via Niall Kennedy… Today Nokia announced a new pre-installed mobile feed reader on the Nokia Series 60 devices (e.g. N95 in the above photo). While ostensibly to support consumption of YouTube videos on mobile phones, it is also an increase in the ease of consuming a daily dose of ChinesePod.
While subscribing to the ChinesePod RSS feed in a feed reader, such as iTunes, is a step up in convenience over directly going to the website and manually downloading each individual lesson, it is still a pain to ensure that one’s iPod is properly sync’ed every morning with the latest lesson content. Direct downloads over Wi-Fi (as opposed to metered downloads over GPRS) eliminate this need and provide a new ‘wow-level’ of convenience.
Even though ChinesePod has been prominently featured on Yahoo!Podcasts for a while, we have held off on updating our RSS feeds with (Yahoo-pushed) Media RSS tags. Now that these Nokia devices support this format as well, we will update the RSS in the next iteration of ChinesePod.
With a Safari-browser in both these Nokia phones and the upcoming Apple iPhone, we can also provide XHTML web access to key functions that might be accessed on-the-go, specifically lesson review (discussion, dialogue - even the rollover effect will be enabled, vocabulary, expansion), vocabulary review (list management, flashcards), conversation tracking (fed by RSS feeds), and a glossary lookup function. Mobile access to the audio lesson input and related reinforcement activities, will open up a new channel to the ChinesePod service.
We hope all this will mean the computer will be one less obstacle to learning Chinese on your terms.
中文 Chinese
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
February 14th, 2007 at 4:56 am
I think that ChinesePod is too much in love with technology.
If I look at the vocab area of ChinesePod then my feelings are that there is still a long way to go to achieve better usability and better value for money. In the moment I am not willing to pay 240 $ per annum for a rather poorly designed flashcard system. E.g., there is no switching between traditional and simplified characters. Another feeling of mine is that ChinesePod has no real teaching concept. It’s only a fun way (that’s OK!), but that’s it. Grammar coverage, character coverage is a must for a Chinese language learner, and CP doesn’t offer much in these areas.
All the best and good luck
hanyu_xuesheng
Ken Carroll Says:
February 15th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Hanyu xuesheng,
It’s completely up to you to decide if there is value in the subscription.
If you read my blog you will know that the teaching concept is never out of the discussion. There are literally hundreds of posts and thousands of comments on the topic. Sometimes I think we’re obsessed with it. These inform our academic decisions.
However, we still take an eclectic approach to the whole issue. I believe in teaching certain precepts that are true for me in my experience as a teacher and a learner, but I not hold these as gospel truth, and I do not force them upon learners. Ultimately, ChinesePod is about choice for the learner to engage with the content in ways that work for him. I he wishes to listen to my suggestions on how best to learn, great. Alternatively he can listen what the Big Brain tells him.
Ken Carroll
AuntySue Says:
February 17th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
No doubt there will be a USA market for this sort of thing, and it might earn you some money, but it doesn’t interest me personally.
I do like mobility, in fact, I demand it. I will not bother paying for anything that always requires me to be at my desk. All of my serious study is done elsewhere. But for me, mobility means without the network, and no amount of technological invention is going to change those options where I live, because there’s no infrastructure and that’s something we cannot control.
ChinesePod provides some materials that can be used in a fully mobile way, with neither computer nor network, after a little manipulation of the data by the student. For example, I convert each lesson’s dialogues from PDF to GB2312 or Big5 plain text for use on my Palm PDA, and convert the pinyin to numbered pinyin, and make flashcard sets with PlecoDict, as do many other cpoddies. Sometimes I edit the audio files down to just the dialogues too, and speed them up. Indeed a lot of us have been doing it this way over the past year. Even though we have to stop and massage the data to fit our mobility, it’s worth it, because computer time, network time, desk time is not available. We didn’t get very upset about ChinesePod not catering to our needs, because mobile learning is a very modern concept for a learning site to take on board. And now we’re being leapfrogged.
While those new mobile devices will have unavailable or unaffordable network connections in some places, ordinary network connections can be unavailable too for other reasons. For example, I can’t visit the site in my lunch break, because it’s not work related and therefore not allowed at work. Or maybe the link at home is saturated whenever the teenager is awake. Lots of reasons. It’s simply too limiting to always need the network to do Chinese.
Sometimes I’ll pick up my laptop and my pampered creature, and disappear for a day or two, to somewhere secret with no phone no network but plenty of take-away ChinesePod. Now THAT’s mobility.
Good on you, move forward by all means, it’s great to see you getting into the next revolution while it’s still new. But be aware that it’s only going to help those prepared to be tied to the network to do their study, and who live and work in places where that is possible, and for some of us it looks like only partial mobility. Us old hands at mobile learning will see no change, unless we can buy into something new and/or move to a place where it is going to work. We might even do that, eventually, but for me it won’t be for a few years. Hopefully we’ll still benefit anyway, because increased profits will make our teachers better resourced all round.
Bravo, get it while it’s hot, and good luck.
Ken Carroll Says:
February 18th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Aunty,
It sounds like a very attractive thing to be somehwere slightly secluded, particularly in a palce like Australia. Sounds just great to me. Don’t go rushign to the big city!!!
Ken Carroll