Electronic Education: Put a Hot Potato --- with all the fillings --- on Your Internet Menu

Martin Holmes is one of the team members of Half-Baked Software. Half-Baked Software’s most well-known product is the "Hot Potatoes" group of six programs for making Web-based interactive teaching materials. He is also the creator of the "Markin" program for instructors who want to be able to mark or comment on student writing submitted on-line or via email. His current position is Programmer/Consultant in the Research and Development Section of the Language Centre at the University of Victoria.

What is your experience with computers in language teaching?
From 1991, I worked in Saudi Arabia with the Saudi Aramco oil corporation, and Computer Assisted Instruction was an integral part of their courses; classes would regularly do grammar, reading and vocabulary exercises on Apple IIE computers. During that time, I bought a PC and began to learn programming with Visual Basic, feeling that the Apple-based material was too limited, and the combination of Windows and VB offered the possibility of creating more interesting materials without having to learn anything hard like C++. I've still never done any computer courses at all, and I have all the weaknesses of the autodidact. There are whole areas of programming, from assembler code to graphics rendering, which I know very little about.

What are your current responsibilities?
Our responsibilities in R & D are to provide a range of different computer-related services to faculty and staff in the Humanities. Our focus is to support teaching and research, and we do this primarily by writing instructional software and creating course-related websites, although in practice we do everything from telephone tech-support to putting course outlines on
departmental websites. Up until April 1999, I was still doing some teaching online (ESL writing), but I no longer have any real teaching responsibilities. We give regular workshops to faculty, staff and ESL instructors, and my colleague Stewart Arneil (one of the other two members of the Half-Baked Software team) and I are often asked to do guest presentations in courses related to ESL training or educational technology.

What was the impetus behind the site "Web-based Language Learning Materials" (http://web.uvic.ca/langcen/ rnd/weblang/contents.htm)?
For several semesters, a professor in the Linguistics department at UVic had been asking me to do a guest spot in an applied linguistics course -- usually it was a very general request to "do something related to computers and language teaching." As more and more of our work moved onto the Web, and away from standalone machines, I found that I was spending much of this session "demoing" websites, which seemed a rather unrewarding approach. I decided that the participants in this course would be better served by working through an interactive website which explained and demonstrated some of the basic principles involved in CALL. Rather than attending a physical session; they'd be able to move at their own pace and try things out for themselves. It seemed to work quite well. That particular site is now looking a little outdated, but I think the basic principles are still sound.

What led to your involvement in Hot Potatoes?
We developed Hot Potatoes initially for ourselves. We were doing JavaScript-based interactivity manually, and it was taking much too long. In addition, we wanted to find a way for students, research assistants and faculty to do the content-creation and data-entry tasks, rather than having to do all that ourselves, so we needed a simple interface that separated the code from the content. In our development work, we're often the project managers of a team that consists of content-experts, research assistants and workstudy students doing data-entry chores. Hot Potatoes enables all of those people to work on the course material, and test it out easily in an interactive format, without having to worry about the mechanics of the code, or the graphic design of the final site. We released it on the Web as an afterthought, really.

Which is your favorite program?
I like them all for different reasons. Markin is at the heart of my work, because I'm now rewriting it from the ground up for the third time; it's the oldest of my "serious" programs, and I always develop and test new techniques in Markin, then use them in other applications. Hot Potatoes is a favorite because it's a collaboration with Stewart Arneil (the Mac programmer) and Hilary Street (the graphics guy); it's more fun working in a team than slogging away on your own. Hot Potatoes is also achieving some public acclaim, which is gratifying, of course. Another application I'm just finishing is a standalone Windows application called LIPS, written in collaboration with some people from the Linguistics department; it's intended for teaching transcription using the IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet]. It's been a lot of fun to write because it involves extensive use of video clips, something I haven't done much of before.

How much time do you spend on software development?
About ten hours a day. From 5 am until breakfast, I work at home on my personal projects like Markin; I work at the university from 7.45 till 5.30 or 6 most days, and most of that work is software or website development. Now, with Half-Baked Software as an independent company, we're working some evenings too, on customization or independent development projects.
Many of those involved in CALL cope with large demands on time with little in the way of financial return. Where do you fit in?
I'm paid full-time for this work at UVic -- it's my job. My work at home (the TexToys and Markin shareware programs) brings in a little extra every month, and when I do other work for Half-Baked I'm paid for that. My total income is probably less than that of any faculty member, but I love what I do, and I was doing it for free for many years before anyone offered me money for it! In the last five years, I've managed to slide sideways from classroom teaching into a whole new career which I enjoy thoroughly. Money isn't that important to me as a motivating factor.

Can you yourself benefit financially when you are doing the development work on "University" time?
This is an interesting and important question: The work I do at home (such as the Markin program) has to be kept completely separate from university work; I don't even like to do presentations on it at the university because of the possible conflict of interest. The marketing and distribution of that work is handled by another company, Creative Education Resources in the UK which helps to keep the two worlds separate. However, the university has encouraged and helped us to set up Half-Baked Software so that we can generate some revenue for the Language Centre from the software we create at work. We are directors of the company, and co-own it with the university, so we do benefit financially from some of that activity, but most of the money coming to us personally from Half-Baked is earned by doing custom programming jobs outside work hours. I can't speak for the university, but our experience has been that UVic is working to create conditions under which people such as Stewart and myself are encouraged to innovate, and allowed to profit to some degree from that innovation as long as the university also benefits financially. We're in the early days of this project and this relationship with the university, but all the signs are that we'll be able to create a healthy and profitable company that puts money back into the Language Centre, and at the same time enables us to pay ourselves for extra work we do - an alternative to overtime, in a way, since we don't have "overtime" in our salaried jobs in normal circumstances.

What sort of recognition have you received?
UVic is very supportive indeed of the Language Centre and its staff. We have a large degree of autonomy in choosing the projects we work on, so we rarely spend time on unrewarding or ineffective work, and our work is generally appreciated by the faculty and staff we work with. We don't spend much time at conferences (we don't have a travel budget!), but when we do, we usually find that projects like Hot Potatoes are very kindly received. One of our goals with Hot Potatoes has always been to stay one step behind the state-of-the-art, so the programs tend to be practical in the sense that no special software or plug-ins are required, and students don't need the very latest browser to use the pages. This has meant that Hot Potatoes is relatively easy to use, and instructors in particular appreciate that. The Hot Potatoes registered user base has grown to over 13,000 and user responses have been overwhelmingly supportive. This is our single biggest reward: I still get a kick out of coming in and checking the database in the morning, to find that 50 people from 20 different countries have registered since I left the previous night.

Do you have any suggestions for teachers who would like to try developing their own software?
Start by learning HTML and JavaScript - the concepts are fairly simple, there's no need for investment in expensive software, and the results are cross-platform. After working through an introductory text and doing a couple of projects, I'd say you'll probably know whether or not programming is for you. If you do get hooked, then Visual Basic (on Windows) or SuperCard (on the Mac) would be a good next step. My favorite development tool is Borland Delphi, but it isn't easy for a beginner - it took me a year to get productive with it.

Barry Bakin is an ESL mentor teacher in the Division of Adult and Career Education of the Los Angeles USD. He teaches at Van Nuys Community Adult School.