Wish List

Today near the end of our meeting we started a discussion of the future use of StringNet. A future tool bar that includes a variety of tools would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike. My contribution was to discuss possibilities for increasing exposure to English collocations or chunks. My thoughts were in regards to what happens after students have collected a number of chunks, what then can be done? It would be "cool" if a chunk could be marked for later repetition through different tools within the tool bar. One possibility could be a series of mini games in which the chunks could be loaded as modules into the game. In this way the user would be providing the content that they would be exposed to instead of being given by the teacher. Another idea I have is a feature so that you can turn on a small display in the tool bar in which a chunk from your "marked list" will be displayed. It could also randomly change after a set period of browsing time, say 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 24 hours, etc. If it catches the user's attention, they can click it to "see examples." These are simple ideas and as Prof. Wible said today, would be considered "boring" if this was the only thing the user was doing. On the other hand, if the user is getting information pushed to them in many ways, things will never seem boring or monotonous to the user. I have one last idea that I find really interesting but I am not sure of the programming that would be required. I envision users reading web pages (or I hope in the future this will be possible for PDF journal articles or e-Books) users can save chunks to their user profiles. Now once these chunks are saved to their user profiles many things can be done to them, such as the ideas I mentioned earlier. One other interesting idea would be if it would be possible if after they add a number of chunks to their user profile, they have the option of turning on a "cloze" function from the toolbar. Essentially, what this "feature" would allow would not only to find chunks in a certain webpage (article, pdf, ebook, etc.) but users could have the option to not only highlight chunks but to create a cloze article for those chunks they have stored in their user profiles based on the current article they are reading. Let me explain again. A user frequents webpages, pdf files, ebooks, etc. marks particular chunks as useful. These chunks are saved to a user profile. After the user generates an adequate list, later when browsing the user has the option to turn on a cloze feature. This cloze feature will take any webpage, pdf, ebook, etc. a user is reading and make it into a cloze activity. It will not only take all chunks and create clozes, but rather only those the user has previously tagged and are saved in the user profile. This will give the user more opportunity to exposure in *NEW* contexts. Some of my ideas are simply to have users gain experience in attaching "meaning" to the chunk but in other instances such as the cloze exercise described above, I hope users will have a better understanding of the usage of the chunk. What do you think?