--- Forwarded Message from "Richard Kunst" <[log in to unmask]> ---
>Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
>From: "Richard Kunst" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: "Janis Smith" <[log in to unmask]>, "Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: RE: #6339 Hebrew in PC environment
>Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 12:01:07 -0400
>In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Importance: Normal
------------------
(I am sending my reply to Janis to the LLTI list too, because I thought my
remarks re Hebrew, WinCALIS, and Blackboad might be of general interest to
list members.)
> >From: Janis Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
> >Subject: Listserve
> >Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 11:22:45 -0400
> If anyone has
> experience with Blueglas or any other authoring program that uses
> Unicode ,
> please let me know.
DearJanis,
Thank you for your inquiries re WinCALIS. I saw your posting to the IALL
list and intended to mention WinCALIS to you myself. I think WinCALIS has
the kind of Hebrew support you need. We have several different keyboards for
Hebrew, including the standard Israel PC keyboard and a couple of
student-friendly phonetic keyboards (in which, e.g., gimel is typed with the
"g" key and nun is typed with the "n" key, and so on). Keyboards can be
modified and created anew quite easily. Everything is Unicode/ISO
10646-based.
See other specific replies below.
Rick Kunst
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janis Smith [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 9:17 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: WinCALIS 2.5
>
>
> I just found out about your product on the IALL listserve and I am very
> excited so far. (We have a language lab for university level
> modern Hebrew
> instruction). Can you send me pricing info and the latest
> evaluation demo.
The link to the download for the latest version 2.5 of WinCALIS is a little
obscure on our website. Here it is:
http://research.humancomp.org/ftp/pub/download/wincal32.exe (18,617KB)
That includes the setup for a WinCALIS Author Workstation, with both
WinCALIS, for running exercises, and WinCALIS Author, for creating them. The
Web download doesn't include as many extras, such as sample exercises in
various languages, especially with bulky multimedia, 3rd-party shareware
add-ons, Java WebCALIS, etc., as the regular WinCALIS CD. If the Web
download is inconvenient or you have trouble with it, or if after
downloading you would like to get the CD for further evaluation, let me know
and I can send it to you.
> Thanks so much,
> Janis
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Janis Smith [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 9:54 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: WinCALIS
>
>
> I have another question- by the way, after I wrote the last
> email, I found
> the pricing info. I'd like to know what kinds of actions I can
> set up with
> the authoring tool. Are there templates that are standard that I can work
> from?
In WinCALIS Author, we have standard templates for short answer (called
"Open Response"), multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-blank, contextual
cloze exercises (very powerful, with lots of bells and whistles),
column-matching, jumbles, and a few more. Since WinCALIS internally uses a
quite powerful scripting language called CALIScript, which is generated by
WinCALIS Author, anyone who wants special customization can go in and tweak
the CALIScript to achieve just about any functionality they desire.
> For example- can I elicit audio responses and keyboard responses.
Yes, you can elicit either audio or keyboard responses (or mouse clicks, or
dragging buttons, etc.). Keyboard responses have historically been our
strong suit, with automatic "SpellMarking" of student answers as the
default, in any language, including Hebrew. This catches a huge number of
student errors, including accidental typos, which the author does not have
to worry about anticipating. And for correct or incorrect responses which
the author does want to anticipate, WinCALIS has unparalleled
string-matching support using wild cards. (E.g., you can match five common
English spellings of the 19th century Russian author's name with
"{Dosto[iy]evsk[iy]|Dostoevsk[iy]}"; or match all English wh- interrogatives
with "wh*").
Authoring with audio can get a lot more complex, but asking the student to
speak and recording his or her voice, with the option of playing it back is
also quite straightforward and easy. For more advanced, "bleeding-edge"
authoring, WinCALIS also supports authoring with speech recognition, given
an available SR engine and language-specific speech model (I have no
experience with a Hebrew language module for the engines we support, mainly
IHAPI and IBM ViaVoice, but if, say, you had ViaVoice with a Hebrew-language
module installed on a PC, WinCALIS should be able to make use of it.
> Is there
> an information manager (storing student responses) component to
> the program?
There are several layers of record-keeping, ranging from just adding student
responses to a file on disk in the same folder as where the exercise is
stored, to database-based authentication and record-keeping, either stored
via the local file system, or sent via TCP/IP to a remote IP or e-mail
address.
> Thanks, Janis
>
> Janis Smith
> Director, Becker Language Lab/Media Center
> Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
> 1299 Church Road
> Wyncote, PA 19095
> 215- 576-0800, ext. 107
> [log in to unmask]
> Secondly, this is our first year using Blackboard for uploading course
> syllabi and reading materials. It would be wonderful if we could find a
> platform that uses Unicode that would enable us to type in Hebrew for
> discussions and chats and upload documents in Hebrew.
Regarding the second inquiry above in your original LLTI posting, I have
some experience with adding documents in Hebrew, Chinese, and other exotic
scripts to Blackboard web sites. I need to review the exact procedures I
used and check whether they would work with your version of
Blackboard/CourseInfo. But here is one approach: the WinCALIS Student
Workstation includes a multilingual "Composition Editor", which was designed
for students to write and print out compositions, papers, messages, etc.in a
language lab or student-dorm room setting, in any of the languages we
support. Unicode e-mail messages can be written by typing them in
Composition Editor, then copying them to the Windows clipboard and pasting
them into a Unicode-aware e-mail program such as Outlook, Outlook Express,
or Netscape Messenger and sending them from there. For Blackboard, this
approach hasn't worked so well, since Blackboard didn't expect to receive
Unicode in the clipboard's "UTF-16" (aka UCS-2) format, and thus didn't
generate the proper header for the HTML page it generated.
But the WinCALIS Composition Editor, like WinCALIS Author and our UniEdit
multilingual text editor, also includes in its Edit menu a "Copy as" ability
to copy to the Windows clipboard in a number of other formats/encodings,
including Unicode UTF-8 format, in which ASCII characters (all and only the
characters which appear on the standard U.S. PC/Mac/Unix computer keyboard)
are exactly the same codes, and all other characters become multi-byte
combinations of what look to a conventional editor application like zillions
of accented European characters. This "Copy as UTF-8" feature can be put to
use handily to move Unicode text unchanged through any non-Unicode-aware
application or platform.
Hence in Blackboard, Hebrew text typed in Composition Editor, then copied as
UTF-8 encoded text, can be pasted into, say, a chat window, which will pass
it on just as if it were English, French, or Portuguese text. At the
receiver's end, the reader will need to force his or her web browser to
interpret the page as Unicode UTF-8 (all browsers in the last few years can
do this), in which case the Hebrew should be interpreted correctly and look
right to the reader. It may be that recent versions of Blackboard now allow
the user to indicate the desired encoding and insert the proper tag (which
would be <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;
charset=UTF-8">. In this case the browser will automatically display the
page correctly, without user intervention.
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