The following was presented by Peter Spevacek, President InterLangua:

InterLangua provides native-speaking language tutors who live and work in their developing countries to students in the United States. How do we do that? We use the technologies of the new Flat World so that Amarildo Bal, who is living and working in Guatemala, can appear in your PC to help you learn to speak, and I re-emphasize the word, speak, Spanish.

Tom Friedman gave us the short hand way of referring to a combination of technologies and economic changes which are making new styles of communications across large distances possible. The end result of all those technologies and economic changes Friedman calls the Flat World. I am eternally grateful for this short hand. We all now have a way to understand that in the US it is possible to access almost any knowledge-worker through the fiber optic lines running all over the Globe. This is different than manufacturing or farming, which has known globalization since the time of the Silk Road  trade. It is the access to those who work with knowledge that is so radically different.  We don’t know what instant access to knowledge workers means yet. But we know the Flat World is possible. It is possible for Amarildo Bal to tutor a student in Boston or New York or Dubuque Iowa from Guatemala City, Guatemala. And in the process they all benefit.

Friedman’s book does not address another type of flattening. This change is the flattening of computer systems. Fiber optic lines carry huge amounts of data and remove the problems of time over distance. But if systems of computing had remained vertical, what InterLangua does would be inconceivable. If systems had remained vertical I believe most people would think of computers as machines that gave them orders which they had to follow. All of computing would appear to be an elaborate ATM cash machine, telling you to type in your code before it gave you the cash you need. These were certainly the vertically programmed computers I knew.

What were once vertical systems with Master Servers and slave client computers have become radically distributed systems. The underlying technology that InterLangua relies on is best defined as “distributed” computing. Each computer involved in an InterLangua tutoring session is processing roughly equal amount of data. In the past, every time I said distributed computing, I saw nothing but fear in the eyes of potential users. After Freidman’s book I began to tell potential users that we use “flat” computing. Every computer does it own processing. And when those computers connect together only then does the “software” work. This explanation scares no one.

Since I am at a conference with technology in the title, let me exclaim at how strange, powerful and wonderful flat computing truly is.

Everything had to change for computing to flatten. The idea of what a CPU is had to change. The idea of what software is had to change. Standards had to be invented for computers to work together. The single standard with the greatest impact is, of course, Ethernet.  We use Internet standards to flatten our computing at InterLangua. It is not exclusively the internet. In America students connect over the internet because it is convenient. We can run our service over any Local Area Network or Virtual Private Network. Anywhere there is an Ethernet standard being followed. In certain countries we will not be on the internet. We will be on a Virtual Private Network using Ethernet. It’s faster and it is cheaper than the Internet.

One of our language tutoring sessions involves two different computers usually running two different CPUs. Each one of our users’ CPUs processes their own video and audio. And these are off-the-shelf cheap, sub-five hundred dollar computers, including the monitor. After you’re done with your language tutoring session, you can write an email, work listen to music, edit a movie, do anything you want. Today almost any Perntium4 level computer can create 24 frames a second, full motion in a video window. This video window is, according to a whole lot of research, the basic size you need for face-to-face communication. It even has a name. It is called CIF. When you create a CIF size window synchronized with audio on a close-up monitor, the human brain fires off a million signals all of which says I can communicate. Change the video window much smaller or lower the frame rate by 20% and people cannot manage to look into the monitor and communicate face-to-face for more than a couple of minutes. This phenomenon is why Skype users turn off or ignore the heavily flickering video which goes with their incredibly good audio. I call what we have full motion video. And without full motion video at CIF sizes face-to-face language tutoring over the internet does not work well.

I have personally set up Interlangua’s initial sessions hundreds of times. And when the initial session starts the immediate reaction in almost every case is laughter from the new user. Last week I set one up with a very tough network administrator who was desperate to defend his network against all new things. And the poor guy was laughing so hard when he realized he was talking naturally to a young man in Guatemala through this CIF video and audio window. This was a guy who had installed hundreds of thousands of dollar of video conferencing equipment. Most of which never was used. Why wasn’t all that video conference equipment ever used? That’s a really big subject.  And I would argue almost all traditional “video conferencing” engineering is based on television. And I contend television is the perfect example of a vertical technology. It is based on one active presenter or presentation and a whole lot of passive participants.

The software we use came out of corporate “instant messaging.” I bring up the history of the software we use because it was created for one-to-one or small work team communication. It has no legacy attachment to the vertical video conference. The guys who wrote it had no intention except to make a better Instant Messenger for big corporations. What is Instant Messaging? It is a radically flat way of communicating across a complex organization one-to-one in real-time. It has been described by corporate users as more effective than email. Because the programmer’s corporate customers were working on Local Area and Wide Area Networks, that is Ethernet. Along the way the programmers realized they could add video and audio in a unique way. They could add it using nothing more than the Ethernet and internet standard of HTTP. The programmers just included audio and video in the same stream as the text message they were “sharing.” They included no proprietary hardware requirements. At about the same time Logitech came out with USB cameras for under $100 capable of creating the video to flow over the Ethernet stream. And, happy accident, you really had something. Video over IP.

The software we use is missing another vertical legacy. It has no legacy to the vertical classroom. There is no way to raise your hand in our software. No way to signal to the “presenter” you have a question about what is being presented. The underlying assumption in the design of the software is that there are two or more people communicating instantaneously with each other. The software we use is lousy for vertical classrooms with a lecturer and twenty listeners.

Our server is stranger than our software. It holds no data for the users to share. It’s not even fair to call it a server. It is better to call it a traffic cop between two computers which are connecting. But the role of the server is more complex than a simple router. In the conferencing software we use there is no software “application” until the two separate computers make a connection through or on the server. It takes two separate computers and a server to create the application. There is no executable file on the two separate computers. There is a small ActiveX control which turns either Internet Explorer or Firefox into the application which then exists only as long as the connection across the network is maintained. The Peer-to-Peer software like Skype which creates connections without the mediation of a server are about three to five years away from full motion video and audio. Processors will have to about double in speed. And we’ll need something like a video and audio “cache.”  Another technology which is working developing in this space is the latest 4G telephone services. They are capable of full motion video at CIF sizes. I mention these emerging options because this type of communication – face-to-face full motion video - will be much more common in the near future.

We at InterLangua are software neutral. I don’t care who has the best software in six months or if in six years you are working with Amarildo Bal on your cell phone. What’s important to us is that you have access to these educated, skilled professionals. To use Tom Friedman’s phrase, these knowledge workers.

There are currently three major types of software to create these web conferences with full-motion video. The one we use is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET 2.0. Another group of software products is based on the Macromedia Flash technology. And the third major group is based on the JAVA virtual machine. None of these are Peer-to-Peer software products. They all require servers to “handshake” the conferences. I have no idea which type of software will be best in the long run. ASP.NET 2.0 has the smallest use of bandwidth right now.

It is one thing for you to sit down at your broadband internet connection and work with Amarildo Bal. I often talk about convenience when promoting why you want to have your language tutor visit you in you computer. There is no more convenient way to receive a Spanish tutorial

It is quite another thing for Amarildo Bal to be able to get to a computer capable of working with you. This is where the chicken bus becomes an integral part of the story.

The chicken bus, for those of you unfamiliar with Central America, is an old, used up American school bus, preferably manufactured by a company called Bluebird, that has been rebuilt from the ground up. It is painted gaily, has a really loud horn and is the primary means of transportation. In Central America more people take the busses than ride in private cars. Chicken busses are dangerous as hell to ride in. There are no statistics kept on chicken bus accidents caused by bad breaks, blown tires or broken axles. In Guatemala, a country the size of Tennessee, they do keep track of one statistic. They keep track of the number of murders during chicken bus robberies. Last year 45 people were killed on the various bus routes when armed gunmen stopped the busses and stole whatever the Guatemalans were taking with them to work. Mostly the armed robbers get cheap, plastic cell phones. 

To get to our office Amarildo Bal must ride forty minutes each way on a chicken bus. Osberto, our newest hire, rides 90 minutes each way. Amarildo has been through one robbery and one flipped over chicken bus accident since we began this company together about two years ago.  

I find it helpful to think about that 40 to 90 minute ride the tutors takes each way on their chicken busses as the length of the digital divide between poor and rich countries.

The InterLangua office in Guatemala City is on the far western edge of where fiber optic cables reach in Guatemala. IP transport is now close to twenty times more expensive in Central America than it is in the US. In addition to the cost of the IP transport you must be in a premium office building. Because of the way economies and tariffs are structured computers and computer parts are taxed an additional 35%. A $500 computer ends up costing an additional $175 in countries where wages are less than one-tenth of what they are in the United states.

I mention these grim economic numbers because technology is not available everywhere in the world like it is in the US. And when it is available it can be shockingly expensive.

I just said it is important to us is that you have access to these educated, skilled professionals. My job is to get them access to you.

Because of the rarity of technology in Guatemala, understanding of technology is more rare still. We spend a great deal of time training our knowledge workers on how to use the tools which moves their knowledge across the fiber optic lines. We start with how to save a file in a folder on a Windows computer. Why there? Because access to computers generally does not include the right to store any documents on a computer where we work. Our knowledge workers rarely know how to differentiate between the many file types.

What kind of knowledge worker does not have years of experience working on computers? Our knowledge workers who can help you speak a new language.

The tutoring methodology practiced at Interlangua grew out of a cultural and economic phenomenon. For decades the only jobs available for Guatemalans educated in the Liberal Arts was to teach Spanish to visiting doctors, aid workers and university students studying Spanish. This was a phenomenon that existed primarily outside the major city of Guatemala. The world's economic circumstances were structured in such a way that a visitor to Guatemala could have their own private tutor five days a week for a month for less than the cost of typical state college three-credit Spanish class. This phenomenon later became known to American and European students as the Spanish "immersion" trip. The InterLangua tutors came out of this tradition.

To describe the tutors of InterLangua as highly motivated is true but does not do them justice. They bring a set of skills that we do not believe exists in sufficient quantity in the United States. These skills, coupled with their motivation, makes them uniquely qualified to be involved in mediated language acquisition, learning to speak a new language.

What the Interlangua tutors do from Guatemala cannot be replicated by a technology. The technology only delivers the tutors from Guatemala to the United States. The tutors are experts in creating conversations in which they teach their native language. And these are not "fake" conversations about the location of-the-book on-the-table in-the-room. These are conversations which force you to speak in a new language in meaningful ways. They are conversations in which you must mediate the language, choose from your vocabulary and intellectual knowledge of grammar and make it come alive in speech. Internally we refer to the methodology as "la entrevista." The only methodology I can readily compare it to is the Socratic method practiced in certain philosophy departments and at certain law schools. It is not a rambling conversation or a repetition of grammar rules. The goal is to include a new use of a grammar point or expanded vocabulary in each session. The tutors work with different curriculums. And many different levels of spanish proficiency. In each curriculum and at each level the subject matter changes but the human process of finding the right question to enable the student to speak in the new use of the new language continues.

The other benefit which comes from working with an InterLangua tutor is the student's exposure to the culture of a developing country. The cultural exposure has been a key factor at one university we work with. And it has been pretty much ignored at another university which focuses on medical Spanish. With or without a focus on culture, students bond with their tutors. We exploit this a little bit in getting students to sign up early for their second or third classes. We guarantee them their same tutor if they sign up by an early date. So far, we're averaging better than 70% with early sign ups.

Student benefit. And the tutors benefit. The tutors were making significantly less money before InterLangua was able to deliver their skills over the fiber optic flat world. The tutors now make professional wages. They were receiving no technological training. Osberto, the newest hire of Interlangua, had been teaching U.S. medical students in a Spanish immersion school for eight years yet had never saved a file on a computer hard drive. Economicly, educationally, it is a good deal in both directions. My job is to aggregate enough demand in the United States from a variety users to keep the knowledge workers in Guatemala riding the chicken bus across the digital divide. None of this is possible without the Flat World.