Korean Computer Monoculture

Pandora.tv is an amazing site that hosts South Park videos subtitled in Korean and it's a high school native speaker's dream.

But there's one problem. It doesn't work for me. In fact a lot of Korean website simply do not work for me and as I was trying to figure out why I stumbled across this blog post from Mozilla in Asia that links Technology & Monoculture together. The post tells me that practically all Korean sites are made for Internet Explorer running on Windows circa 2000 and any other kind of configuration (like a FireFox running on a Mac circa 2007) is blatantly ignored. There's a couple follow-ups describing some hope and progress and there's even some valid change, but 6 months after most of these stories broke, Korean computer monoculture is still annoying westerners.

So I go back to pandora.tv, this time with Internet Explorer running on Windows (courtesy of my school) and it does indeed work, but not before the site installed a collection of ActiveX Controls, something that the blog post predicted and warned about.

Now in the grand scheme of things, being forced to watch Korean subtitled videos on a windows machine isn't really a big deal. But it's frustrating when this computer monoculture creeps into other aspects of my online world. For example:

Each Korean citizen is issued a nation ID number. This is embedded into the certificate issued by the Korean CA. Thus non-Koreans in Korea (such as US military in Korea) cannot make secure transactions like online banking or online commerce. The ‘package’ (including SEED, the national ID, and the Active-X cert.) that the CA’s distribute is Active-X based, and thus only works in Windows and IE.

There's a lot of geek words in that paragraph but you can see this as an explanation for why foreigners can't buy stuff on the Korean Internets, especially escape tickets.

It also explains why Internet Banking is such a needless complication. My banking package, like the kind offered free of charge by Shinhan Bank, only works on Windows machines running Internet Explorer. Seems simple enough, but this certificate that they're talking about is an actual file. And it's a file that I have to present every time I log into my account, which means if I try to access my account from another computer I must somehow materialize, via a floppy disk or whatever, this file to be examined. After that, I also need to install a third party program (Inisafe by Initech—no, not this Initech) to process this certificate and ensure that whatever transactions do occur are secure. Only then, after I've got

1. Windows
2. Internet Explorer
3. Certificate File
4. Inisafe
5. Password

can I look at my bank balance. By comparison all of these extra steps are needless hoops that I have to jump through and they end up elevating the North American system of a simple userid & password to a something akin of universal access.

This computer monoculture reveals some aspect of the Korean psyche that I'm failing to understand and unfortunately I can't quite describe it. It's a narcissism or nationalism that drives them to spend so much effort in developing their own way of doing things that they fail to see the easier, cheaper or more efficient path. I could see it from a perspective of competition or even going after a niche market but why then be so exclusive? It's probably another facet of the culture difference that I'm failing to grasp, but it's strong enough to make me doubt validity of any Korean high tech idea that exist solely in Korea.

Teaching with Online Videos

Thanks to YouTube et al, creating a lesson around a video is one of the easiest and popular ways to teach kids esl. But getting the videos from the Internet into a more presentable form, like a Power Point file, requires a little bit of extra work, especially when your class room is state of the art, circa 1980. In some previous lessons I've used downloaded videos and figured out a process of getting videos from my home Internets into my classroom presentations.

Downloading Videos

If your school trusts you with a live Internet connection that directly spews into your classroom, you're in luck. Others end up with either no Internet or a crippling firewall that does not allow any fun at all. Downloading the videos to a CD (or whatever) at home and bringing it into the school side steps this problem completely.

Finding the video is straight forward but while some sites let you download the video directly, others aren't as generous. So far the easiest and most fail-safe way that I've found to download videos from the Internet is through DownloadHelper, an extension to FireFox. I'm already using FireFox and its other extensions so I'm partial to DownloadHelper in a keep it in the family kind of way, but there are some valid alternatives, like the web-based VideoDownloader site. But so far DownloadHelper has proven the most reliable thanks to the massive list of video sites that it has been tested against.

Playing Videos

Most of the videos on the net are in the flash video format (*.flv files) and there are tons of options for playing these files and you'll have to convince your school that it's okay to install at least one of them. I convinced my school to install K-lite by simply installing myself and not telling anybody about it. So far nobody has complained.

Now, K-lite is a Swiss army knife of video manipulation and is really intended for people who know about encoding and codecs and other computer geekness but it's super easy to install and use. There are multiple versions of K-Lite and the standard is a good entry point since it'll install the the FLV codec as well as Media Player Classic, a simple movie player that is free the bells and whistles featured in other applications.

Embedding Videos into Power Point Slides

Embedding flash videos in Power Point files creates a nice smooth transition from slide to video and back to slide. Embedding videos into Power Point slides is fairly common problem and easily solved by other people. Unfortunately most versions of Power Point do not support the *.flv file; they do, however, support embedding Windows media video format (*.wmv files). And quite fortunately, you can convert between one and the other thanks to the good people at media-convert.com.

Videos in Power Point are not really embedded, but linked. This means that if you want to share your presentation you'll need to be sure that you also share the video files and that they are placed in the same folder as the Power Point file.

Alternatives
There are some alternative methods to using videos but so far my favourite ones are the video tutorials done by reponzo01:

Connected to the Internet:

Not Connected to the Internet:

Microsoft Office Viewers and Converters

Microsoft Office has a considerable market share in North America. Same here in South Korea. So chances are that you won't have to rely on another office suite to do your lesson planning.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that the version of Office you have on your laptop is going to be the same version that you have at your school. Usually this doesn't matter, but for the heavy PowerPoint 2007 user (like me) who creates on an English machine and presents on a Korean machine, converting is an essential way of life.

Microsoft maintains a collection of converters. The same page also has a collection of viewers which are great in the rare case that you get a computer without Office installed. And the new version of Office has a completely different file format (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc) that is still not as readily accepted as the previous file formats (*.doc, *.xls, *.ppt, etc). For these files, Microsoft provides a converter by way of the Compatibility Pack.

And of course if you don't want to download any software, there's always the converters at Zamzar.

*.hwp files

These files are document files created by the Korean equivalent to Microsoft Word, Hangul Word Processor by Haansoft. For non-Koreans, there's a bunch of information already on the web, including this English translation of the corporate and product page, some information about the history of Hangul and entry on Wikipedia that mentions:

To open HWP files in a non-Korean Windows system, users can download and execute a conversion program [1], which enables files to be opened with Microsoft Word. This program, however, can only be used with files created with Microsoft Word 2000 and below. Haansoft has also a Hangul document viewer program freely available on its website called "Hangul Viewer 2005" (한/글 뷰어 2005) [2].

The information on the wiki is a bit outdated since navigating the Haansoft website reveals a 2007 viewer and another search reveals updated information regarding Microsoft Office 2007. And if you're dealing with this file, then you are probably doing so because of school; most schools have a site license for Hangul so installing the application could be as easy as a short call to the school's IT department.

Hangul on English Computers

Before figuring out how to type Hangul you may notice that your computer doesn't display Hangul properly. If you navigate to Korean site (say a certain high school's website) and you see Hangul then you have nothing to worry about; if you see garbage characters, like "Àü³²Á¦ÀÏ°í" then you have a problem. This site solves that problem, but only for the web pages.

On occasion I need Hangul for Korean applications; without the language support I get pop-ups and windows with garbled character that consist mostly of question marks. There is way but it's useless to me since I have the wrong operating system. This note from a Microsoft help site tells me how to change the language on Vista, but it's only viable for Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise. I have Vista Home Premium and I'm screwed. And apparently so are others.

The Korean Keyboard

I'm only a fan of laptops for their portability. I mean they're great when you're about to hop, skip, and jump over an ocean or two but I'd rather have my keyboard, mouse and flat screen monitor all as separate entities that are free to move around on my desk as far apart as possible. So one of the first things on settling in list was getting a keyboard and mouse. And since I'm in Korea, I'd thought I'd get myself a keyboard and mouse.

My Keyboard & Mouse.

There's a Samsung store right down the street from me and I spent 25,000 for the Smart & Super SMH-710CB USB Combo Mouse and 27,000 for the Smart & Super SKG-720C USB Combo Keyboard. And they're okay. That store won my heart with it's proximity so when I saw a fairly decent keyboard and fairly decent mouse I picked them up more on an impulse buy rather than educated shopping. Turns out that there are better deals, like at GoYongsan where I could have picked up the keyboard for 16,800. Google doesn't tell me anything about the mouse so I assume that it spontaneously came into existence just for my benefit.

The extra 한자and 한/영 keys.

The keyboard is a Korean keyboard with English and Hangul characters and comes with two extra toggle keys that switch the keyboard's character set.

The 한자 (Hanja) key, to left of the space bar, deals with Chinese characters. Korea and China have an intertwined history result in a collection of Chinese characters that are still used in the Korean Language; the number systems are an excellent example of crossover if you're really curious. Many Chinese characters are homophones so matching the Korean equivalent requires some prior knowledge.

Using this key is easy:

1. Phonetically spell the symbol in Hangul.


2. Highlight the Hangul.


3. Hanja-ize the Hangul.


4. If there's a homophone conflict a menu should appear presenting you with your options for the correct Chinese character.

Let's try it out on an easy example: The number one. Now normally numbers are written out in their Romanized form but spoken in Sino-Korean; Pure Korean pronunciation is 하나 (Hana) and Sino-Korean pronunciation is 일 (Il). So, in our favourite word processor we highlight and hanja-ize 일, getting a menu listing the available Chinese equivalents, and choose the correct Chinese character 一.

The 한/영 (Han/Yeong, short for Hangul/Yeongeo ) key, to right of the space bar, is more straight forward. It simply toggles the keyboard between the Korean and English character sets that you see on all of the keys. The keyboard's state is usually displayed on screen.

The Korean Import Method Editor.

Straight out of the box, your keyboard's 한자 and 한/영 keys won't work. Even though you can clearly see these extra keys, the computer cannot. Of course, for some reason beyond my comprehension or Internet searching abilities, Korean applications like Hangul will automatically recognise new keyboard straight out of the box and work magically. For other applications, like Microsoft Office or your favourite web browser, you'll need to do some configuration on your (in my case North America) laptop to recognise the foreign keyboard and the new keyboard's extra buttons. Fortunately Declan Software has all that figured out the Korean IME.

The IME remaps the current keyboard into what ever language you want; this means that if you already have a keyboard you can buy keyboard skin instead of a new keyboard. and let the IME do all of the work. Really, there's really no need to buy a new keyboard unless you're going to buy one anyways. Enabling the IME also enables the Language Bar and the virtual language tools.

Korean Keyboard Problems.

After configuring the IME I had the following problems:

1. My 한/영 button didn't toggle but my language did toggle when I used the ALT key right next to it.


2. My Won (₩) key was typing the Reverse Solidus aka The Backslash (\) instead of the ₩ symbol.

The first problem was solved by the support article Microsoft, detailing a fault in the operating system and the second problem looks to be more a case of bad design that nobody complains about as hinted by this post that deals with boring computer geeky stuff like keyboard input codes.