stores will eventually follow, but since the Kindle platform is the most popular and most widely used, I’m starting from there.

This book is aimed at intermediate and advanced German learners who already have some basic knowledge but it can also be an exciting way for beginners to get a feeling for the language without being too overwhelming.

Last week I’ve talked a bit about the technical implications behind this project.  Geeky details aside, I’ve found a workflow which allowed me to focus on the story while automating all the coding and layout aspects. Hopefully, now that this workflow is in place, the second and third part of this story will be released quicker than the first.

Help Me Make This Even Better

Today, I’d like to invite everyone to get this book, download it on your Kindles, iPads, Androids and share your feedback. Since this is only the first part of a trilogy, I want to get as much feedback as possible so I can integrate it into the next part of the story. For example: do you want more sword fights? Less dialogue? More dungeons? Leave a review and help shape the next part of this epic adventure for German learners.

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Everybody knows what a book is: a stack of printed paper, held together by glue, staples, etc. If we talk about the ebook, however, it’s not that clear. What is an ebook? Is a huge Word document or PDF an ebook? What about Kindle books, Kobo books or Apple’s iBooks?

For many years people have been saying that the ebook will revolutionize our reading experience with video, audio, quizzes, Social Media integration and whatnot. But if we take a look around in the big ebook stores most books are actually just straight text, except for children’s books which sport the occasional (non-moving) image. It’s like on the early Internet; most of it is text. Why isn’t there more interactivity, embedded audio and video? Because the format and devices don’t support it.

All eBooks — so-called — are right now nothing more than a lightly tarted-up text dump into a specific electronic container. They’re objects with less capability than print (go on, riffle through those pages with eInk’s refresh rate!) and even dumber than print (uh, which page are you actually on?). They are linear, they are stupid. They are the lowest common denominator of what an eBook can be  - Mike Cane

Amazon Kindle, one of the biggest ebook platforms/stores in the world, is based on the MOBI pocket format, which doesn’t support audio, video or interactivity. Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Kobo and other ebook platforms are based on EPUB, which is slightly more advanced, theoretically allowing embedded audio & video since EPUB3, but often the stores or reading devices themselves do not support it.

Therefore, most interactive ebooks you’ll find these days are actually not ebooks at all, but apps. What’s the difference? An ebook is a digital text file, much like a Word or HTML document. An app is a software, like a game for example.

An ebook is a very simple document which consists mainly of text and can be read on any device or platform from e-reader to smartphone to tablet to desktop computer. Its focus in on reading, nothing else.

An app is a platform-specific piece of software (e.g. Android or IOS) that may have lots of multimedia elements and interactivity but is limited both by its platform and system requirements, i.e. e-ink e-readers like the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, etc. have neither the screen nor processor to run these apps.

Of Walled Gardens & Incompatible Technology

For publishers all of the above means that the more interactive and multimedia you make your book, the less compatible it will become.

In other words, if you create a simple ebook (EPUB, MOBI) it might not have much interactivity or multimedia elements but it can be read on any device from simple e-ink readers to high-end tablets. Admittedly, as soon as we upload these files to an ebook store there might be platform compatibility issues (i.e. you can’t read a Kindle file on a Nook or Sony reader) but these limitations are easily circumvented if the publisher hasn’t locked his books with DRM. In short, ebooks are simple, and that’s why they can be enjoyed on almost any device, regardless of manufacturing or performance differences.

With apps, it’s a lot more complicated. If you design a book app specifically for the iPad or iPhone, then you might offer background-music, animated illustrations, zoomable charts, maps, videos, etc. – but all the people who don’t own one of these devices are not going to have access. If it’s an Android app, all Apple users won’t get to read it. And even if you create both an Android and Apple app, all the people who have computers or e-ink readers but no smartphone or tablet will be left out in the cold.

Innovation Within Limitation

The problem with ebooks as they exist now is the lack of user experience innovation – Kane Hsieh

About one year ago I decided that I would try to break the above graph. I started integrating more images, more complex layouts  and even the occasional bit of audio into Kindle books. Didn’t I just say that Kindle books don’t support embedded audio? Actaully, yes. But you can still insert a link to an audio file into a book. This way, if readers click/tap the link on more capable devices they can listen to the sound while on simpler devices (i.e. e-ink readers) the sound doesn’t play, but also the book doesn’t break.

Half a year ago I started pushing the envelope even more. I was imagining an interactive ebook (not app!) where the reader could make choices during the book which would influence the story. What seemed impossible at first slowly started to take shape. I designed a custom set of text-manipulation commands which converted a set of certain symbols in my manuscript to interactive elements in the final ebook. This way I could focus on developing the story and let the computer do the rest. I even managed to squeeze in a few “achievement” points where readers can share their successes with their friends.

So far I haven’t found any other books that use the same mechanics, but if I figured this out, I’m sure others have, too. Ultimately, only time will tell if there’s a place for this specific form of enhanced user experience.

If you want to find out more about this project, it’s a fantasy story for German learners and it will be released as a Kindle ebook on the 15th of April. The project’s website is: learnoutlive.com/genowrin

On the website I also added a little animation that illustrates how the interactive elements work. What do you think? Could this make the reading experience more interesting? Or is it just useless bells & whistles?

UPDATE: Just made a little video that showcases the book’s non-textual features:

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img: cc by » Zitona « via flickr

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Are video games a valid method of foreign language learning?

Slaying dragons and fighting epic space battles may be an entertaining way to kill some time, but it’s not what most people would associate with the process of learning a language. It may be easy to just change the language in a game’s menu. But what’s the use of knowing the French word for “two-handed sword” or “quantum-cannon” in everyday life?

1. Authentic Situations

Playing video games in a target language has many benefits. Above all, it puts us in authentic situations. What’s authentic about slaying orcs? Well, it’s not the content, but the context. An authentic learning situation puts the learner in a position where she has to make choices. The better he understands the story, options or characters in the game, the better his choices become.

Dionne Soares Palmer, a freelance writer from California, wrote her PhD dissertation on learning Spanish through playing World of Warcraft. After eight months of playing the game in Spanish she had jumped two levels in a placement test.

2. Urgency & Motivation

Unlike other programs targeted toward learners of a second language, role-playing games capture and hold learners’ attention through the game itself, not the promise of language improvement. [...] Whereas in a classroom there is no urgent incentive to communicate effectively, games such as World of Warcraft simulate life-or-death situations in which everyone needs to be able to call for aid or give fellow players vital information. (UNC)

When you are playing a game – it doesn’t have to be a MMPORG – you can’t look up a word in the middle of a battle, because you might die. It’s this kind of urgency that puts a learner’s attention into high gear to quickly grasp phrases and circumstances. Learning a language demands a lot of motivation. Games which are task-based and require in-game communication or deep understanding of a storyline deliver that impulse to just try “one more time”.

3. Repetition Makes The Master

Unlike learning from a book, failing is much less painful in a game. According to Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman and Jesper Juul it may even be that “the continuing possibility of failure is what makes games worth playing”.

[G]ames embody a paradox: we prefer to experience success rather than failure; we enjoy games; yet games involve repeatedly exposing oneself to failure. Juul quotes an interview with the wife of one committed player: “It’s easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams, ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it’ then I know he will finish it and buy version two.”

In a video game, failure doesn’t come at a great cost. We just pick ourselves up and try again. Good games are designed in such a way that the more we fail the more we want to succeed. It’s this dynamic which language learners can tap into.

While repeating a certain level or task within a game, a player will come across the same unknown words or phrases many times, thereby strengthening the new material. Also, since the player’s response in the game correlates with tangible actions, the ”novel word or phrase will be associated with the correct action through conditioning” (UNC), similar to the way infants learn their first language.

Pro-Tip For Gamers: If you’re using Steam, you can download additional language packs for free, simply by clicking on a game’s properties in the Steam client and choosing your language. While browsing games in steam, make sure to check if the supported languages (screenshot) come with full audio.

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img: CC by Joxon

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

When learning a new language there are those things we need to know, those things we need to practice and a million other things we don’t know.

1. Knowledge Is (Passive) Power

Knowing something usually doesn’t take a lot of effort. Either I know, or I don’t. It’s the process of committing something to memory which is the difficult part. For example, once you’ve learned that the past participle of the French verb “vivre” is “vécu” - you know it. But how did you get to know it? And how do you keep from forgetting?

Let’s isolate this moment of knowing for a second, that instant after we have committed something to memory, before the (often) inevitable happens and we forget.

If I know that the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, for example, then this information is stored somewhere in my cerebral cortex. It’s like a hard-drive of a computer. Once it’s in there it stays in there, until it gets retrieved, updated or accidentally erased (forgotten). If I don’t access this information, however, it just sits there, waiting for the natural erosion of memory.

In other words, the actual knowing is completely passive. Knowledge may be power, but only as a potential. It could be true that in some cases “rote learning” might be the fastest way to learn irregular verb forms of a new language, but there’s always the danger of a kind of semantic satiation (excessive repetition leads to loss of meaning).

Put more bluntly, knowing isolated parts of a language doesn’t equate with knowing a language.

2. Talent Is Not A Substitute For Practice

Let’s face it, we’re not all equal. There are people who are naturally better at certain things than others. Some have a natural disposition towards maths and science, others towards language and arts. But when it comes to learning, we all have one thing in common: the need to practice.

For example, when I was working as a language teacher for children and young adults, one of my assignments was to determine individual weaknesses and “patch up” holes. And what I found was that bad grades were never just bad grades. There were those students who worked very hard but foreign languages just didn’t come naturally for them. And then there were those with great natural abilities or even talents for (foreign) language learning, but they simply lacked the practice.

In other words, practice can make a mediocre learner better. But without practice even a good student doesn’t get perfect.

Learning a language is like learning an instrument. It’s not enough to just know your scales and modes, you have to practice every day. Practice is not about thinking or “figuring something out”. It’s about doing it. Then doing it again. And again, and again…

3. The Art Of Not Knowing

All of the above should be nothing new to the seasoned learner. In language learning each person has their own ratio of knowing vs. practice, based on their own natural disposition. There is another component, however, which is not often talked about: not knowing.

Many people who are beginning to learn a new language want to know everything as quickly as possible. We want to be able to express ourselves as fluently in the new language just as in our mother-tongue. We want to progress fast beyond the awkwardness that comes with being in new social contexts where we don’t understand everything. In short, we’d like to avoid the pain of not knowing.

But there is no shortcut here. Not knowing can not be countered by sheer brute force of learning by rote. We cannot skip this stage of feeling like a helpless three-year old when first trying to understand foreign speakers around us. And even when we finally begin to understand them, our contributions to the conversation will feel like clumsy crayon drawings. There’s no way we can go from “zero to hero” and bypass the stage of not knowing.

It can be practiced, however. We can relax into not knowing and use it as a drive. The first step is to recognize that not knowing is not a bad thing. It’s working in our favor. Not knowing is at the beginning of every learning process. Not knowing is what allows a child to display innocent curiosity where adults only show disillusion and cynicism. Not knowing is what makes even the experts humble, because the more they know the more painfully aware they become of what they don’t know.

We tend to think sometimes of not knowing as a problem which knowing will fix. True learning, however, never completely eliminates not knowing, it just grows into it. Whenever we have learned something new we learn about something else which we don’t know, yet. In that sense, not knowing is not just the absence of knowing. It’s at the beginning, middle and end of every learning process.

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img:  CC by tim geers via Flickr

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

A study at the university of Sussex found that reading can reduce stress levels by 68%.

Technology has significantly accelerated the pace of life over the last century. Cities, factories, cars and television may have made our lives more comfortable but they have also taken a toll on our mental well-being. And we don’t even have to stand on a New York sidewalk, frantically waving over a taxi or trying to squeeze into a jam-packed car on the London Tube. Just sitting in front of a computer screen might be more of a stress factor than we’d like to admit.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRESS AND “PHANTOM VIBRATIONS”

In 2012, researchers at the Salford Business School asked Social Media users about their daily experience and what they found was that not only did people show heightened stress levels but some even experience anxiety when trying to log off.

Two in three respondents report finding difficulty in relaxing completely or going to sleep after spending time on social media sites, with over half saying they were “worried or uncomfortable” when they did not have access to their social network or email accounts. Of respondents, three out of five say they had to physically turn off their electronic devices in order to get a break, with a third of all respondents saying they do just that several times every day. The remaining two thirds do not turn off their devices, rather remain connected at all hours – agbeat.com

In the age of the smartphone it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid this particular kind of technology induced stress. We experience “a relentless need to immediately review and respond to each and every incoming message, alert or bing”, as HealthDay put it. Some people even experience “phantom vibrations”, thinking they got incoming calls or messages when in fact, there aren’t any.

THE ESCAPE HATCH OF IMAGINATION

In the end the question is not how we can completely avoid technology induced stress – because we often can’t – but how to find more effective ways to wind down. A study at the university of Sussex found that reading may be the most potent way to relax, far more effective than listening to music, sipping tea or going for a walk. The researchers increased the subjects’ stress levels and heart rate through a number of exercises and then noted which methods were most effective for calming down. It took only six minutes of silent reading to slow down their heart rate and relax their muscles. Reading decreased the subjects’ stress levels by 68%, follwed by listening to music (61%), tea or coffee (54%), taking a walk (42%) and playing video games (21%).

Dr Lewis, who conducted the test, said: “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. [...] ”This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.” – The Telegraph

This all begs the question whether reading a book on paper or an ebook are equally relaxing. Furthermore, is there a difference between reading on e-ink device or on tablets? What about reading on a smartphone amidst a storm of incoming notifications? -

img: CC by Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl)

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

1. Who are you and what do you do in education?

I always think of myself as having 2 lives. One in the past, when I was in France where I was born and grew up, and one now, in Florida where I live. The two are completely different. In France, I studied business and had a typical career in Human resources in a big company. In the States, I am my own boss because that is what I always wanted to be and I must admit, it is much easier to do it here than in France.

I chose the path of tutoring French by chance. One of my friends was looking to improve her French and I started to help her. I realized that I really enjoyed doing so, and it reminded me of being 7 or 8 playing teacher in my bedroom in front of invisible pupils…I didn’t follow this path then because everyone around me was telling me that I would never make money with that profession. Well, they were not completely wrong, unfortunately…. So I cannot say I have many years of tutoring experience behind me but I get very good reviews from my clients on sites where I advertise my services and that is very rewarding.

What I like the most now is the contact with my clients especially always trying to offer them the best professional services that I can.

2. Describe a typical work day in your life!

I just turned 49 but I am a young mother! My younger kid is 5….So my day is full. After dropping him off at daycare and after a good homemade cappuccino, my day is a mixture of private lessons, group lessons, Skype lessons, organizing meetings with my french club through Meetup , working on my blog, updating my professional Facebook page, following sites like Edupreneurs Club (all all the very inspiring edupreneurs there), Fair Languages and Twitter (among many others) to stay informed of all new trends in education, and all available resources that can help me build my lessons and most of all be more efficient. When I find extra time, I work on an e-book of French texts that I hope to publish soon. Let’s be honest: I would have much more time if I didn’t have two mornings a week playing competitive tennis against clubs in the women’s league, but I cannot stop this. Tennis is my other passion.

3. In what way has technology in general and the net in particular changed your work?

I have always been a fan of new technology and internet. My daughter who is 18 always says that I am more aware of new trends in that field than she is. Even in my career as a Human resources manager, I was always ahead in that field. It was therefore very natural for me to apply this interest in the education field. I like to use a wide variety of resources and tools to help my clients improve faster. However, the challenge for me now is to find the time. For example, I have wanted to start making videos for YouTube for years, yet I still haven’t found the time to do it. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed when thinking of all that I could and should do and also seeing all the competition out there doing so, and sadly this just diminishes my energy. A weakness….

4. What challenges do you see for education in the future?

Education is a very broad field and I only operate in a very small portion of it. In a broader sense, I believe that education has to be revived by new trends like the concept of flipped classroom which I actually try to apply in my own tutoring approach.

The challenge is to convince everyone of the necessity of renewal and to get things done, especially in countries like France where everything is….so…..slow…..to…..change…..My older son is in school in Paris and seeing him still take notes on a paper notebook while the teacher is talking makes me crazy. Also, I believe in public school and hate to see that more and more of my friends put their kids in private school because these schools have better teachers with more resources, especially in the States. There is a real challenge for public schools to find the funds and the energy to keep attracting students and stay alive.

In the tutoring field, the challenge is to keep the clients motivated to learn and to teach them how to use the many free resources on the net wisely, whilst encouraging them to continue to use paying services and to pay good money for them. I must admit that seeing teachers/tutors charging sometimes so little, especially for their Skype lessons, drives me nuts. They are devaluing the profession and the asset that is speaking another language. Of course, it is a dream that everyone have access to free or very cheap education on the net and luckily it is more and more the case, but there will always be people who at some point need a tutor: this is a niche and in business, any niche requires specific, highly valued services.

You might have noticed: I never call my clients students. They are clients, customers. I run a business. If I cannot offer my clients anything else than what the net offers, then yes, my services have to be cheap, even free. But I strongly believe that I offer them an added value and a global offer, thus justifying charging a higher rate. This should be all private teachers/tutors’ strategy.

4. Where can we find you online?

My website: french-classes4u.com
My blog: french-amis.com
My Facebook page: facebook.com/french.amis

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About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Through the years as a German teacher I had the chance to work with learners from all over the world. Not only did I observe a variety of difficulties due to peculiarities of mother tongues but even beyond that each individual student had very different needs in terms of explanation and practice.

Therefore, I have become very cautious in dealing out general advice to new learners. It’s almost impossible to recommend a certain style of learning German that will work for everyone. It’s much easier to say what won’t work!

Stuff Your Brain With Vocabulary

Some people think that if they learn as many German words as possible as quickly as possible their vocabulary will surely grow. It must, right? The bigger the input, the better the output? Actually, no. Just memorizing random word lists will not magically increase your “Wortschatz” (literally: word treasure).

There are two problems when learning vocabulary: Relevance and Retention. If a student learns a ton of words he doesn’t use in everyday life (either actively by speaking or passively by reading) they are low on the relevance scale and therefore harder to retain. On the contrary, words with high relevance are easily and naturally memorized without a need for “artificial” methods such as vocabulary drills.

Interestingly, the difficulty of the words doesn’t really matter. If you read and hear the word “Leistungsschutzrecht” every day over a couple of weeks you’ll remember it, no matter how convoluted it may seem at first.

Achieve Perfect Pronunciation

Let’s make an experiment. Try to say: “Streichholzschächtelchen“. If your native language is English, this may be very difficult. There’s that nasty R like in “Brot” and ch as in “ich“. There’s absolutely no way you’ll pronounce it correctly right off the bat. This is what it sounds like. Most English speakers, however, will say something that sounds like “Strike-holes-shack-tel-ken”.

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You say words like these over and over again but the sounds just get stuck in your windpipe, syllables tumbling all over each other.

While some people might actually enjoy doing these somewhat musical exercises, for many others it’s just demotivating. Good pronunciation slowly develops over time.  For the time being, what matters is Understandability and Unambiguity. What that means is that your pronunciation doesn’t have to be totally correct. It might even be very far off, but as long as it’s understandable to an average speaker, there’s no need to torture your larynx.

It is important, however, that a mispronunciation shouldn’t overlap with the correct pronunciation of another word. Example: Due to the “Auslautverhärtung” in German, there are no soft plosives at the end of a word. A German will therefore pronounce the English words “kit” and “kid” exactly the same: “kit”. A native English speaker on the other hand might pronounce the German word “Kür” (freestyle) just like the word “Kur” (regimen).

Learn ALL the Grammar

German grammar is infamous for its exceptions. Whereas in French and Spanish, conjugations and their irregularities are rather complicated in comparison to English, in German even the nouns and adjectives are changing their endings in seemingly unpredictable ways.

Some people will try to learn all the declensions, tenses and moods one after the other. For grammar nerds and linguists this can be an exciting endeavor but for most of us, Konjunktiv II Plusquamperfekt Passiv is not just a mouthful but a real headache.

There are many things in German grammar which are irrelevant to beginners and even intermediates. Just like in English there are a few grammar rules which are used all the time in everyday language and then there a lot more which are very rare.

As with the other points noted above, it’s important not to get lost in the details but to stay with what’s relevant. It may be difficult to ascertain which rules are relevant and which are not. Here are a few pointers: “Deklination” is important for using nouns correctly, but you don’t need all them most of the time (Genitiv is increasingly rare, for example, Nominativ is the standard form. So you can start by focussisng only on Akkusativ and Dativ). When it comes to tenses, the most important ones are “Präsens” and “Perfekt”.

In a Nutshell…

Learning a new language is like exploring a cave. At first there’s only darkness, then you start shining a flashlight around the corners and familiarize yourself with common shapes until one day you can move around without bumping into walls.

The key is that in you don’t need to know everything but only what is relevant. Since for each learner relevancy is defined differently based on level and interests, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, there are only general guidelines and the pragmatism of everyday life.

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img: CC by unpatitodegoma

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.