Two notable individulas who have been using Chinesepod have blogged about their impressions. Rick Nigol is an e-learning expert who has been using ChinesePod for the last few weeks, as has Paul Dillon, aka, the Learning Guy. Both seem to like ChinesePod, and for similar reasons.
Community
Both cite community as a source of motivation, help, and good learning practices. I hope the instructional part of ChinesePod is helpful to the learner. It’s clear to me, however, that the line between teaching and learning is being blurred by the internet. Teaching can no longer be seen simply as supplying information, with teacher as provider and learner as consumer. What matters is sharing knowledge between the various members of the community, through a conversational framework where everyone contributes. Whether its learner-to instructor, learner-to-learner, learner-to-content, learner-to-infrastructure, it’s the interaction that glues the learning together.
This framework also highlights how we come to know, rather than simply what is known. No teacher can possibly understand how all students learn, but learners with similar needs and objectives can be a tremendous source of insight for each other. To me, this is one of the big differentiators with ChinesePod: For too many years I’ve seen how how teacher-centric instruction inevitably becomes more of a case of preaching than teaching.
Learner control
Both bloggers talk about the importance of learner autonomy/control. Yes. The learner has to be challenged to make his own learning decisions. Learning is not something that is done unto you by others, but something you must choose to do for yourself. Otherwise you’re wasting your time (and I’ve seen a lot of people waste a lot of time on learning iniatives that didn’t go anywhere).
Context
Rick also states the importance of context. Again, yes. I’ve always tried to emphasize the psychological importance of cognition and engagement with the input. (I just realized that in yesterday’s lesson, there are tons of references to where and when specific language can be used.) In addition, over the last year I’ve learned soemthing else about this medium: the provider of learning content must make it concrete and inductive, rather than abstract and discursive. In the old days the book defined the limits of the message. Now we have multi-media and hypertext. There is no reason to employ abstraction where we can have concrete examples. (This is proving to be of massive significance in the context of www.spanishsense.com - that language has, er, grammar.)
Telepractice and the tailored program
Paul is a busy man. He needs to do the learning on his own terms, so the ten minute call per day appears to fit into his schedule. Telepractice adds one more layer to the blending and the interaction. Of course, speaking practice is essential in developing the skill of spoken fluency. If you’re not getting speaking practice of any sort, you should consider some.
Ken Carroll
Hi Ken,
I just read Rick Nigol’s blog entry; it is really interesting. Context. Learner control. Community. These principles apply to not just language-learning. In medicine, every practicing physician involves him/herself in continuous learning, both to increase his or her knowledge base as well as improve the “art” of medicine. After formal medical training, we must accrue medical education credits in order to maintain board certification. That’s our knowledge base. But, the “art” of medicine is applying that knowledge to the patient; that’s “contextual” learning. There are myriads of resources that allow me to be in control of my learning i.e. conferences, audio CD lecture series, online medical websites, etc. The increasing poplularity of medblogs creates the community of learners that encourage practicioners in an less didactic format and a much more accessible medium. This is 21st century eLearning.
I’ve emailed you this complement before, but it bears repeating. ChinesePod is truly amazing. I am so addicted to my ChinesePod lessons. I experience them as if I was an invited guest in a private tutorial, not just once but hundreds of times. Thank you for providing the world with this amazing service.
AZERDocMom
AZERDocMom,
I appreciate the kind words. As long as we get support like this, it’s only going to get better.
As to contextual learning, I wasn’t aware of how far medblogs had progressed. Regardless of profession, we’re all entering an era where continuous learning is mandatory. The shelf-life of a professional knowledge base is getting shorter and shorter, so we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives struggling to keep up with the advancements.
As I see it, 3 things can help us:
- Tech to create the networks and (some) content
- Pedagogy to guide good learning behaviors
- The collective wisdom of the Big Brain
The rate of change will increase dramatically. The cause and the solution is the internet. These are some of the insights that drive ChinesePod.
This is just the beginning - imagine where we’ll be in ten years!
Ken Carroll
ChinesePod is an amazing piece of work. It gets the tech right and the learning right. This is truly rare. I agree with azerdocmom that it is way ahead of the curve.
I even get the feeling that we’re seeing a little piece of history in the making. Perhaps in a few years all online language learning will be done this way. It wouldn’t surprise me and ChinesePod deserves the credit for showing the way.
Jeff,
Thx for this vote of confidence. I agree that we’re at a historical turning point for many industries. The new social media will upend, or even wipe out, many of the old media incumbents. Since we’re early adopters of such social media, we may indeed prove something of a disruptive force.
It’s still too early to tell, of course. I’m confident and excited about the prospects but wary of making any predictions. The more I know about this stuff, the more I realize that the future is unknowable. Change is happening so fast and it’s going to get faster. So far, riding the wave has been a great experience.
Ken Carroll