Here Comes Everybody

Here’s a revealing article about how Mandarin is being taught in New Zealand.  It opens with this line: 

 ‘Confucius say getting Kiwis to learn Chinese is like banging head against brick wall.’

 It continues:

 ‘Confucius Institute director Nora Yao says the aim to make New Zealanders China-literate sometimes seems impossible.’

  One problem here lies with expectations. Too many people are drinking the ‘30 million’ kool aid. The true global demand for Mandarin is nowhere near the numbers that the Chinese government has bandied about. That myth has created some totally unrealistic expectations, like, perhaps, the one that NZ schools might suddenly, and en masse, embrace Mandarin into their core curricula in the space of a few short years (or in this case, one year).

But here’s another take on the reasons for the slow adoption from a NZ high school principal. 

“We can’t find the time to fit it into our busy curriculum, and also it’s not easy finding a teacher who is proficient in teaching Mandarin”

I think the principal is closer to the mark. Miss Yao sees it as a lack of interest on the part of the Kiwis, not of anything to do with the teachers/purveyors. I somehow find that a weak argument. It may be coincidental, but in my experience, struggling teachers almost always blame the students for the problems. (I trained/observed teachers for 12 years.) Is it the congenital laziness of the New Zeland public, or is it teachers/methods that are at fault? My guess is, the latter.  

Even with the best intentions, Mandarin teachers who rely on  traditional methods will struggle badly in western schools. What’s worse, they oftern fail to figure out why western students are so unresponsive to their hard work.  I’ve seen it happen. It is painful and unrewarding for all concerned. It can lead to the cancellation of Mandarin programs before they ever take off, because  teachers think the students are lazy and students think the language is impossible. The problem will continue until there is a well defined discipline of TCFL. At the risk of sounding self-serving, they’d be better off for now using ChinesePod.  

Ken Carroll

 The subject of online language learning has been in the news, particularly since Live Mocha received funding some weeks ago. Yesterday, my company, Praxis Language  appeared alongside them, in the New York Times (the same story appeared in the International Herald Tribune today). 

There is a deeper undercurrent to this story. It concerns how the future of online language learning is being played out.  After a career in the industry I know change when I see it: After a somewhat slow start, Moore’s Law and the internet are starting to rattle its foundations. This will result in change - change in how, where, and with whom we learn languages - and it will reach all corners of the industry, including those who may now feel immune to it, Berlitz, Rosetta Stone, the language schools, and universities.  

I have no idea who will dominate the new landscape, but some things strike me as inevitable. Web 2.0 has yielded  new learning insights and practices that will almost certainly be widely adopted going forward. The whole nature v nurture (technology v pedagogy) debate has been opened up again and it is proving fertile ground for innovation. I cannot imagine, for example, any online learning system that failed to use RSS going forward. On ChinesePod and SpanishPod, that technology has created a whole new conception of  what a lesson is. RSS turns the daily lessons into learning events, something you don’t want to miss, rather than a chore you have to do, and a place where your community of learners hang out an work to the same beat.  (This is also described as pull v push by Charlie Gillette in this excellent article.) This type of learning as an event was impossible just a few years ago, but I believe it will prove itself indispensable for any future developers.

And while we’re on the subject of community, it’s clear that social software, though still in its infancy,  has a huge role to play in learning.  Learning alone from a black box will no longer cut it,  because now there is an alternative: the community of practice, with a clear social object, a purposethat everyone in the learning ecosystem shares. 

Things are going to look different, three years from now. Mark my words!

I also refer you to this excellent overview of some interesting trends/developments by my friend, the excellent  Dr Curt Bonk. 

Ken Carroll

Both ChinesePod and SpanishPod come under the banner of Praxis Language. The Praxis vision is pretty radical: re-formulating how online language learning is done. (We, er, don’t lack ambition.) 

Recently, Praxis were asked by National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOCFL) to develop a web strategy for their Confucius Institutes. (NOCFL are also known as han ban.) We have accepted. In a couple of months we will launch the Online Confucius Institute (OCI) - more details here and here.

This is a prestigious commission. The CI’s are the equivalent of the British Council, the Goethe Institut, or Alliance Francaise. Thus far the various Confucius Institutes around the world have developed their own websites, but independently and without any consistent brand, design, or theme.  The new OCI will provide a center of gravity that will hopefully support the efforts of the various Institutes and bring the world-wide community of teachers and learners of Chinese a little bit closer together.

I think there may be some other interesting angles to the story.

 The Chinese government gets web 2.0?

First of all, han ban is a government entity, appointed by the State Council. By commissioning us to design/develop/build the OCI, they have shown a remarkably progressive outlook. We pretty much have a free hand to develop it as we please and that includes maximizing the web 2.0 features, social networking,  and and other participatory elements.  

 I believe  the OCI design will allow it to leapfrog the standard, web 1.0 fare of the British Council and others. This will put he CIs way ahead. (Who says the Chinese government doesn’t get the web?)

The political thing

 People are already asking if the political motivation behind the CIs is to infiltrate western universites with Chinese propaganda. In almost every article you read about the CIs, you get the ‘concerned’ people, so let me share a secret with you: no-one from the han ban has ever asked us to spy for them! Nor have they talked about propaganda, soft power, hard power, electric power, or anything else that might be construed as a political motivation.  No hint of ploitics ever came up in any conversation we have had with them.  In fact, they more or less handed the entire project to us because they didn’t have the capability internally. (I’m not sure how  they’re supposed to infiltrate the free world if they cannot do their own web strategy.) I’m kind of small government guy by persuasion because I believe all goverments are obtuse. From what I’ve seen of han ban it will be a long time before they develop the capability that these chaps (another obtuse government entity) seem to fear in them.

TCFL

The discipline of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, TCFL, is not yet well developed. It is, however, the single biggest obstacle to the spread of Mandarin. There simply aren’t enough teachers out there who could teach Mandarin in a way that works for other cultures. My hope is to use not just the latest technologies but to try to encourage more progressive thinking in how the discipline might develop. I’m hoping to adopt pedagogical approach that embraces connectivism and other disciplines.  

I’ll let you know more details as things develop. In the meatnime, feel free to suggest, criticize, or chastise.

Ken Carroll