Is ChinesePod setting industry standards?
There are lots of blogs on the subject of learning 2.0. They tend to focus on what is theoretically or pedagogically desirable in the New Learning, as well as the new understandings that emerge from our experience of learning on the network. This discussion remains theoretical because mainstream business and education have been slow to embrace the New Learning. Examples of these theories in an integrated format, in practice are not common.
Except, I would argue, with a couple of exceptions. I believe ChinesePod and SpanishPod are actually rather good case studies of putting these concepts to work.
An integrated learning 2.0 scenario
There is a general agreement about the need for learning environments, learnscapes, or learning eco-systems, that enable participation, collaboration, and user-input, etc. The central organizing principle should, of course, be the network, with all the attendant network qualities and the right social software. The key thing about a network is that everything is connected to everything else. Connecting the people and all the bits enables the sharing, the discussion, the dissemination of good learning practices, as well as the self-expression, the debate, and all the other things that make human learning possible.
In this scenario, the learners are necessarily in control because networks break down hierarchies. The role of the instructor (or practitioner) is that of modelling and demonstrating, rather than as arbiters or controllers.
Learners are then free to select content on a self-service basis, and at the times that they, themselves choose, preferably from an input-rich environment, with a variety of ways to consume it. (Learning is multi-dimensional.) It also needs to be self-directed and happen through direct experience and personal decisions, rather than through instruction and vicarious decisions.
Within this adaptive, de-centralized, recursive, and exploratory learning environment, content needs to be cognitive, and engaging. An inductive approach that allows learners to participate, to discover meaning, to reflect, and identify patterns, takes precedence over lectures because learning is individualistic, and subjective. All the while, members of the community can communicate on various issues, and threads to pursue their own goals with practitioners and other learners.
Sounds familiar
In fact, the scenario I’ve just described is pretty much how ChinesePod and SpanishPod actually work. Almost every feature I mentioned exists there. The approach we took has certainly been organic. Lesson topics and other resources (and therefore the curriculum) are generally informed by learner request and not complete without their comments. The environment is dynamic, evolving in collaboration with the needs and behaviors of the learners. Ultimately it functions as an online community of practice.
Other features include the use of modular learning objects (check) that can be tagged (check) and delivered as an RSS flow (check) when needed (check). This means that the learning is just in time (check) rather than just in case. Meanwhile, the future apparently will be learner-centered (check) immersive (check) mobile (check) democratic (check) designed for the medium (check) and the environment in which it will be consumed (check). All these elements exist on ChinesePod.
I guess I’ve made my point.
Was all of this planned in advance? No, it was not. It emerged as we went along - which is consistent with what network learning theories, such as connectivism, might suggest.
ChinesePod and social networks
I believe ChinesePod points to a distinctive type of social network, and one that will become more prevalent once it becomes more widely recognized for what it is. I would distinguish (for the sake of argument) three types of social network. First, you have Facebook, Linked In, etc, where the social object is to connect with people and serve some social purpose (finding a job, making new friends, etc).
The second type of social network is what we might call the content communities. The social object here involves sharing information, photos, music, or something else - examples, Delicious, Flckr, Youtube, etc. As with the first type of social network, you register, get your own page, and get on with it.
I believe we may define a third category - the social network as an online Community of Practice that exploits the learning-friendly qualities of the network. (This can extend beyond the internet itself, for example, into the mobile context.) The social object is learning a language, a process that requires very high levels of participation.
The Big Bang of 2005 yielded Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, and so on. In terms of learning, the results were more patchy. The ’small pieces loosely joined’ approach has led to new ideas about personal learning environments in the manner that Stephen Downes has described. That has more to do with managing for the individual. I would argue, however, that we are the clearest example of an integrated approach to what the participative web has to offer in learning in specific subject area. I beleive the community of practice is a powerful way to do that.
Our goal now is to set the standards for the online language learning industry. This is just the beginning, but I hope we’ve taken the first steps.
Ken Carroll
March 28th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Ken,
you asked (yourself): Is ChinesePod setting industry standards?
Good question.
In terms of language podcast quality and listening fun: YES.
Where else can you get such a well-done podcast (and for free!)?
But:
A CP “learnscape” does not exist IMHO.
Look at 88groups, it is not a success.
Only the lesson discussions within CP are quite good - but there are always the same people communicating. The CP forum is nearly dead.
I don’t see a “Community of Practice”.
How many of your customers are “silent” customers which don’t enter the discussions??
95 %?
The CP Premium features can be found also @ LearnChineseOnline.com, and some features there are even better than @ CP. There are also weaknesses of the CP approach: no progressive course, which some learners are looking for, big gaps between levels. I don’t see that CP is setting “something special” or industry standards.
Yes, the learner has more freedom, and that’s good.
But IMHO the learner sometimes needs guidance from experts or a progressive approach.
The practice plan seems to be a must for every REAL learner, but it’s too expensive and via SKYPE too “far away”.
A teacher, who sits in the same room, is not a bad thing in these days of WEB 2.0.
There is still much to do.
Fred
March 28th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Fred Learner,
Your comments are frivolous and miss the point entirely. You do, however, manage to get in an advertisement for a competitor site - which appears to be your real intent.
Ken Carroll
March 29th, 2008 at 2:07 am
What I find most exciting about the ChinesePod model is how much potential there is to work with what’s already there. To use the example of the “structured curriculum” issue, it’s a rather trivial matter to sequence ChinesePod lessons, and in doing so, to also help overcome the “gap” issue. Anyone with some time could do this right now on a blog by just linking to ChinesePod lessons.
Obviously, ChinesePod has an obligation to provide more structure to its learners, and we are, in fact, working on something that will be much more powerful, customizable, and extensible than a static list could ever be. My point is that you can’t do this kind of thing with a collection of sequential lessons. The potential doesn’t go both ways. This is one of the most visionary aspects of the ChinesePod model, in my opinion.
One thing you brought up that really interests me, Ken, is the different types of social networks. You mentioned three types, the first type being centered on the social connections themselves, and the second being centered on community-generated content. You mention the third being a sort of community of practice, but what is the content on which the community focuses? Clearly, on ChinesePod, while the users do create and link to lots of content, the main draw is the content created by ChinesePod itself. This also brings in the issue of authority. I’d be interested on hearing some of your ideas about authority, learning, and communities of practice, and how they apply to ChinesePod.
March 29th, 2008 at 4:11 am
I don’t believe we’re setting technical standards, but if you look at the way ChinesePod features get emulated by hopeful competitors, it seems fairly clear that we’re setting standards for content bundling.
I personally think the value of many Web 2.0 features (tagging?) are exaggerated by developers who think that interactivity itself will provide much of the value for their services. The important thing is creating an environment that people can use to help structure their own learning. Tools and content and interact to support people whether they’re studying or working or whatever.
March 29th, 2008 at 4:29 am
There’s an interesting discussion going on over on ChinesePod itself. Herre are some of the comments:
From Sebastian: “Saying something is ahead of its time (or was ahead of its time) usually has a rather negative connotation. (”It was great, but nobody understood and used it, because it was ahead of its time”.)
So if Chinesepod was ahead of its time, nobody would be using it now and people would only discover years later how useful it would have been.
Setting industry standard is something very different from being “ahead of its time” and I think CPod is very successful and certainly setting trends. ”
Goulniky: ” Ken, I’m glad you see CPod as a good case study, I predicted long ago on your blog that some (brick and mortar) academic was sooner or later going to produce one…
What really interests me is what it took for CPod to emerge and be allowed to set those industry standards. I am familiar with most of the effects and many of the causes, but it’s must be the unique combination of ingredients that made this cocktail work.
Timing is one of the elements, and I’m not sure you can really bundle ChinesePod and SpanishPod together. I don’t know how succesful the latter is, but certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the former.
There’s some unique excitement and characteristics that are undoubtedly due to Chinese and Shanghai, in addition to personalities, openness, UGC, technology etc.
I have limited exposure to the Learning industry, much less its standards, but I think you’re setting standards for user interaction, community and learning broadly speaking, probably not just language learning.
One of the specificities of this site is still a predominantly ‘anglo-saxon’ audience as we say around here, largely US-based.
There are a number of language learning podcasts / blogs out there, Chinese and otherwise, and whilst some of their content can be top class, they’re lacking most of the emerging properties of this place.
I agree with sebastian’s point about being ahead of its time vs setting industry standards, but it remains to be seen whether you are setting trends and what real impact you will have, either on language learning (effectiveness as demonstrated by language abiliites ‘learning on your own terms’ really develop), or on language teaching (I’ve seen a few comments recently from professionals about how multimedia had promised the ‘moon’ and finally delivered little, vs the value of modern, adapted language teaching techniques, which don’t have to be boring and stiffled).
I forgot to elaborate on your specific audience, and point out that what didn’t seem to work is extend to a really multi-lingual platform, the vast majority of comments (I’m talking CPod here) being in English, few in Chinese, and certainly none in any other language.
It might be due to the peculiarities of Chinese and hanzi, things may be different on SpanishPod, but that is something I have an issue with if we want to measure industry standards not just in terms of fun but also target-language interaction…. back to my previous post about language interaction, I know that CPod emphasizes oral over written language acquisition, but the main return interaction still needs to be the written medium (with current technology).
How would you feel about language classes, student/teacher interactions where the student would hardly ever respond in the language she’s trying to learn?
So, while there is no doubt about setting standards, there is one element crucially missing from the interaction, and that is the use of Chinese. This is one reason I try not to enter lesson comments in English anymore.
Henning: ” Let me play devil’s advocate once again:
For me the real innovativeness of CPod neither lies in the pedagogical concept nor in the technology.
The core of the CPod idea is actually very simple:
One fresh lesson each day (at least). Consequently. Ongoing over the course of years.
And that entails the need to find a source for the lesson ideas: The users.
This is bolstered by the community and of course it needs both professionalism (quality of the production, efficient processes), dedication to teaching, and last not least a combination of enthusiasm & fun on the side of the team.
But it would all be hollow without the “1 day - 1 lesson” scheme.
Is this an industy standard?
I don’t know about that, yet. It surely is an industry benchmark.
PaulC: “Excellent blog Ken. Any thoughts of where 2.0 is heading for the future in terms of further innovations in learning, emerging trends, what needs to be improved with the current model etc…?”
Suburbanite:” Ken,
I think CPod is right on time. Without broadband availability at reasonable prices–what would be the use in subscribing? An could there be a practice plan w/o Skype or some other cost effective solution? Probably not.
The model is simple, and it look like you’ve kept the website lean. My only beef is that it does seem slow at times.
But I like what Henning said–fresh content delivered daily. Even topics or vocabulary that gets covered and recovered is taught differently. Qing Wen, Movie Madness and Dear Amber all help keep the feed fresh. But also we get a little more flavor of the culture and daily life.
The social aspect of Chinese Pod is also different. There are many language learning websites, but Chinese Pod has many active listeners. And we see helpful comments and interaction in the comments. Other sources do have that element–or it’s not as well done.
You might look at eslpod.com or studypond.com as points of comparison.
The really question in my mind is how do CPod and its cousins grow with expanding technology?
88groups are nice–but is anybody looking at Skype Conferences or semi regular sessions with or without Cpod staff involved. Perhaps an interface to organize activity of this kind among uses of Praxis Language services.
I could go on, but I won’t . I think you guys are doing well–perhaps slightly ahead of your time, but not really.
Can you manage the growth?”
March 29th, 2008 at 5:13 am
John,
To answer your question, I think there can be many, many types of CoP. They can function purely on the basis of what the users decide to discuss and disseminate. In this case, however, we’re talking language. It is essential that the learners have access to something approximating the model of the target language. The selection and presentation, as well as the way that the items are put into context makes a huge difference from an efficiency perspective. Many of these insights come from having been through the experience ourselves.
If users were to provide content for a language course it coudl be disatrous and disastrously slow. This is where the expertise or ‘authority’ (in the sense of familiarity with learning the target language) of the practitioners comes into it. I see content that is professionally produced, when combined with users input as the optimal content. I also beleive that the place that offers the most plausible sense of ‘authority’ on the topic is the place where most learners will eventually migrate.
March 29th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I am no expert nor am I heavily involved in this field, however, I would agree with the fact that CPod is setting industry standards. Self-motivated language learners can go on CPod and learn lots of Mandarin whenever they want to. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and people are definitely copying CPod; I think that they will continue to do so in the future because CPod is on to something.
That said, I don’t see very much networking between CPod users either. I would also like to see more structure in the lessons and access to a more grammar explanations, especially on SPod.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Ryan,
I wasn’t really referring to ‘networking’ in the traditional sense of hooking up individually or getting together. People who are on the (ChinesePod) network are automatically connected. Simply be engaging in a discussion thread (on a lesson, for example) you are taking advantage of a key network quality: the ability to share perspectives and get diverse opinions on how to learn, or make the content stick, etc. As the producers of the lessons, we can do our best to present them in the way we think most helpful, but user contributions (in the fom of comments) always, always, always make the lesson better. Learners are individuals who learn in different ways, so a wider set of perspectives is almost certainly a good thing. This is just one aspect of how the network helps learning.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Understood. Thanks for the clarification Ken.
March 31st, 2008 at 2:18 am
Ken,
You know how much I admire what you have done. I really appreciate the extent to which you have upset the old conventions of teaching Chinese, put listening at the center of your curriculum， and infused your lessons with creativity, wit， and personality.
I also believe that your have increased the responsiveness to your customers by 1,000% over traditional schools. However, I do not believe, that you are democratic nor do I believe you are decentralized and I wonder why you want to worship so much at the alter of the network when the network is only marginally involved in creating the content that is so clearly C-Pod.
You have recently spoken about nodes and connections within a network. I am confused by all this talk (sorry) but I suspect if you looked at the connections between C-pod and your customers that all of the connections would be of the spoke and wheel type with 99% of the connections running first through BIG BRAIN CENTRAL (or C-Pod). Are these connections altered when they pass through the BIG BRAIN？Sure！
In fact， I don’t believe that C-Pod is democratic. You may get suggestions for lessons but it is you who create the lessons according to internal standards of your own. The fact that you have already gotten rid of old lessons attests to the fact that you have decided that your lessons must embody certain qualities. These qualities come from a CENTRALLY ORGANIZED ENTITY. Call it what you will but these standards did not arise from your listeners （or what you seem to now refer to as the network）
This quality of creativity that you exhibit daily is not something that is a property of this network. It is a property of the central node, the node which you sit at or near.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:26 am
Ken:
it may be that my comment seemed frivolous to you, but it is just my opinion, ok?
I ask myself: Why do you react so annoyed when I compared CP to CLO premium services? I wonder whether you or your staff compared both services in DETAIL — I did. Why do you think that the only purpose of my post was setting a link to a competitor’s service??
Every reader may form his/her own opinion about that.
Fred
April 1st, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Michael,
I think ChinesePod is democratic in the way that Stephen Downes describes it. As with it’s political equivalent, this doesn’t mean that everyone has exactly the same role. In politics, we elect leaders to get certain jobs done. Communities have to have hierarchies and organization of some sort, including democracies. Even the smallest democracies are centrally organized entities, but are nonetheless democracies. On CPod, the community votes with its feet. A completely flattened structure would not allow for lesson production, for example. In fact, it would produce chaos.
Fred,
Opinions are allowed. I won’t ban or delete them. No personal offense meant!
Ken Carroll
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Wooot! ChinesePOD for the win!
I’ve attempted to learn mandarin, without any success, approximately 4 times prior to finding cPOD. Now may be it’s just 5th time lucky, or I am now intellectually or even possibly socially ready to learn mandarin now but in just a few short days on cPOD, I have learnt more conversational mandarin than any of the previous times.
I think one of the main reasons cPOD works so well is that it assumes nothing and gets to the real language immediately, without spending endless hours on the theory. Later on, once I am more comfortable with the sounds of mandarin I will want to delve in to the theory a bit deeper but for now I want to accomplish the art of simply speaking to another person using mandarin. However, these resources of the theory are immediately available from the start.. they are just not thrust upon you like so many formal schools in mandarin do.
The other reason it works, for me at least, is that I am able to find things that are relevant to me.. that is, topics I can actually relate to and then work outwards from that point. I can be as structured or as unstructured as I need to be.
As a musician I find it very similar to the way I originally learnt to play guitar. For the first few years I just learnt enough to know how to play other peoples’ songs, that is.. things I could relate to. Understanding the theory before the practical in music may be ok for some people but not for me. I played what I wanted, when I wanted for many years and I became quite an accomplished player. Then I turned my attention to the theory and an entirely new world opened for me. I see many similarities between this and cPOD.
Also.. Jenny and Kian are very funny to listen to sometimes.. most cPOD lessons make me giggle at least once.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Hi Ken,
What began as a comment on this blog about some thoughts I had on things Chinesepod could improve on morphed into a post I made on my blog, as I felt a lot of my thoughts are probably based on my personal learning preferences rather than some end-all, be-all thing.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I asked in my first post:
“How many of CP customers are “silent” customers which don’t enter the discussions?? 95 %?”
This chart ( http://thenetworksense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/chart2.jpg ) on Hank Harkoff’s blog shows that my assumption was not so wrong.
A CP community does not exist.
A few “power posters” make not an “online community of practice”. It’s a pity, but it’s true.
Fred
April 5th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
The Lurker phenomenon has been around since the dawn of online communities, even back in the late 1980’s on dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS). There is always a large % of people who “look but don’t touch”. They have their questions answered by others who posted before them and then feel that they don’t need to post because of this.
An online community can not be judged on its regular posting quota alone. There is more to it than that. Statistics are great in some contexts but how do you gather data from people who fall into this “already had my question answered” category, or any other category that warrants them not to post or prevents them from posting.
April 6th, 2008 at 3:16 am
Luke,
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?
April 6th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
This is a great discussion. My view is that participation on the web is always a matter of a very small % of people doing pretty much all the interaction - 1% or less. It has always neen that way as far back as the early 90s. We hope to improve the numbers but it will still only ever be a couple of % of total users. I’m not sure we can radically change that.
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
April 7th, 2008 at 3:33 am
I really feel I know both Ken and Jenny even though I have only ever listened to the PODcasts. It’s a very odd feeling to be honest. I know I could not call them my friends, nor anyone else on there.. Connie, Amber, John etc. However everyone is so open and friendly and community focused, plus the fact that I listen to the PODcasts on a daily basis, means that I feel as though they are all part of my surrogate Chinese family.
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.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:42 am
The way I see CPOD is like a Church. We (I’ll stick with this form) certainly have devoted followers, yes? My gosh, by the sound of it we even have pilgrims. We have regular sermons that people flock to in the hundreds of thousands. These sermons trigger an incredible amount of exegesis by men and women of great devotion and learning. We have a charismatic leader, who envisions the future and ways of leading us into the promised land of “learning on our terms”. We used to have a chorus (The Saturday Show) but when the chorus started becoming more interesting than the sermons, well, the chorus disappeared.
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.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:45 am
That was fun!
April 7th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Michael,
Wow. Brilliant!
April 7th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Michael’s epiphany, er, comment, wins my vote as the Best Comment Ever. It’s almost like a new testament or something to ChinesePod.
Ken
April 8th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Oh great, now how can I ever post again? You have jinxed me for sure.
Seriously, are you guys one of those non-profit religious organizations?
July 21st, 2008 at 2:27 am
I’m not sure about ChinesePod being a “hub” of Chinese learning…as far as it being the industry leader and setting a new standard, no doubt. I would say though that the majority of the Chinese Pod users are there for the podcasts and not much else.
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.