Comments on 2009 AFL International Conference---Day 2, IB-201

I was the bell ringer for all the conference held in IB-201 on Friday. Here I would like to give my criticism to all speakers who gave presentations in the room first. Then I would give my brief summary to one of the presentation.

First thing I noticed was the outfit of the presenters. Although it was a formal event, only a few presenters dress properly. Many of them wore jackets instead of coats; many of the female presenters wore jeans; a presenter wore a pair of evening shoes without fitting around the heel. Second, about half of the presenters put too many words on their Power Point slides. They put almost put the whole script on their slides instead of only giving the necessary key words. Third, some presenters did not memorize the scripts but just bring them to the stage and read them to the audience. The result of doing this was they gave very little eye contact with the audience. Moreover, it showed their lack of confidence and preparation.

Speaking of preparation, I think fluency of the speech is also a sign to show how much a person prepares for his presentation. Unfortunately, I found many of speakers, mostly graduate students, paused or gave lots of meaningless utterance such as uh during the speech, which obstructed audiences’ concentration and understanding of the content.

Despite the drawbacks, still there are quite some impressive presentations, such as the “SynctoLearn: an Automatic Video and Script Synchronization Tools for ESL Learners” done by Dr. Hao-Jan Chen. Dr. Chen is an excellent speaker who not only delivered the content fluently and clearly, but also used eye contact and gestures to enhance the conveyance of his speech. For these reasons, his presentation left the most impression to me.

In his topic Dr. Chen introduced SynctoLearn, a system which provides the videos and its corresponding scripts in a way that looks quite alike the videokes you can find on the video screen of a Karaoke Box: the scripts are displayed along with changing color that indicates which word the people in the video is saying at the moment. Moreover, the system was designed to be accessible via the internet that makes it the perfect tool for distance learning. The system is an exciting new technology, however, Dr. Chen also pointed out the system is still under developing. It has some flaws such as the limited videos for learners to choose from due to the fact that all the videos and scripts has to be put togeter and proofreaded manually that consumes a lot of time. Furthermore, the process of editing and uploading somehow decreases the quality of the videos. In addition, the system is not open to anyone using the Internet because the server has certain load limit.

At the end of the presentation, Dr. Chen stated that his team is working on perfecting the system. Perhaps one day we will all be able to use it.