Tracking spreadsheets?

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mcthulhu
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby mcthulhu » Sat May 20, 2017 1:23 pm

Discussions like this interest me because they provide perspectives on metrics that I might build into my reading tool. I like the idea of keeping metrics; but don't particularly like the idea of manually logging every activity and getting stressed out when I (inevitably) forget to do it. This is from a tool perspective, of course, but I think spreadsheets should create themselves, and a tool should gather metrics in the background, transparently, without user intervention, and just have the metrics/spreadsheet available when needed.

There are some metrics that would be easy to track that way, e.g. time spent reading a language in any given day, approximate number of words read, reading speed in average words per minute (which would, ideally, show an increase over time), number of words looked up for a given period of time (hour?) and/or amount of text (1000 words?), number of flashcards created, percentage of flashcards I get right if I'm doing any flashcard review, vocabulary size and lexical richness of the current text, average sentence length of the current text (also an approximate measure of difficulty level); and cumulative totals and averages over time for all of these. Performance on sentence translation exercises would be difficult to measure meaningfully; but a Levenshtein difference score could be generated, for what it's worth. Let's consider this a list of requirements.

With some more work, it might be possible to do some automated relative frequency analysis of the kinds of words I'm looking up, not just the quantity, e.g., am I still looking up "cat," or am I now only looking up words like "logorrhea"? It might be interesting to track how that reflection of vocabulary level might change over time as well.

Although I prefer unobtrusive metrics, there might be a few situations in which they should be obtrusive. One example might be trying to implement Seinfeld's "not breaking the chain" strategy; missing a day of language practice should be highlighted somehow.

Of course all the above metrics would only reflect what's visible to the tool, and would miss other foreign language activities like reading non-ebooks in a waiting room, or watching movies, or Anki. Maybe there should be an option to add manual entries when absolutely necessary, but preferably with just a couple of clicks, from a selection list.
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 22, 2017 8:24 am

Initially I was just interested in tracking spreadsheets but I'm impressed by the diversity of subject this brought up - it now has me thinking of simplifying this further by writing an app.

My own requirements :
- simple (like really simple) tracking entry
- available via web/phone
- delivers metrics
- allows other apps / services to send it data
- categories
- languages
- activities
- days not breaking the chain
- export
- tweets directly to challenges
- targets and alerts

If I write the app, I'll make it available to the ll.org community. I need to finish my current app set ...
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby Hazy » Mon May 22, 2017 9:29 am

zenmonkey wrote:Initially I was just interested in tracking spreadsheets but I'm impressed by the diversity of subject this brought up - it now has me thinking of simplifying this further by writing an app.


An app for this would be brilliant, whether it was a web app or a phone app. My first thought when tracking my learning was to use an app on my iPhone but I had trouble finding something that was ideal. I tried Strides and Nomie Pro, both allow for basic number tracking, but I think I'm going to go with a spreadsheet after all. Especially after seeing the wonderful examples in this thread!

But if you get to the stage of needing a tester/guinea pig I'd love to help! ;)
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby arthaey » Mon May 22, 2017 2:45 pm

I've been tracking most of my language-learning with the iPhone app ATracker since December 2014.

I just have to tap "ES listening" or "FR reading" or "HU Anki" to start a stopwatch timer, then tap it again when I'm done. I can optionally add a note to each entry, typically with what material I was using.

Then I can make charts that split things up by either language, or subdivide within one language by activity, like so:

Image

Image

There are more graphing options. It can export to CSV (ie spreadsheets) and sync to DropBox. But mostly I just use it for posting screenshots here on the LLorg forum. ;)
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 22, 2017 3:12 pm

arthaey wrote:I've been tracking most of my language-learning with the iPhone app ATracker since December 2014.

I just have to tap "ES listening" or "FR reading" or "HU Anki" to start a stopwatch timer, then tap it again when I'm done. I can optionally add a note to each entry, typically with what material I was using.

Then I can make charts that split things up by either language, or subdivide within one language by activity, like so:

There are more graphing options. It can export to CSV (ie spreadsheets) and sync to DropBox. But mostly I just use it for posting screenshots here on the LLorg forum. ;)


very nice, the app covers a lot of what I want to do - not 100% but I like it. Will check it out, thanks.
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby Iversen » Wed May 24, 2017 8:42 am

I can't see the point in counting hours - after all ten minuts used efficiently may teach you more than having a TV set switched on in the background for 10 hours. On the other hand having a TV set switched on in the background for 10 hours may aid you to learn more from those 10 minuts of intensive study. Who knows? Besides I do two things most of the time. How do you assess the time used on each activity?

I do however have an Excel sheet with two tables: one for the images I have used and the other for the languages in which I have written on each page of my log thread (quotes don't count).

PS: I'm impressed with mcthulhu's statistical ambitions. If the science community had measured learning rates of home learners on such parameters under different circumstances then we might have useful basis for discussions about ways to study efficiently. But generally the community has focused entirely on class room teaching and in many cases left the empirical study methods aside in order to discuss politics and more or less unfounded opinions of collegues. Actually the amount of space spent on references in articels in scientific marticles is mindboogling - how can those professionals ever get time to do their own research or just sit down to THINK?

That being said: I have done my own studies on vocabulary acquisition, but I don't want to let my daily study routines be dictated by excessive documentation aspirations. In between the 'statistical frenzy periods' I don't count anything.
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 24, 2017 9:27 am

Iversen wrote:I can't see the point in counting hours - after all ten minuts used efficiently may teach you more than having a TV set switched on in the background for 10 hours. On the other hand having a TV set switched on in the background for 10 hours may aid you to learn more from those 10 minuts of intensive study. Who knows? Besides I do two things most of the time. How do you assess the time used on each activity?

I do however have an Excel sheet with two tables: one for the images I have used and the other for the languages in which I have written on each page of my log thread (quotes don't count).


You are right, time spent doesn't evaluate quality. However...

I'd say that 'time on task' is generally used to evaluate focus and as a motivation tool. While 10 hrs of background TV is probably not a great learning method being able to track time spent with a mix of reasonably efficient material will give one personally the evolution of effort. As to quality, effectiveness, efficiency or focus - well - one could add subjective evaluations of each. Personally I don't track these.

If you look at any of the challenges - they all either directly track time on task or variables (pages read, movies seen, words written, cards reviewed, vocabulary words added) that are directly proportional to time spent. One could track each of these independently or, keeping it simple, use 'time on activity' is a reasonable substitute. None of those variables is a direct measure of the quality of learning either.

You do two learning activities at the same time? For example, listening to German while writing Portuguese exercises? Now that is a learning strategy I want to follow! Let's assume that if that was, in general, your method I'd probably assign an arbitrary but consistent factor - 50% each or whatever. Being able to say I spent x more hrs writing in y this month versus last month may or may not be useful to the review of your own goals.

In any cases - the measure of time spent is only good for "assuring the means" are applied and not "assuring the results". With your hypothetical - if we have someone here saying I spent 2 000 hrs last year learning Huichole but I only stayed at the A1 level. Looking at the time spent (oh, that's a lot of background TV!) may give one an idea on directional changes to make.

If you want to evaluate against quality of results - maybe periodic tests or subjective evaluations of language interactions are a way to go.

Some people are just data driven. :D

By the way, why do you use Excel for those tasks? Wouldn't a Word document work better?
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby Iversen » Wed May 24, 2017 10:06 am

Zenmonkey was actually commenting on the first part of my message above while I was writing the second. So let me just add: it would be a good thing to get apps or other tools to measure things easily and without disturbing the learning process itself. I would probably not use them myself (being so very paperminded as I am), but the results from others could be interesting.

As for doing two things at the same time I have to say that watching TV in languages I more or less understand while doing word lists in another doesn't seem to hamper my learning - and even less listening to music while studying. But two difficult linguistic tasks at the same time is a no-go. I can listen to music while doing intensive text studies in weak languages, but not listen to Serbian TV while working with Bahasa Indonesian or Icelandic texts. Somehow it seems that music is lodged in a different part of the brain, and the other activity could however also be non-linguistic in other ways - like eating or preparing a meal or solving sudokus. Well, even pretending to be studying language while being distracted by sheer unrelated thinking is doing two things at the same time. Should I count half time if I listen to Spanish TV while cooking? Or 20% or 80%? I simply don't know, and that's one of the reasons as to why I don't see the point in counting hours.

And yes, I do know that psychologists claim that doing two things simultaneously is impossible. And I accept that we ought to speak about doing things in timeslices instead of doing them simultaneously. What those psychologists tend to forget is that it is possible to do things in thin timeslices if and only if the tasks are so easy that you can keep the connection between two successive timeslices with a certain activity. Even the otherwise deeply venerated Mythbusters forgot this: they conconcted an experiment where a person was driving a car while being distracted by hard questions per telephone. I do not think this should be encouraged, but it is an example of the kind of test where the research team stretches the limits of the connection I mentioned. They made the disturbance so intrusive that it became too difficult to keep its time slices together while also allotting time for safe driving - and then the driving behaviour suffered (as might be expected). Letting the second task be something simple such as chewing gum would probably have given the opposite result, namely that multitasking 'in slices' is possible.

Finally: why use Excel? Well, mostly because it is easier to deal with multiple columns in a spreadsheet - cfr the table below.

Languages-used-May-2017.jpg
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 24, 2017 10:25 am

Iversen wrote:As for doing two things at the same time I have to say that watching TV in languages I more or less understand while doing word lists in another doesn't seem to hamper my learning - and even less listening music. But two difficult linguistic at the same time is a no-go. I can listen to music while doing intensive text studies in weak languages, but not listen to Serbian TV while working with Bahasa Indonesian or Icelandic texts. Somehow it seems that music is lodged in a different part of the brain, and the other activity could however also be non-linguistic in other ways - like eating or preparing a meal or solving sudokus. Should I count half time if I listen to Spanish TV while cooking? Or 20% or 80%? I simply don't know, and that's one of the reasons as to why I don't see the point in counting hours.


I sometimes do word lists or Anki in German while watching American TV - it doesn't seem to impact the results much. Personally, I'd count that time as 'German Anki time'.

I understand your reserve with the ambiguity of counting the Spanish TV while cooking. I do not like at all when one of the Challenges tries to assign an activity with multipliers. There are obviously different tracking strategies - personally I'd mark it down as "background TV listening".

Clearly, whatever it is that you are doing works for you.

PS - 99% of my podcast listening is done will driving or cooking or something else.

PPS - :shock: :o at your chart. That's impressive.
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Re: Tracking spreadsheets?

Postby coldrainwater » Thu May 25, 2017 3:40 am

Iversen wrote:...But two difficult linguistic tasks at the same time is a no-go...And I accept that we ought to speak about doing things in timeslices instead of doing them simultaneously. What those psychologists tend to forget is that it is possible to do things in thin timeslices if and only if the tasks are so easy that you can keep the connection between two successive timeslices with a certain activity.

I recently started attaching my TL to my forearm (pre-loaded with podcasts and other pure listening media) to create a high number of daily opportunity hours. The material I listen to may be playing for many hours during the day and I use simple mindfulness to guide my attention. What I have found is that I am naturally taking more complex tasks (non-listening), tasks that might require hard-focus and deep processing, and converting them into tasks that involve shallow processing. I have a strong desire to hear and understand my TL and so I'd like to make more of those hours listening-focused and simplification in all areas of life seems to be a helpful step.

Like you, I have found that I seem to be able to have two things going during the same timeframe. My direct example last night related to drilling grammar exercises using Practice Makes Perfect. The drilling was what I was after, and I noticed that I was able to handle it with background Spanish (funny, it could even be FSI). Verb patterns are often boring and simple, so they don't really require deep processing if I am drilling. I definitely used timeslicing.

In the corporate world, this has led to several process improvements where I streamline my own personal workflow (creating shallow processing and thus allowing some mindful focus on listening). When this is not possible, or I can't figure out how to do that in the present moment, I then hit the conveniently-located pause button the earbuds. Additionally, if I sense that my listening is completely passive for any other reason for more than 10 minutes (or so), I hit pause. Thus for tracking purposes, I personally want an hours totals that are not 100% passive.

I can also twist it the other direction and choose listening material that leans toward shallow processing should the situation warrant it. Opportunistically, that leads to high flexibility. My hunch is that after an initial tracking frenzy, I can likely estimate total hours in a day and simply back into an absurd amount of additional data using facts given to me for free (for example, assume I hypothetically listened to FSI, which I know was X hours...and so on). All you need to be able to do (in my experience) is see ahead of time what you will be able to derive (and if you can derive it, then by all means don't track it). If estimates are reliable enough, same deal.
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