The Pocket Calculator, Google Translate, and Generative AI: Educational Challenges and Opportunities in Response to Technological Innovation
Van Pelt Library, Collaborative Classroom, Room 113

This workshop will provide participants with opportunities to reflect on the potentially disruptive nature that new technologies can have on learning environments. We will draw a parallel between the controversies the pocket calculator has sparked in mathematics education in the 1970s and 1980s with the reception of machine translation apps, such as Google Translate, among language educators in the 21^st century. Equipped with this historic appreciation for the impact of new technologies on learning environments, we will discuss a range of instructional and curricular options in responses to Google Translate and offer a reflection on educational responses to generative AI, including ChatGPT.

Light refreshments and friendly conversation at 1:30 PM.

Per Urlaub is Director of Global Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His scholarship is located at the intersection of second language studies, language and literacy education, intercultural communication, and applied linguistics. Before joining MIT in 2022, he held tenured faculty appointments at the University of Texas at Austin and at Middlebury College, where he also served as Associate Dean of the Language Schools for five years. During the academic year 2014-15, he was a scholar-in-residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Second Language Studies. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University.

Eva Dessein is a Senior Lecturer in French and leads the French language program. She has taught French language, literature, and culture at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. Prior to joining Global Languages, she taught at Middlebury College, the University of Texas at Austin, Williams College, and Vanderbilt University.

Her scholarly work engages broadly with questions related to language and identity, intercultural competency, language learning in immersion settings, and instructional technology to explore the intersections of second language learning, intercultural education, and study abroad. Her current scholarship analyzes the role of the digital humanities in intercultural education and the impact of machine translation technologies on cross-linguistic communication.

Check-in, pick up symposium materials, and enjoy some coffee.

Welcome

Christina Frei is Executive Director of Language Instruction in the School of Arts & Sciences and Academic Director of Penn Language Center. She specializes in constructivist curriculum design, intercultural communication, and diverse applications of technology for teaching and learning world languages and cultures. Frei co-authored a textbook for introductory/intermediate German language and culture: Augenblicke, German through Film, Media and Texts. Continue to her full bio.

Anne Pomerantz is an applied linguist, language instructor, and teacher educator. She is an expert in the teaching and learning of new languages in classroom and community contexts. At Penn GSE, Dr. Pomerantz directs the Ed.D. specialization in Educational Linguistics and teaches courses on language pedagogy, intercultural communication, and discourse analysis. She works closely with the Penn Language Center to support the dynamic and diverse education community on the Penn campus, including co-convening the annual Penn Language Educators Symposium. Skilled in community-engaged teaching, Dr. Pomerantz mentors university students who work as language educators and ethnographers in immigrant-serving organizations and has developed several academically based service-learning courses. 

Researching AI to Change the Landscape of Learning Experiences

Recently, AI breakthroughs have opened new paths for unprecedented possibilities in how AI can support educational goals. Since 2020, multiple AI institutes have been funded by NSF as part of the "AI-Augmented Learning to Expand Opportunities and Improve Outcomes" program. Cutting-edge research built on close collaborations between schools and universities is promising to change the landscape of learning experiences. In this talk, I will present an overview of the range of capabilities afforded by recent AI advancements in text and video analysis. We will reflect on the range of innovative yet practical applications that are currently developed across the country and some important ethical concerns, including privacy violations and algorithmic biases, which need to be addressed.

Eleni Miltsakaki obtained a PhD degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Ellen Prince and Aravind Joshi. Her research has focused on discourse structure, text analysis, pronoun resolution, and readability.  Her work has been published at top journals and NLP conferences. She’s the founder of Choosito, an educational technology startup using NLP and Machine Learning to select Open Educational Resources and other documents freely available on the web that match the reading comprehension ability and interests of the learners. Dr Miltsakaki is currently Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Robust Intelligence program of the division of Information and Intelligence Systems and senior researcher at the Computer Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

Games, Brains, and Novel Ideals:  How Communication Games Unlock New Vistas for Understanding the Dynamics of Language

Using examples from his own research, Dr. Roberts discusses how language and communication games can be a useful and powerful tool for both research and teaching. He argues that they gain this power, in part through the potential games have for stimulating engagement and temporarily creating new worlds for their players to inhabit, framing goals and decisions in different ways from how they’re framed in the real world.

Gareth Roberts is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Penn, where he runs the Cultural Evolution of Language Lab. He also co-runs SCEW, a cross-disciplinary Social and Cultural Evolution Working Group at Penn. His research principally involves using experimental language and communication games to shed light on social and communicative factors in language evolution, broadly construed. This semester he has also been teaching a new undergraduate class on using games (theoretical or experimental) to study language. He grew up in the original North Wales and speaks Welsh exclusively to his three kids.

During lunch please visit a demonstration of a virtual reality map as designed by French instructor Mélanie Péron. The interactive map was created as part of a Digital Humanities grant and is entitled, “Mapping Paris during the German Occupation”. Ms. Péron developed an interactive multimedia map of Paris during the German Occupation using Neatline and Omeka. Attendees are invited to experience the map as well as learn more about the process of undertaking such a project.

View the lunch menu.

Integrating Language, Literature, and STEM Education: (Literary) Translation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Despite the astonishing progress of machine translation in recent years, even the most powerful systems fail miserably at translating literary texts. What can we learn both about machine translation and about literature, when we confront AI systems with literary text? This presentation will describe and analyze student perceptions of an undergraduate course offered at MIT in Fall 2022 that was centered on this question. Students read fundamental theoretical texts in translation studies by thinkers ranging from Martin Luther to Walter Benjamin and created a translation portfolio with their own translations of expository and literary texts. Equipped with these theoretical insights and practical experiences as translators, the students analyzed the output of Google Translate and compared it with their own translations. Students grew linguistically in the languages that they used for the translation portfolios, refined their aesthetic sensibilities for characteristics of literary discourse, and gained a critical appreciation of the affordances and limitations of machine translation.

Per Urlaub is Director of Global Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His scholarship is located at the intersection of second language studies, language and literacy education, intercultural communication, and applied linguistics. Before joining MIT in 2022, he held tenured faculty appointments at the University of Texas at Austin and at Middlebury College, where he also served as Associate Dean of the Language Schools for five years. During the academic year 2014-15, he was a scholar-in-residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Second Language Studies. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Stanford University.

Use of Augmented Reality Tasks in the Additional Language Classroom

The goal of this workshop is to demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) language-learning tasks can be designed and implemented in both web-conferencing and in face-to-face environments. AR, or an extension of the real world to the virtual reality through the multimodal digital elements, has become a new trend in additional language education. While interacting with virtual objects and experiencing the virtual world in a three-dimensional view, learners can use language like they would do it in real life. The workshop consists of two parts. First, the workshop participants will experience two tasks, “Going on a Date” and “Experiencing Van Gogh”. The former task is designed using Google Maps whereas the latter one is developed using Google Arts & Culture platform. The task demonstration will be followed by a discussion on the features of the AR task-design that can facilitate language development in the additional language classroom.

Iryna Kozlova, PhD is a Lecturer of Educational Practice at the Educational Linguistics Division, Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on (online) teacher training and the application of technology in language education. Her recent projects explore the use of Augmented Reality in online ESL classroom, teacher training in 3D virtual worlds, and the application of the evidence-based engagement framework for teaching in the web-conferencing environments.

Yufeng Jin, M.S.Ed., is an alumnus of the Penn TESOL program. He is interested in the application of technology in language teaching and learning.

Sitong Gao is a graduate student in the Penn TESOL program. She is interested in the use of technology in language education.