Ken Carroll

“Dude. Let’s tear down the barriers to organizationl learning though a mobile learning platform, also known as an MLN.”

We’ve recently spent some time on a new mobile learning platform, the MLN, or mobile learning network. Pretty soon you will be able to see it. In the meantime, let me, erm, talk about it!

The old problem 

The platform has been designed to work for groups, dedicated cohorts within companies or other organizations, and to solve the biggest problems they face with language instruction: low attendance and the flagging interest that inevitably follows.

The MLN is designed around the possibility that this group may (or may not) wish to convene in a physical classroom as part of the learning mix. Example: a group of colleagues in Beijing who need to work on their business English skills. They meet for a certain amount of classroom instruction, but because of travel and scheduling restrictions, cannot often  make class together. Once people start to miss classes, motivation takes a dive. In fact, by week 6 of the training, attendance typically trails off dramtically and few are getting the benefit of the thing.

We’re talking low impact and poor return on investment in this scenario. It is not uncommon. I would argue that it can even be quite bad for the organization as it sends the message that learning and training are neither effective nor important.

Enter, the mobile solution 

But this could be about to change and it is mobile that could make the difference. Mobile access to the content and the cohort has one major effect: it collapses the classroom walls so that learning/engagement/interaction are no longer confined to any physical space or schedule. You can now have many of the benefits of the classroom without the physical and scheduling barriers. Any cohort of learners with a common goal can build a community of paractice that extends to wherever they happen to be, at whatever time and place they choose to do the learning. If 4 of them are in class with the teacher in Beijing while the rest are in various parts of the county, they are all still connected to the learning events that occur around the publication of the lesson, the dicsussion, etc.

In this regard, the MLN platform also builds around some older features from ChinesePod, most notably the freedom to choose from a large database of learning objects - short audio lessons with exercises and extras on top. One major difference is that the CPod platform is for individual study, while the MLN is for groups, with a teacher to choose the lessons and lead the learning.  This dimension is critical in the context of the organization. It means that learners can work as team towwrds a common goal, while HR managers get an overview of who is learning what and the effort/progress they are making relative to each other.

Anyway, that was my 20 minute essay on collapsing classroom walls through mobile access. I think it offers a  taste of what we’re working on, though I realize I’m just touching the surface.

More on this later.

Ken Carroll

I think it’s the early career epiphanies that make the greatest impact. Here, I share mine. This post is my contribution to Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learn Carnival.

1989
I’m a fledgling ESL teacher who learned a few languages through immersion and a self-directed approach. But language teaching is dominated by grammar in Europe and behaviorism in the US (the audio-lingual approach). There’s an awful lot of lectures and grammar drills going on. It’s neither fun nor effective.

I read Stephen Krashen and a new world opens up. One idea above all starts to sink in: He notes that most teachers are too concerned with structures and the what of language teaching: What are the structures of the English language? He suggests that the real question is psychological and concerns the how: How can we help induce the process of language acquisition? Suddenly, the world of cognitive psychology becomes relevant to the classroom. We can stop obsessing grammar, and look to a million other sources for creative ideas.

For me, language teaching was liberated from its structural shackles in one act. I was then able to look at it in entirely new ways and from the perspective of different disciplines.  In a sense it was a double-whammy epiphany: 1. Grammar isn’t the key to language teaching; 2. Get eclectic, and seek ideas from any discipline that fires up the creativity. It’s hard to capture how invigorating this was at the time, but this set my teaching practices and career on a new course.

2009
It was the insight that keeps on giving and it still affects my work. True, these days things are more complicated. There’s way more research and diversity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In fact, the only thing the theories seem to have in common these days is the fact that no-one really agrees on much. Muriel Saville-Troike describes (2005) how SLA theory struggles to integrate linguistics, psychology, and sociology, like so many blind men touching the elephant. Some touch SLA at the tail, others grab its trunk. Each views SLA through his own framework, methods, and procedures. Linguists see grammar, competence, lexis, etc, while the psychologists look to cognitive, affective, and other processes, and so on. Meanwhile, the web has forced me personally to look at social theory to understand the online relationships that are emerging.

All of these things can feed into how language teachers go about our work. If we’re looking for grand-unification, the cross-discipline approach frustrates, but if we’re looking for inspiration, it invigorates. My advice to any learning professional is to make sure you get ideas that, on the face of it, are from outside your own discipline. They could be the source of enduring insight.

Ken Carroll

Must write shorter posts.

Ken

Gary Harpst defines a business as a fit between a purpose and its execution. The purpose explains the organization’s existence. It informs strategies and objectives and is generally defined (or refined) by a sub-group within the organization over a relatively brief time period. Execution, then, is the difficult part because it involves everyone in the organization, 100% of the time.

If you tie purpose and execution together you can end up with a very effective organization. This is where the connectivism  comes into it: The  more that people are connected to the purpose, the better they perform.  

Unfortunately, a tight fit between the two is actually quite rare. This is true in small organizations as well as large ones if the leadership fails to articulate its purpose. It explains why individuals are so often abstracted from management decisions or unclear as to what is expected of them. Now, however, technology offers us a solution.

The network model helps here

Looking at purpose and execution as a network is beautifully simple. What’s more, we have the tools to exploit it and make information flow as it should. We also know that collaboration is not just a matter of simple data exchange. As Chris Yeh points out, with web 2.0, we can go way beyond that. For example, we have the ability to capture semi-structured data (the stuff that is in peoples heads) as conversations on blogs and wikis and share it as we wish. Add to that the emergence of mobile, cloud computing, etc, and a new basis for organizational behavior emerges that will radically change how we manage and collaborate. [See Venkatesh Rao and his  concept of the cloudworker.]

Like all change, this one creates its own problems, and information overload is the most obvious one.  The solution: a clear organizational purpose helps us identify  information that is meaningful/revevant. The rest should be ignored.

 Even org charts can be interesting

We see something similar at the level of the organizational chart. Omar Khan describes the org chart as a web of conversations that need to happen. With links, nodes, and stuff flowing through them it looks like a network again. From a conversational perspective, this makes sense, but it also poses a question: How do org charts as hierarchies fit into a flattened network?

I am not sure they ultimately do. Western management is grounded, to a large extent, in Frederick Taylor’s seminal The Principles of Scientific Management, published in, erm, 1911.  Our management philosophies do not fit very comfortably with full-on network principles and this is a problem.

Eductional philosophy is not the only thing in need of change. Western management is being challenged by the network. When hierarchies meet networks, hierarchies lose. Its time to revisit some of the fundamentals of our management practices.

PS, you can hear both Gary Harpst and Omar Khan talk on these subjects on Anna Farmery’s excellent The Engaging Brand podcast.

Ken Carroll

Some discussion this week on this George Siemens article. (See Graham Attwell, Stephen Downes.) He asks if the power structures in our education system are willing to fully embrace the network and the adoption of the PLE. He believes they will not, and I agree.

Most of what George writes is eminently sensible. To explain the causes for this phenomenon, however, he takes his cue from Evetts, Mieg, and Felt. They  conclude (for $66, btw) that industrial corporations are the source of the resistance:

Education - moving from the high ancient ideals of developing better people to the development of employees for corporations…

The idea that our educational systems are in thrall to the corporations and designed to serve them, strikes me as neo-Marxist fantasy. It is a specter that has nothing to do with the real world and cannot be examined in any real sense. Apply the map of ’power structures’ on anything and you can conjure up  gruesome power relations - sex, gender, football - and construe them whichever way you want. Evetts and company would need to provide some kind of concrete evidence of such a proposition, but it is almost certain that they can do it only at the level of ideology. 

And if corporations are controlling the whole thing then our educators are either witless or complicit. It looks like an easy abrogation of responsibility from educators to blame those sinister men in neck ties. Nor are ’control, accountability, manageability’ the invention  of corporations - those have a much longer history than that. (It pretty much describes 2,000 years of confucician imperial examinations, for example.)

I also think I would know if the subjugation of our educational system was on the corporate agenda. I am an active, conservative, pro-business, life-time student of the discipline who has worked with people from the corporate world for decades and never heard nor seen the slightest reference to it in that milieu. (And what % of the US population actually works for a corporation anyway? 15%?) How could it have developed such a powerful hold over education if no-one talks/writes about it or even mentions it?

The real causes of resistance 

The cause of institutional resistance to the PLE is simpler, and more direct, and lies much closer to home: the academic class itself. Even the most liberal educators will turn conservative if you threaten their status or their futures. They have plenty of reasons of their own to resist change. There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about this. People do resist change.

But an even bigger cause, to my mind, is the issue of complexity. Our institutions are not configured to make deep, transformational change en masse. In terms of process, such a widescale change in education would involve a massive level of complexity that no-one really understands and is all but untenable in institutions that were designed to teach, not to change.

The historical roots of our educational systems are long and tell a hierarchical story. That’s just the way it was. I am as much a proponent of flattened organizations, autonomous learning, and a full embrace of the network as anyone, yet I am an unrepentent capitalist. I also believe that most educators would like to see change if it didn’t threaten them, if they unbderstood it, and if it were manageable. No conpiracies. Sometimes what you see is what you get.

The effect on e-learning

All of this explains the patchy state of e learning. On a recent visit to the US, I asked Curt Bonk about the state of e learning and he replied ‘What is the state of human development?’ Touche. Often, e learning is being used simply as a new way to automate old processes. This has sometimes relegated it to the level of a weak compromise between the old ways and the network’s true potential. (In other cases, it’s being done rather well.)  The new learning medium needs new messages. If we want to see the true benefit of the network we have to embrace it fully. This requires that we understand what it can and cannot do.  Probably no-one has done more in terms of advancing that understanding than George Siemens, through his work on connectivism. I guess I just don’t agree with him on what is causing the bottle necks.

Ken Carroll

It’s funny how we all associate Google with learning, rather than just searching. For specific information, I can see why: a single result for Oxfordian theory, for example, satisfies my needs pretty well. Not bad for a time investment of a few seconds.

But searching and learning are not one and the same. Consider what happens when you search for a broader topic. The word Shakespeare yields 52 million random and mainly unhelpful results. After hours of related search I’m not learning much, relative to the time I put in. I discover that Project Gutenberg has the plays for download, but its messy and I find a book or DVD much more convenient for the actual plays. Meanwhile, the Merlot  collection has similar offerings.  Clearly, we are still some ways off manageable OER resources, and I find no systematic way to tackle my subject. For sure there are some good articles on Google, but it’s all random (and all text) and I get the feeling, again, that a decent book might serve me better.

Why haven’t more people tried to create learning frameworks for the disciplines online? Google search results do not coalesce in any sense. By contrast, a book will pull the information into context, even if it is arbitrary or limited. Online, I can store stuff in a PLE, but that is still just a loose collection, rather than a framework per se. And while text results were at least plentiful on Google, the audio and video results were abysmal (essentially nothing for ‘Richard 2nd’, for example and even the most popular plays.)

Try another search

With my 2nd search - learn English - things really went downhill: 50 million results, but all random stuff, of mostly poor quality. Much web-based language learning content is out of date, compiled by hobbyists who patched sites together over time with no notion of networked learning, instructional design, or even the tools of social media, and still less any notion of how to present it. The visitor pays the price, in the form of time, particularly since it is difficult for a non-expert to distinguish the good content from bad. Learning English on the basis of of serendipity is not a learning strategy.

 Frameworks
Google simply takes us to whatever is out there - bits of information. Very little of that was even designed for the web,  but  simply migrated there from elsewhere. Learning a discipline, however, takes more than just data, which is why people still go to night classes and buy textbooks. Efficiency, time, and focus are all hugely important issues. A framework ties this  together and offers as sense of direction.

For some, the framework might involve human guidance, while for others it could simply mean a book, or a schedule at a night class. For us, the solution has been a platform that brings together the people, content, system necessary to enable a sustained learning endeavor. We try to give learners enough guidance to set them on their way but enough freedom to choose their own lessons and actively create their own context.  (Learners really should make their own decisions.)

More specifically:

• At the people level: this includes advice/guidance from practitioners and other learners. Aggregating the experience of practitioners and successful learners can motivate, save vast amounts of time, and accelerate learning. In a sense the people are part of the framework. Pretty soon you have a community of practice  on your hands.
• On a systems level: the framework offers searchable, accessible learning objects that are tagged and organized along a number of possible learning objectives.
• At the content level: lessons are designed for relevance, engagement, etc. These learning objects form a repository of lessons that can be tied together at will.

Our objective was to enable the learner to hit the ground running and create real value. With a clear social object, the community that grows around it adds to the context of learning, and is part of the framework.  I discussed this issue with the brilliant Vincent Wade from Trinity College, Dublin last week, when I met him at Elliot Masie’s Learning 2008 Conference, in Orlando.  There was much fruitful discussion and I believe there will be more.

Ken Carroll

Via Stephen Downes, Judy Breck believes, and I agree, that the economic crunch will speed the advent of network learning.

Getting a college education in the US is absurdly expensive, but like property, or the stock market, the education bubble too will burst - the financial institutions simply no longer have the money to fund the madness.

Change is on the way. Consider how the Open Courseware movement is giving way to the idea that, in essence, a university education could become available (including Open Accreditation) free of charge. This is not, of course, a done deal, but  economic necessity will force us to look more closely at these issues. And crucially, we can now consider such possibilities because of the network. The network doesn’t just change the way we learn from a pedagogical or behavioral perspective - it also changes the economics of the production, distribution, and consumption of educational products and services. The network has the potential to dis-intermediate the inefficiencies in the system and change it fundamentally. That is what will and should happen.

So, it is fair to ask about the value (in the economic sense) of a US university education.  Given their origins, it is unsurprising that university cost/benefit may be out of sync with the broader economic reality. Schools are hard to manage from a cost perspective. I’ve sat on the board of a privately held language school since 1996 and I’ve seen that, without the strictest approach to cost-control, for example, the customer can end up paying for the institution’s inefficiencies. In a state-funded university with a closed system and little financial accountability, I can only imagine what goes on.  (Even without seeing the books, we could probably guess, though.) And as we all know, there are many other reasons why our educational institutions can allow their fees to, er, bloat.

 What I am not saying

Let me be clear on something.  I am not proposing that  the educational system be turned over to free market forces (though there may actually be a case for it).  Nor am I saying that our universities suck and that educators are bad, etc. What I am saying is that the network is exposing the economics of the old system and it doesn’t look good in the context of the tough times ahead. It is the economics, too, that will determine the extent of the changes we are about to see to a far greater extent than will the ideas, the pedagogy, or even the technology.

The fact is that the network can replace large chunks of the old system at a fraction of the cost  but it is the economics that will determine how it configures. Judy mentions textbooks, scaling up good teachers, etc, but there are endless other ways. And Judy is exactly right when she suggests the power of mobile learning in this scenario. But there are, in fact, entirely new conceptions of what a university education should be that go way beyond this. This is not news, but that conversation is going to get louder.

 Our example

It was this economics of the network concept that brought Praxis together as a company. I spend my days trying to figure out the economic reality of schools, of networked learning, and of how to create more value for our learners-as-customers. I would argue that we are slowly but surely solving the puzzle - thanks, of course, to the network.  A Praxis Pass, for example, offers full access to 4 languages for about 80 cents per day. Meanwhile, the more we scale it up, the cheaper it can get, to the point where we could offer access to dozens of languages (or other subjects) for a few cents per day. Nor is there any reason why we could not do that (assuming we reach reasonable scale) make money, and even give the service away free to entire regions where people were too poor to pay for it - parts of Africa, India, or China, for example. We are a small organization (58 people) but it is entirely possible that we  could do those things. It may demonstrate the broader potential of the network in this context. We just have to think about this differently.

The point is that networked learning is in its infancy, and so are the economics of networked learning. There is an awesome power out there waiting to be unleashed if we are willing to reconfigure how we think about all of this. The coming economic collapse will provide the push. After that it will be time to be very open and very creative.  This isn’t edupunk -  this is real life. I doubt if any of us would have liked it this particular way, but hey, get ready for the era of networked learning.

Ken Carroll

This week was an exciting one for us - ChinesePod published lesson number 1,000.  Around all these learning objects we have had tens of thousands of conversation threads, questions, answers, and comments. There are some serious connections getting formed out there.

Meanwhile, there is some real energy in the edublogosphere concerning this course in connectivism.  So, what about ChinesePod from a connectivist perspective? As it happens, connectivist theory and ChinesePod practice are surprisingly consistent. Let me point to some examples.  

 Connectivist principles

Central to connectivism is the primacy of the connection, the belief that more connections lead to more learning. ChinesePod started out with a similar idea: to maximize the interconnectedness between the people, the content, and the system on the platform. At this point, I think it is self-evidently true that (connectivist) theory squares with (our particular) practice. More connections on a network simply do enable more learning, though there are other factors involved.

And where you get connections, you also get networks. George Siemens distinguishes 3 types of networks that enable learning. These are slightly more tricky to assess but I think they also square with our experience.  Let’s look at them:

1. Neural networks. No one can really know what goes on in learners’ synapses, but we all know that it is possible to induce learners to mobilize their cognitive faculties to a greater or lesser extent. More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork,  repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call  ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles. The connections around the subject should be many and varied, a position consistent with connectivism: ’The act of knowing is to be in a particular manner of connectedness’. 

2. Social/external networks.  Learning has an undeniable social dimension, and on the network there are many ways to exploit the fact.  For us, the starting point was Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (reinforced by Krashen’s more cognitivist input theory). Hence the ethos of the community of practice, the specialized groups, etc, on ChinesePod.  These things were designed to bring together teachers, practitioners, and learners and increase learning opportunites. Most  learning in life happens when we connect with someone who knows more about a subject than we do.  There’s no reason why that would be any different on the network, or on ChinesePod, and so the community, an the connections they are allowed to make, play a central role.

3. Conceptual connections.  To me, language learning must subordinate the structures (grammar) to meaning, concepts, conversations, and events. Concepts provide the basis for discussion, reflection, and cross-referencing from the learner’s own life experience and existing knowledge. We start with the concepts and try to relate specific language items to them by using those items for what they are designed to do: to describe concepts. The language learning is almost as a bi-product of the conversation, the reflection, etc.  I am convinced that there is such a thing as conceptual networks and that they are crucial to learning. We hang the language onto the concepts, not the other way round. It is also very clear that learners are far more willing to engage with real concepts that connect with their lives than with grammatical abstractions that do not.

Seeing the patterns

Connectivism clashes with one of dominant concepts in ESL for the last 20 years - second language acquisition.  Stephen Downes asserts, I think convincingly, that we do not acquire linguistic items in the sense of holding or possessing pieces of knowleledge, wrapped in language forms. Instead, we come to recogize meaning as an epiphenomenon of distributed patterns. I can actually live with both notions but as it happens I think we have taken a course that is consistent, once again, with the connectivists.

Example: The teachers and practitioners on ChinesePod do not see ourselves as lecturers or teachers who impart knowledge in the old sense. Instead, we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).  One example is the focus on lexis, rather than grammar. Grammar offers a set of abstractions to be used, theoretically, in a deductive way to generate accurate sentences. In reality, however, it suffers from the humpty-dumpty effect: good for breaking language down, but not for putting it back together again. By contrast, lexical patterns, chunks, and collocations reflect how the language is actually spoken. It shows how certain words are more likely to consort with certain other words (like clusters or even networks).  At the level of comprehension and of production, language learners do well to get good at identifying the patterns of the target language.

What are the differences? 

All in all, I think there is a good deal of consistency here. Looking at the differences would require a new post, but such differences as there are emerge from perspective rather than philosophy.  As a content provider we have to be very mindful of the motivational, humanistic, and affective dimensions of learning. (Carl Rogers had a permanent effect on me, personally.) We also need to ensure the learning is as relevant as possible - relevance is something that we have to strive for on a daily basis, to paraphrase John Pasden.  

Most edubloggers are concerned with the broader question of education as a system. That is a huge challenge and a noble undertaking. We approach it from a very different perspective and a narrower focus. I think this explains the differences in perspective but again, this is one for another day. In the meantime I salute the people behind the connectivism course and I will continue to follow it as closely as time permits.  After all, we have much in common.

 Ken Carroll

Below is a passage taken from an old ChinesePod blog post about the lexical approach. It is a subject I hope to revist as I think it has certain connectivist implications, so here it is:  

“Beginning in the 1980s, computer-based studies (mainly of English) began to provide us with powerful insights into the workings of our language. Linguists fed millions of English documents into software programs to scan them and see what they might yield about their patterns of behavior. These studies were known as ‘corpora’ studies. From the beginning, the corpora studies began to reveal surprising insights into how words interact and behave with other.

The studies offered empirical data, based on a very broad range of English language sources. They allowed us to take a given word or expression and look at how it behaved over the course of thousands of examples - how it was used grammatically, where it was likely to be used, with whom it as most likely to keep company, etc. The results were often startling and they began to challenge traditional ideas about the role of grammar and even about how we defined grammar.

One outgrowth of these studies was the development of the ‘lexical approach’ to language teaching. The first description of a lexical approach is attributed to Michael Lewis, who wrote a book of that title in 1993. This book became a classic amongst language teachers and I myself have been greatly influenced by it over the years. I convinced that the lexical approach (with some revisions) offers very useful insights into how we might approach the study of Mandarin, so let me explain a little about what it is.

The most striking revelation from the corpora concerns how words tend to associate strongly with other words in the form of chunks, fixed expressions, collocations, etc. As an example, let’s take a look at collocation. The word ‘collocation’ refers to the tendency amongst words to collocate, or ‘co-locate’ (appear close to) certain other words. Some random examples (out of millions of possibilities):

seriously ill
serious problem
serious accusation
common cold
unfair advantage
decisive action
strong tea
join hands
commit a crime

If you typed the word ’seriously’, into the corpora software, it would yield thousands of sentences (taken from original documents) and show you the words that ’seriously’ was most likely to appear next to. In this case, ’seriously’ occurred much more frequently with the word ‘ill’ than with any other word. We can therefore say that ’seriously’ collocates with ‘ill’. The word ’serious’, meanwhile, is more likely to appear next to ‘problem’ or ‘accusation’ than with any other words, and so on.

The other phrases on the list above are every day expressions (or collocations) that every native speaker of English knows. But here’s the really interesting thing: even advanced level non-native speakers are unlikely to know these expressions! In fact a non-native speaker is more likely to make a mistake when using such expressions than to use bad grammar. (If ever you are in doubt about whether someone is a native speaker of English, just test his/her knowledge of these kinds of expressions.)

To non-language teachers, the examples of collocations I offer may seem trite, but let me tell you that they set off a firestorm of innovation and debate in the language teaching world that has continued unabated to this day. (Actually, while we’re at it, ‘to this day’ is a nice fixed expression, while the word ‘unabated’ tends to occur with ‘floods’ or ‘firestorms’ or things like that, for some reason!)”

Ken

Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL, is where language is taught through subject areas - math through English, for example.  (This is also known as immersion.) This week, I came across some CLIL initiatives in Europe, where the classrooms have two teachers in  what is called ‘team teaching’. Here, one teacher is a subject matter expert who delivers the lesson (history, biology, whatever) in the target language (or ‘L2′). The other teacher is an actual English teacher, who looks for opportunities to exploit the language from the context and draw attention to it at certain points in the lesson.

I love the sound of this - mining an authentic communicative context to source language items on the fly. There’s also something very real about it: learners experience the language in concrete terms, rather than as something  hypothetical, to be learned for some distant future need. 

Team teaching 

I can also attest to the power of team teaching through my Praxis experience - audio lessons typically include a native L2 speaker (Jenny) together with someone who reached proficiency in it (John). For us, this has opened the door to tremendous possibilities:

• Learners get more than one perspective on the topic - male/female, different cultures, etc - in a time-efficient way.
• There is division of labor and specialization: The native speaker is arbiter of usage, pronunciation, etc, while the second one understands the process of learning L2,  anticipates relevant questions, and offers experience, etc.
• The lesson becomes a conversation between two practitioners with different  expertise, working to solve one problem. The native speaker models/demonstrates the language while the other one anticipates learner problems. The to and fro between them means that it’s all very lively - it’s prepped but never scripted - and they have 7 or 8 minutes to make it stick in the learner’s mind.

Learning needs a context

But there are other similarities between Praxis and the CLIL approach. CLIL and immersion work because they provide the learner with an authentic experience. The context is real and so learners approach L2, not as an artifact to be examined out of context, but rather as a tool for communication (the real purpose of any language) and very much in context.

So, where does that leave ChinesePod? If CLIL is so good, why don’t we teach Chinese through academic or other specialist areas? Wouldn’t that kill 2 birds with one stone?  Well, the answer is that we do take a CLIL approach on ChinesePod (and all the other pods, too). Instead of an academic focus, however, the context for ChinesePod is Chinese culture. I’d even go as far as to say that, ultimately, the object of study on ChinesePod is culture, not language.

Mobile is the new immersion

And there’s more. Although immersion is undoubtedly an efficient way to learn a L2, it hasn’t generally been widely adopted in schools - it’s expensive to immerse kids in such an environment and not easy to administer. But it occurs to me, now, that mobile is the new immersion. The learner can simply pull those portable islands of context into his personal learning network and take them with in wherever he goes. This works at he leve lof the receptive skills, and especially listening, and it’s soemthing we have worked hard on. One new development phase for us will be to find ways to leverage the productive skills - ways to enable learners to practice with teachers but also with each other. I believe we’re starting to figure out ways to do that. Now all we have to do is, er, build the technology to enable that.

 Ken Carroll