English-Teaching Robots Arrive in Korea

English teaching robots have arrived in South Korea!  As reported in the Joongang Daily, the Daegu Office of Education introduced 29 robot teachers in 21 elementary schools.  The 1-meter (3.28 feet) egg-shaped robot, named “Engkey” (an abbreviation of English key), spoke, asked questions and conversed in English with students, and even entertained the crowd by dancing to music.  (Click on the accompanying graphic to see a full size version.)
From my point of view, one of the most interesting aspects of this experiment is that these robots are linked to real live teachers. These teachers control the machines by remote from the Philippines. They have cameras to record their faces - which show up on a flat panel screen that forms the robo-teacher’s face - and they can also see the Korean students through a camera installed in the robot. Basically, the robot is a rolling Internet link between students and teacher, although the human teacher can also command the robot to make human gestures with its arms and wheels.
No doubt this news is going to strike a chord with many of the expatriate English teachers now living and working in South Korea.   It is also an interesting bit of evidence to support Korea's ambitious goals for the future of its robotics industry!  Comments welcome!

English-Teaching Robots for Korea by 2018?

An article in today's issue of The Korea Times proclaims "Robots to Replace Native English Teachers."   Participants in a recent robotics forum speculated that, by about 2015 robots should be able to help English teachers in the classroom and that by 2018 they should be able to teach on their own, while communicating with students."  Robots are already available in English classes through a pilot project in Masan, aimed at testing the viability of robotic teachers.   Some participants in the robotics forum also saw English -teaching robots as a remedy for the lack of English teachers in small rural farming and fishing villages.
After reading this article, I remain very skeptical.  Nothing is mentioned about the current state of the art in machine translation and the considerable challenges of teaching English to native speakers of Korean.  The linguistic and pedagogical challenges of teaching English would seem to be too large to be overcome by developments in software and artificial intelligence in less than a decade.  In any event, we'll all see.

Education, English, and Korea's Knowlege Economy

Although I have adopted the information society rubric for this blog, it should be clear that education is a big part of the picture. Technology development is certainly an important part of information society development, but today's technological innovations could hardly take place without education. In addition, education is the source of most of the research and ideas that become the content flowing over modern networks. Furthermore, as the world becomes more closely knit together through transportation and communication, the globalization process seems to inexorably give more weight to foreign-language education, especially the learning of English. It is difficult to imagine that any other country in the world makes a greater overall investment in education than South Korea. Given its Confucian cultural heritage, there is a natural tendency here to respect and value scholarship, learning and testing. Hard data show that the nation invests more money in education, publicly and privately, than almost any other country. Parents will sacrifice almost anything to give their children the best possible education. Since the election of a new President here, the issue of how to revitalize the South Korean economy has taken center stage. The presidential transition committee has publicly announced many changes that the new administration will introduce, politics permitting. A large number of these have to do with education. For example, the college entrance administration will be revamped to give more discretion to individual universities in admitting students. However, more than education per se, the topic of English education has become a major national policy issue. The new administration proposes to gradually introduce a policy whereby all English classes in public schools are taught in English. It also proposes to strengthen public school English education in order to reduce the huge current expenditures on English training through private institutes or "hagwons." Beyond the expenditures on institute training here, the country also faces a rising services deficit, owing to the number of students going abroad for intensive English study. Future posts will deal with the major issues in education, English education and the overall effort to bolster South Korea's knowledge economy.