Rudaí23 thing#22: Mobile Things

Mobile technology has really taken off in the last few years, as evidenced by the popularity and availability of smart phones. Anybody working in a library is going to have to get used to apps as one of the main ways that their users access and obtain information and interact with their favourite online companies, so Rudaí23's second last thing is very topical. What's brilliant about apps is their diversity: you don't necessarily associate apps with one particular 'thing': they cover everything from getting up-to-date weather information, playing games, accessing email, or messaging.

Getting the right apps for your library

Of course, the apps that will be suitable for your library will be determined based on your users' needs, your budget, and the amount of staff that you have to manage any associated tasks, depending on the needs of the app. It is good to try and think outside of the traditional apps that are associated with libraries. There may be an app that you use for a particular function that you never thought would be useful in your work-setting but might suit it perfectly.

One wonderful resource is the 12 Apps of Christmas course. This started again on the 1st of December, but they normally make available all the information after the course has run, so keeping an eye on that webpage might be useful if you find yourself sick of ham and turkey sandwiches after Christmas. The 2014 site had lots of really interesting apps that I had never heard of, so I'm still catching up on getting acquainted with them, but will be looking at the 2015 ones in the meantime.

Duolingo    

I was going to try one of the apps mentioned in the 12 Apps of Christmas, but thought I'd do a brief overview of an app that I've been using over the last few months. It's called Duolingo, and it's a very simple, but very good language learning app. The languages that are available include the ones that you would expect to see: Spanish, French, German, and English. What's interesting is that Duolingo includes courses on Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and even Esperanto. They are also not standing still: languages currently in development include Hungarian, Welsh, Vietnamese, Hebrew and Hindi. There are even rumours that Klingon is coming down the line.

I started using it after a couple of people in my Irish class spoke very positively about it. What really hit home was that a German guy (who had only done one Irish class previously) was miles ahead of the rest of us (and nearly all of us had studied Irish all through our school years). He insisted that his grasp on the language was because of Duolingo, so a few of us made some concerted efforts to use the app.

The main thing about Duolingo is its simplicity, and this applies to every aspect of the app, from its ease of downloading, to how easy it is to grasp the concept, through to the very basic use of colours and images. There is also a nice little 'competitive' feature, where you can link to friends and check your progress against theirs. It's all about repetition, and even includes listening to audio and writing what you hear. You can see your progress in a little bar during each lesson, which takes a step back if you get a question wrong. Complete all the steps and you can move on to the next level. I could immediately see clear signs of progress in my Irish classes, where I was remembering words and sentence construction that we hadn't covered previously.

There are some issues, though. I had been using the app for ages, and decided to see how it looked on a desktop, and realised that the difference was quite substantial. The desktop offers lots of clues about grammar to guide you along for each lesson. Grammar is a particular issue I have with the Irish language, and think that this would have been helpful information to display in the app version. There is also some controversy over whether the person who does the audio is a native speaker, with many native speakers claiming that she is not. This is of course a serious issue, but as with anything as important as learning a language (or doing proper referencing, for example) it is important not to rely on one source.

Despite this, Duolingo is a great example of how to make a learning app popular. It should be easy, fun, and the learning aspect should seem incidental (but be real and concrete). It doesn't take away from the need for classes, but it has definitely helped my ability.