Arts and mobile phones may seem like a strange pairing but The University of Queensland’s Arts Faculty is dialling into the cutting edge of mobile communications.
Using technology they have dubbed Communic8tor, the system will utilise the capabilities of 3G mobile telephony to teach English in real-life situations by using role-plays, interactive dialogues and automatic speech recognition, all integrated into a self-paced program of instruction customised to the individual learner.
The project is also unique in that it is the first ever patent to be applied for from the Faculty of Arts.
Developed by postgraduate student Mike Proctor and Faculty of Arts Manager of Innovation and Commercial Development David Israel, the technology arose from linguistics research in UQ’s School of English and Media Studies and Art History.
The idea came to Mr Proctor following from his work on UQ’s innovative LanguageMAP project, an on-line assessment system that uses speech recognition software to test the proficiency of language learners located anywhere in the world via the internet.
”When we tossed the idea around the research group we thought it would be great to market it to countries that are mobile-obsessed like Japan,” Mr Proctor said.
He said the key aspect of mobile delivery meant someone could learn English while catching the train to work or whenever they have a spare moment.
“They’d just dial in to the service and the program would remember what they were up to the last time and they could get straight into it,” he said.
“We are imagining that a typical customer might be a Japanese couple planning to go to Australia for their honeymoon or a couple of high school kids preparing for an entrance exam.”
“They have high school English but there’s a hunger to learn more and rather than enrolling in language lessons, with Communic8tor they can just dial up our graded program.
“With the help of the video interplay of the pre-recorded lessons they can learn specific things for their trip or drill themselves on specific problem areas.
“Eventually we even hope to refine the lessons to teach particular accents.”
Mr Proctor said the group was now in discussions with potential investors and with mNet Corporation in Adelaide, a consortium looking to help test the system on their 3G test-bed network.
He said they were garnering a lot of interest for the concept as 3G providers around the world were crying out for content as the technology becomes more popular, particularly in countries like Japan, Korea and China.
Mr Israel said with over $20 billion spent on English language learning in Asia each year there was exciting commercial potential in the system.
Media: For more information contact Mike Proctor (telephone +61 7 3365 2712, email: m.proctor@uq.edu.au) or David Israel (telephone +61 7 3365 3072, email: d.israel@uniquest.com.au) or Andrew Dunne at UQ Communications (telephone +61 7 3365 2802).
