CALICO Software Review

CALICO Journal, Volume 17 Number 1, pp. 144-154

Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM 1.01

Peter Lafford - Arizona State University

Product At A Glance Product type: Multimedia CD-ROM companion to video series and textbook Language Level: High Beginner to Advanced Activity: Assuming the role of a legal assistant in a law office, the student helps to solve a mystery by dealing with various documents, audiotapes, and reference materials. Completing a fax, sending (simulated) e-mail, taking notes and organizing information are examples of the activities available. Media format: 1 CD-ROM Computer platforms: Windows 3.1, Windows95/98, MAC-OS 7 or later.

General description In 1992, Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish debuted as a very popular language immersion series on PBS and video. It followed the path through and Latin America of Raquel Rodríguez, a lawyer hired by Mexican industrialist don Fernando Castillo Saavedra, to investigate claims about his first wife, thought to have been killed in the in the late 1930's. The mystery was solved, though the aging don Fernando died at the end of the telenovela, which consisted of 52 half- hour episodes.

Now, five years later, Fernando's brother Pedro has just died, and there is another mystery to solve concerning La Gavia, the family estate. Raquel Rodriguez is, again, involved, assisting a young lawyer from City, Lucía Hinojosa. Since much of what Raquel discovered in the earlier mystery is relevant to the new puzzle, Raquel gets to summarize her previous travels and experiences while filling Lucía in on the history. Nuevos Destinos is the continuation of the first Destinos story.

The cornerstone of Nuevos Destinos is still the videotape series, but this time the episodes are only 15 minutes long, and are designed to go hand-in-hand with the 15 interactive episodes on the CD-ROM (the subject of this review). After watching a videotape episode, the student goes to the corresponding CD-ROM episode where s/he becomes an assistant to Raquel and Lucía, and deals with correspondence, phone calls, and e-mail to help solve the mystery. There are newspaper articles to read, tapes to play and summarize, notecards and photographs to organize, and faxes to clean up and send. Through it all, the student helps Raquel and Lucía solve the problem and arrive at a happy conclusion. Thus, the CD-ROM "provides an integrated, task-based language-learning experience," to quote the promotional material.

The Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM comes with a 16-page booklet (in the CD-ROM jewel case), with descriptions of the video series and the three print packages currently in the works. These includeNuevos Destinos: Spanish in Review, which can be used for a high beginner or intensive course, or as an intermediate grammar review course, depending on which student manual is used with the core text; Con destino a la comunicación, an intermediate (2nd or 3rd year) text with workbook/lab manual; and Nuevos Destinos: El español para hispanohablantes, a core textbook and workbook/lab manual designed for native speakers of Spanish.

System requirements and installation procedures for the CD-ROM are followed by detailed instructions on how to use the various elements of the program. Good on-line help is available on every screen, contextualized for the task or situation at hand, and the student would be well-advised to look at the help screen for each new activity, in order not to miss a clue or an activity. The booklet includes an eight-page section on "Using the Program," which the instructor should read carefully, to be ready to guide the students through the program.

The simulated office environment employed by the CD-ROM is based on a desktop where various objects representing either evidence (datos) or activities (actividades) become available, depending on the episode. A laptop computer is always available, which handles a number of functions: e-mail and sending faxes, word processing which can open and save text files to be used "on the outside," a Spanish-English glossary, and a useful "Personajes" database, with photographs and descriptions to help the student keep all the players straight.

After watching the videotape, the student goes to the CD-ROM. (There is a written plot summary("trama") of each video episode, though the video is certainly an important part of the package.) Upon entering an episode, Raquel or Lucía might appear in the student's office doorway (in a QuickTime video clip) to explain the current problem, and to ask that a certain document be reviewed or task accomplished. In another episode, it might be an e-mail message that arrives, or a phone call. Then the student clicks on an envelope on the desktop to read a letter, clicks on the cassette player to listen to the tape, etc. Some of the activities have comprehension exercises, which might require audio response or multiple choice answers. Maps are available, with video clips and background information. Each episode concludes with a "Tarea" task to complete and perhaps print out (though it might be a fax or e-mail message to "send"). All of these activities and documents are archived on a cart in the corner of the virtual office, and can be accessed later on. Eventually the solution to the mystery becomes clear, the student has used the language in an interesting and realistic manner, and the Castillo family can rest easy for another five years.

Evaluation Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM is a very polished, well-constructed program. The implementation is graphically quite impressive, including live video action integrated into the main artwork of the screen, representing an office and a desktop. While this approaches the sophistication of the latest in multimedia adventure games, it presents a variety of educational activities all tied into solving the ongoing Destinos saga, already proven to be motivating to the student of Spanish.

The user interface is well-designed, and leads the student through the activities without explicit hand-holding. Upon entering an episode on the CD-ROM, Raquel appears at the door. When she is finished and walks out, an arrow directs the student to click at the bottom of the screen to look and move down to the desktop. A note from Raquel on the desktop automatically comes front and center, explaining what else is on the desktop. As in all the written documents, a few of the words have an unobtrusive underline, indicating that an English gloss is available by clicking on the word. When the student has finished reading the note, s/he puts it down with a click on the Macintosh-style "close box" consistently and reassuringly found in the upper- left-hand corner of every object or activity. The next step is up to the student. Moving the mouse over the desktop, the pointer turns into a hand when it is on an object which can be picked up. "Let's see ... the letter ... the laptop ... the folder ... OK. Let's read the letter." Click! The letter opens, and it is from Ramón Castillo, saying that his uncle has died, and the new executor, Lucía Hinojosa, will need some help. Click on ¿Cuánto entiendes? and five multiple-choice questions appear. Click on the wrong answer, and a voice gives the information which should help you select the correct answer. Click on the other wrong answer, and a slip of paper seemingly torn from the letter appears, highlighting the text with more information leading to the right choice. (In neither hint is the language exactly the same as the right answer, so there is good pedagogy at work, reinforcing concepts and understanding, not simple, rote memorization and identification.) Click on the correct answer: "Bien!" Done with the exercise, the student clicks on the close box, and then closes the letter the same way. Click!

No sooner does the letter disappear than the phone starts beeping and flashing. The student clicks on the phone, and hears Lucía asking to meet with Raquel tomorrow at nine o'clock. There is another¿Cuánto entiendes?, but this one has audio questions, to which the student records an answer, which s/he then compares with an audio correct answer. Finished with the phone call, there is a folder with Raquel's original notes about don Fernando, and an activity called "¿Quién lo dijo?" requiring the student to match five 3x5 cards with a quotation to the name of the person who said it. When that is finished, the laptop beeps: "You have e-mail!"

As mentioned above, the laptop provides a number of functions. When the student clicks on the laptop on the desktop, the screen comes front and center, with four application tabs available. The "Correoelectrónico" is the first one, and shows an index of e-mail and faxes received and sent. When reading an incoming message, there is a button to press to respond ("Responder"). When the button is pressed, an editor window opens where the student composes (or completes) the correspondence, and "sends" it to Raquel or whomever; there will probably be a response in the next episode. (All of this e-mail is only simulated. While the technology certainly exists to provide a functional gateway to real e-mail on the outside, the developers of Nuevos Destinos have chosen, probably wisely, this more conservative, controlled path. There are other programs which afford opportunities for e-mail-based problem-solving with classmates, as is the case with Heinle & Heinle's Un Misterio en Toluca and Un Meurtre à Cinet,which use e-mail and the Internet to facilitate solving a murder. Nuevos Destinos already has enough challenging activities without bringing in the variables of e-mail from fellow learners. Similarly, they have so far eschewed the trend toward web-based activities, and concentrate on self-contained activities.) If the student wants a hard copy (perhaps to hand in, which seems to be the only way an instructor could keep tabs on the student's progress in the software), there is also a "print" button available, but all of the correspondence (and other completed material) is archived and available for later referral.

The other main function of the laptop is the "cuaderno" or notebook, a free-form word processor for simple editing. The files students create there can be saved out to disk and opened in another application; by the same token, a text file can be opened by the cuaderno. (One note, though: the only way to get text in and out of the program is with the File/Save and File/Open function of thecuaderno. The normal cut, copy, and paste keystrokes in the Windows and Macintosh interfaces which facilitate the transfer of data from one application to another are not implemented.)

The program does make it easy to save the e-mails and thus monitor the progress the student accomplishes. When starting the program, the student is prompted for a name and gender (to facilitate personalization of some of the activities). When exiting the program, the student is prompted to save the profile to disk. If saved to a floppy, the student using Nuevos Destinos in a lab setting could easily reload the profile from the floppy when starting the next session, and pick up where s/he left off.

When the student completes the last activity in an episode, the arrow appears at the top of the screen prompting the student to look up at the door. Raquel (or Lucía) appears with some final thoughts about this episode and some advance word on the next, and then exits. Then the menu pops up, where the student can opt for the main menu, the exit, or anything in between. One of the options is to see "cosas que hacer," (things to do), a checklist of each activity in the episode. The student can go directly to an activity to review it by means of that menu.

On the topic of pacing, the activities in an episode on the CD-ROM seem well- designed to be accomplished in a class period. Of course, mileage may vary, but the series seems better suited to the classroom mission than the original 52- episode Destinos series. How many students actually got to see the entire series, without the instructor jumping to the last episode at the end of the year to find some closure? With the 15 episodes of Nuevos Destinos, it is more likely a class could complete the series. When used in conjunction with some of the extensive print materials (outside the purview of this review), it would undoubtedly serve as part of a comprehensive course. Since there is access to a synopsis of the plot of each episode, the CD-ROM could be used as a stand-alone activity, but a large part of the exposure to Hispanic culture and spoken language comes from the videotapes. (No doubt the publishers will consider publishing the next version on DVD-ROM, where the 15- minute episodes could be available on the computer screen.) Other elements of culture and realia are present on the CD-ROM. The video clips incorporated in the maps, and clips from the original series which pop up while listing to Raquel's "tapes" are quite informative, and the documents are quite realistic. A letter might be a hand- written note or a neatly typed business letter on letterhead from the Mexican government. The spoken language is measured and clear, but not childish, so students should feel comfortable with it.

The publishers also suggest that the Nuevos Destinos CD-ROM can be used in conjunction with the original Destinos series, and a chart indicating the correlation between the original video episode story line and the CD-ROM lessons is provided in the booklet.

A few technical notes: Installation is very simple, but the Windows program does not recognize QuickTime 3.0 as a valid version of QuickTime. This is evidently a function of Apple's QuickTime 3.0, released since Nuevos Destinos was developed, but it would be helpful to the user to know in advance that QuickTime 3.0 doesn't count as "newer" than 2.1.2. However, the user can go back to the QuickTime folder on theNuevos Destinos CD- ROM and install 2.1.2 from there. From then on, the QuickTime movies should run very well.

Technical support is also very good, at a toll-free number obtained from Annenberg/CPB. Originally, there was a problem with the sound recording routines, which was resolved simply by changing the path into which the program was installed. It turns out this was addressed on the web site, and is due to be fixed in the next release. (Another comment on the sound recording capabilities: the telephone conversation activities and certain ¿Cuánto entiendes? activities allow the student to record his/her voice. The CD-ROM booklet mentions, "In order to conserve hard disk space, the audio files that you record are only available while you are in that episode, during a single session. They are erased when you leave an episode or when you quit Nuevos Destinos." With today's entry-level computer hard disk capacities measured in gigabytes rather than megabytes, the program could be improved by allowing the student to save his/her speech, and finding some way to deliver it to the instructor for evaluation.)

There were also a few occasions on which objects on the desktop started disappearing (without reason or explanation). This occurred only after working in the program for a long time, probably using up memory or overrunning video buffers. The problem went away simply by exiting and restarting the program, and would not usually be a problem for the student in a regular session.

Summary Gone are the early days in the Language Computing Lab when any program that did not crash (or crashed only occasionally) would do. Today's technologically- sophisticated student deserves more mature software, integrated into the curriculum, of which Nuevos Destinos is an excellent example. It is well-founded on the principles which underlie content-based instruction: language acquisition is enhanced when the student concentrates on using the language in meaningful ways. The print and video materials promise to produce a tightly-woven fabric to wrap the student in an environment conducive to learning. Nuevos Destinos is highly recommended.

Scaled rating: (1 low - 5 high) Implementation possibilities: 5 Pedagogical features : 5 Socio-Linguistic accuracy: 5 Use of computer capabilities: 5 Ease of use (student / teacher): 5 Over-all evaluation: 5 Value for money: 5

Technical Details Developer/distributor: McGraw-Hill College and WGBH/Boston The Annenberg/CPB Multimedia Collection P.O. Box 2345 S. Burlington, VT 05407-2345 Sales: 1-800-LEARNER (532-7637) Fax: (802) 864-9846 Technical Support: (800) 648-7378 WWW: http://www.learner.org

Hardware/System Requirements Macintosh Minimum: A 33MHz 68040 processor; System 7 or later; 8 MB of RAM; a 2X CD-ROM drive; and a 640x480 256-color monitor. Recommended: A 75MHz PowerPC processor and 16 MB of RAM.

Windows Minimum: A 66MHz 486DX2 processor; Windows 3.1 (compatible with Windows 95); 8 MB of RAM; a 2X CD-ROM drive; a 640x480 256-color monitor; and a SoundBlaster- compatible sound card with a microphone and speakers. Recommended: A Pentium processor and 16 MB of RAM.

Media Presentation: QuickTime for Windows 2.1.2; QuickTime for Macintosh 2.5

Pricing: Nuevos Destinos video and CD-ROM package: $129.95;includes 15 video episodes on 3 cassettes, CD-ROM (which runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms), CD- ROM instructor guide. Individual CD-ROM with instructor guide: $39.95. Lab Pack of 20 CD-ROMs with one instructor guide: $350.00 Additional CD-ROM instructor's guide: $15.00 15 video episodes on 3 cassettes: $99.95

Reviewer Information Peter A. Lafford is Director of the Language Computing Laboratory in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Arizona State University. He taught French, Spanish, and English as a Second Language before becoming involved with CALL in 1984. Since that time, he has been involved in software development and language-learning technology. He has published articles and reviews on computer-assisted language learning and CALL software and has made numerous presentations on CALL and technology.

Reviewer Contact: Dept. of Languages & Literatures Arizona State University PO Box 870202 Tempe, AZ 85287-0202

Phone: 602-965-4524 Fax: 602-965-0135 Email: [email protected]