The Death of a Language Lab
As language labs it had seen better days. Battered and worn, were
there ghosts of old students haunting the cubicles? Complaining
that they spent too much time in the Lab or not enough, like students
will. We’ll never know. The lab had a good life once. It had been
useful, it had been used and the proof was all the scratches and dents
on the machinery. Could anything else have been done. Couldn’t it have
been up dated, you know Language Lab Version 3.4 or something like that ?
No language labs have changed. There are no more little cubicles, they
were like cages for the students, I guess. No the future language lab
is a multimedia thingy, with lots of lights and flashes and beeps and bumps.
That’s today. Nothing could be done. There are no machines in the school
that can read the material stored in the reels of tape. There is no way to
transcribe all those lessons stored in the cabinets. Gone. That is the
problem with machine read objects. (I am sure someone somewhere is calling
them MROs) Once the machine is outmoded there is little you can do except
trash it or find a museum for it.
Look at the waste. The picture of the
cabinet gives you a good idea of the number of lessons relegated to the
dust bin of history. Each drawer contained at least one hundred lessons,
one hundred ! When there was two or more reels in the drawer it meant
even more than that. Even if we could save the lessons by putting them
on the web, copy to cds or put on the server at the school we would be
running against copyright laws (that is of course if the companies that
own the rights still exist). In order to save the lessons we would probably
have to pay for the privilege.
Check out this tape reel. I grew up with this
technology. I remember camping in my parent’s backyard. My friends and I
set up a tent and inside was a portable tape recorder from Japan. It was
a marvel because it was little. When I say little it was relative but not
little like today’s walkmans. It used four D sized batteries. But I will
never forget the sound of the Doors playing « Light My Fire » inside that
tent behind the house. I remember the fun we had playing with that tape
recorder : making a collection of sound effects, later writing a sort of
radio play and using those sound effects. It was oh, so funny and
unsophisticated. Yes look at this lonely reel, once the symbol of Japanese
technology. You may not agree but it was where the Japanese began.
When I think of the content that has gone, it is staggering one hundred
lessons a shelf. One good thing about a book or magazine is that it
doesn’t need a machine to read it, just you and I and perhaps an electric
light. When you hear all the hoopla about cd-roms or whatever else is on
the horizon just remember this lowly language lab and all the people who
created those lessons.
I never listened to the lessons on those reels.
I don’t know what they contained. I can tell you the lessons were in English,
Spanish, and German, but nothing more. The machines weren’t working when
I first came to the school and by looking at the tapes I could tell you
what they contained. It is funny but I have looked at several cd-roms
that the Ecole des Mines is considering buying, has bought or has
borrowed with the intention of buying and I can tell you that the
content of the lessons seems bare. I wonder what was in those
hundred lessons a drawer...All the lab is now here:
C
Look at the waste. The picture of the
cabinet gives you a good idea of the number of lessons relegated to the
dust bin of history. Each drawer contained at least one hundred lessons,
one hundred ! When there was two or more reels in the drawer it meant
even more than that. Even if we could save the lessons by putting them
on the web, copy to cds or put on the server at the school we would be
running against copyright laws (that is of course if the companies that
own the rights still exist). In order to save the lessons we would probably
have to pay for the privilege. 
