I think you get more of a community learning situation with something like www.EnglishBaby.com - which is an English language learning site. The forums and chat rooms there play much more of a central role in terms of learning than they do with ChinesePod.

Although I don’t think that this is because of ChinesePod being poorly organized or anything - it’s just a different set of circumstances for the user base (and also a different age bracket and lifestyle for the users). EFL / ESL is a whole different kettle of fish, you get ESL students coming in committed at a young age, a number of whom hope to emigrate to or at the very least study extensively in an English-speaking country, who economically might not have the means to do so without jumping through quite a number of hoops.

A lot of the students start out with a pretty high competency level in English and live in a media environment which is saturated with spoken and written English. You also have a decent number of EFL teachers dropping in either to grind their own axes, ask for language exchanges, promulgate their religions, pick up women, etc.

Seriously, are you guys one of those non-profit religious organizations?

Ken

Wow. Brilliant!

The interesting thing about this church however is that all is spoken in the tongue of MP3. And we don’t need to be in church to receive our MP3s. We just queue for a download to our shiny i-pods, complaining in mass only if the connection (undersea cable) breaks.

We don’t shake hands, wear our Sunday best, or break bread together. Yes, we sometimes go to meet the staff of the church and its icons but we never meet each other. This all has the feel of a community as long as we never stop to consider that a community is the people and the people rarely meet.

There is a small number who commune with us regularly. They are called The One Per-Cent. They sit at the cross roads of the nodes and do the work of the church and tend to us when we have questions.

Some day our Holy Book will fill volumes and volumes (we are already beyond 800) and the work of our leaders will be done. New unwashed ones will enter our church and peering at their screens they will be astounded. How can there be so much? Where do I begin?

Then will come the day the leader had rued. He will be forced to say, there is a path through this, follow me I will lead the way. And each of us will follow, alone in our dimly lit room, aware that around the world others must certainly be doing the same.

The way the community is at cPOD, everyone is there for the same main reason “learning/teaching mandarin” and then everything spirals out from that point. I have experienced this phenomenon only a few times in the past where there is always that common focus at the centre of everything.

An example of this is with a guitar lessons website that I assist in moderating the forums of. Everyone’s focus there is to learn/teach guitar, and then the more or less people join in on spin-off conversations defines the direction the community goes but in the end, the ultimate point of the site remains the same: to be a learning centre of guitar. At the guitar website I am talking about there are well over 800,000 members but only an extremely small percentage actually post.

That is what cPOD is: a learning centre of Chinese language. A hub with many doorways that can be opened.

There are a number of reasons why I stil think of the CPod community as much greater than the people who post. First, we simply have contact with a far greater number of people than post on the site. Day after day we see hundreds of people sign up. We see the info they provide their reasons for study, why they join, and the general patterns. I get emails and messages all the time from learners who do not post on the site - including teachers of Mandarin, for example, who use CPod with hundreds of students. People regularly walk into the ‘factory’ who seem to know everything about us, about the community, etc, but who had never once posted there. (I’ve even met people who travelled from the States just to meet us, even though we didn’t know they existed.) It’s also clear that our approach to learning Mandarin has been adopted by lots of people - teachers, and individuals (not to mention, imitators). Hundreds of thousadns of people listen every week.

So Michael’s point is valid: How do we delineate the community? My thinking has been that ‘community’ is indeed a vague term and that people who visit and learn from the discussions are part of the community whether or not they post. The learning practices and interactions that they observe, function as a CoP and they can benefit from those things. I’ve never taken the time to try to figure out exactly at what point someone offically enters the community.

All of this is tremendously thought provoking. Please keep your ideas coming. Fred Learner’s observations have turned out to be very fruitful! I thank him for that.

Ken

Fair point but it seems to me that if you call something a community (of practice) you need some yardstick to measure that it is what you say it is.

Not only here but, from a skeptical point of view, wherever a business claims a community exists, someone needs to press the question of what makes “X” a community. Should the question of numbers ever enter into this discussion or should we use some qualitative measure? I wish I knew.

So when can a business become a community and who does it become a community for? Does interaction by itself constitute a community? Is there a difference between a network and a community? Is CPOD one community or many separate communities? Is any of this really important?