Korean Job Discussion Forums

[sulperman]

Huh.....I knew the end would come sometime, but I didn't know it would be like this....

http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/01/123_59809.html

[djsmnc]

I wonder how much Kim Shiin-hwa was paid to say that. I think this story is a repost from about 2002-2003. Man, they sure need some new material, especially since the number of teachers has been on a steady rise.

[Rory_Calhoun27]

It's like they found a way to combine The Terminator and Kindergarten Cop into one movie.....

[The Cosmic Hum]

This post is pure gold.
We should save it for April Fool's day.

[spyro25]

as someone who has sat classes last term at cambridge on computational linguistics - i can honestly say the claims are ludicrous. Even the best semantic parsing system only reach 76% accuracy at present, and the largest contextual cue a corpus search can get is a 5-gram (5 words of context in sequence).

seeing as a computational teacher will be running from such a corpus, it might be able to parse the sequence 'hello how are you', but try something like 'as someone who has sat classes at cambridge' and the corpus will probably not be able to retrieve the string. even the largest corpus (google) will struggle getting an EXACT match for a string like that.

machine learning (ML) systems are great at learning rules and applying them to small corpuses, but unfortunately the generative nature of language is such that we are VERY far off being able to develop computational systems that can cope with this kind of processing.

add to this the almost impossible task of pragamatic, phonetic and phonological computational processing (especially over units of discourse length) (i've been told most computational linguistics chaps stay away from speech processing as it is just TOO hard) and there is no way on earth you will get HAL9000 anytime soon folks.

save this for april fools, like the above poster mentioned.

[Nuggets]

Well, they are rolling out those sex robots - so those prostitutes better look out STD-free robots are headed their way!

[Pa Jan Jo A Hamnida]

Too funny

If you plan on being a lifer you might want to get certified in robot maintenance.

[bassexpander]

Will they get here before the aliens that the KH said were coming?

[andrewchon]

Good. In my TPR sessions kids already play 'Robot' and 'Master'.

[The_Source]

[Big Mac]

Well, I knew Koreans really didn't want us in their public schools, but they must be REALLY anxious to get rid of us if they would rather replace us with robots. I guess they've realized that they'll never be able to get their Korean teachers proficient enough in the language, so they have to bring in the robots.

[bassexpander]

It's all a psychological swipe at us, implying that robots could do our jobs.

[VFRinterceptor]

I can see a Robot being well maintained in a hagwon. They've been screwing teachers for years.

[pkang0202]

Just thinking about it, can your classes be taught remotely?

Lets say you have a webcam in the classroom to see all of your students. You have a webcam so the students see you.

You have remote access to the classroom computer, as well as a big screen TV/projector connected to the computer so you can control what is displayed. Your face/body is displayed on a separate monitor from the TV/projector.

Could your lessons be taught from a remote location?

Seriously, you have a coteacher present in the classroom to maintain discipline, give out handouts, collect handouts, etc.. Do you really have to be in the classroom also?

[Big Mac]

Interesting thought about teaching classes remotely. It would be nice to be able to just sit at home in Canada all day (or night I guess) and teach classes at your computer. Plus, the Koreans wouldn't have to deal with having pesky foreigners in their country...because that's what this is really all about.

I've thought of teaching private lessons from afar by webcam, and I know it's been done, so this isn't really all that far out.