An interesting Open Source podcast discussion from Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post on how ‘quality’ content will become more valuable in the future (~ timestamp 5:00 - 12:00).
Murdoch Connection
The discussion was sparked by Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the Wall Street Journal. Via a Forbes article, Murdoch describes the current media revolution:
Fans of small niches can now find new content they could never before. Going elsewhere for news and entertainment is easier and cheaper than ever. And people’s expectations of media have undergone a revolution. They are no longer content to be a passive audience; they insist on being participants, on creating their own material and finding others who will want to read, listen and watch.
But then goes on to argue that in this new landscape quality content will be more, not less, valuable:
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude from this that the age of content is over. On the contrary, people want content more than ever, and there is a role for companies that can provide good stuff–”good” being the operative word. Quality is more important than ever, because the marketplace is more ruthlessly competitive. Options are not merely one click of the remote away; devices undreamed of a few short decades ago are at least as tempting as a change of the channel.
Pearlstein’s View
Pearlstein describes how the conventional wisdom in media for the last five years is that no one will pay for content online because of the vast free options available. In many ways the Murdoch bid is a sign that the market is beginning to recognize that the future value of some types of content will not be free. Currently, free online content is often subsidized by offline revenues sources. As offline revenues continue to be driven down, there is less money to pass to authors and therefore high-quality online & offline content will decline. For stuff that is really valuable, creators want to be paid for their work. As the market shakes out, increased value will be placed on ever rarer high-quality content and people’s willingness to pay will increase. These changes are first happening with financial information because the value of the information is more clear - the better information you have, the better investment decisions and more money you can make. This clarity is not as obvious with more mainstream media consumers and therefore it will take longer for the appropriate value to be determined.
An interesting point was made that in the future the absolute numbers of professional journalists will consolidate, with the average journalist finding himself out of work and the superstars remaining being more influential and better paid. This resonates with our belief here that ’star’ teachers will be born atop all the tech plumbing that is increasingly empowering students. He also argues consumers, “will purchase what news I want, from whom I want, when I want it, on the medium that I want to get it on.”
Sounds very similar to our ‘on your terms’ philosophy here.
Premium Content
While we will continue to offer the full lessons for free, we are going to start looking at developing premium-only audio content. David has been working on a Pimsleur-like audio review product to help reinforce lesson vocabulary and we have also been looking at opt-in channels for the personal feed. If we were going to offer supplementary/complementary audio what other types of format and content would you be interested in?
Hank.
中文 Chinese
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
May 12th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
To elaborate my comments to another post, vocabulary reinforcement could start with links other relevant content, starting with short web articles, news (in Chinese since that’s my focus) on similar topics, or excerpts thereof read by natives, cartoons, video sequences from news, movies, commercials, mashups basically. Can be organized on a lesson basis, or on themes (tags), or re-use of individual (Chinese) characters in different words that may appear in different lessons.
Prez Life Says:
May 12th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Premium content recommendation: Semi-spontaneous person-on-the-street video interaction, somewhat similar to the first couple Video Hotpot episodes (The Market, The Restaurant). I watched both of these numerous times because they contain words, constructs, and a reality-feel that I have not run into in the scripted audio podcasts.
Pearlstein: As a subscriber to both the hardcopy and the on-line content from WSJ, I guess I agree with this. It’s extremely hard to build a spot in that top tier that will induce a large customer-base to pay. WSJ has suceeded becuase there is nothing even close to WSJ out there in terms of breadth and quality. But, maintaining a position like their’s above the dollar paying threshold is a perpetually tenuous undertaking - intense focus on quality becomes your life or death day in and day out.
Presidente for Life
FuDaWei Says:
May 13th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
No one ever learned a language by mimicking static sentences from a Berlitz phrase-book. My concern is that CPOD’s modular approach is often not much different — it’s an audio phrasebook. Nothing builds on anything else. Nothing reinforces earlier material. You’ve also put yourself in a corner (at least in the lower levels) by seemingly avoiding grammar talk at all cost. I suppose you feel it will intimidate people. It does come up; but in dribs and drabs. We’ll hear abour “zai” signaling the Progressive Tense, or the use of “le” to mark past … but there is nothing systematic. You’re not going to change your approach at this point, but I think that addressing some of these issues in “premium-only” content would provide a wonderful opportunity to balance the books. A “Pimsleur”-style reinforcement would be wonderful. And don’t be so quick to thumb your nose at things like “substitution drills” and “repetition” just because they’re old school.
scoff Says:
May 15th, 2007 at 10:08 am
I completely agree with FuDaWei.
Auntie Says:
May 16th, 2007 at 8:08 am
I also completely agree with FuDaWei.
Now on a different, but related point:
Ken See-Foo: As a Basic subscriber, I’m beginning to become very curious about how your vision for Basic content is evolving in the context of this very profound renewal of your Premium-type content, which — to me — is so-far defining how V3 evolves.
Whatever your vision for “Basic” is, my (always friendly) hope is that you will take enough time, have enough flexibility, to truly study and understand your client base.
Eg. How — and why — do your “Basic” subscribers become “Premium” subscribers? How long do your clients keep a holding pattern in Basic before they upgrade? I’m betting that the clincher is NOT your 14-day (7-day?) free trial. How many people actually sign up for “Premium” as their first ever subscription?
Are Basic subscribers simply loyal CPoddies who haven’t been offered enough alluring features in Premium to entice them to upgrade? What if I put it to you that you might possibly always have a core of Basic subscribers who will NEVER upgrade, not because they are tight-fisted, but simply because they don’t need (or want) features such as drills and expansion exercises? If that is the case, how do you retain this particular base? Eg. is there any reason to limit Basic to only lesson podcasts PDFs? At the moment, your content has little competition out there, but what how are you going to maintain your edge as the competition develops?
I wonder whether you would consider awarding “loyalty” points to non-subscribers/ Basic subscribers which could be used to redeem further “free trial periods” of the full bells and whistles from time to time during their membership, to be activated only when they want. Eg. every two months of continuous subscription to Basic will earn them — say — one day of extra free trial. As much flexibility as possible for them to redeem all (or some, or even none) of these free trial days would be very important, because I did read several complaints from CPod users that they were (inadvertently, but this is how the design “flow” worked) shunted into registering for a free trial before they were ready to test the features properly.
My instincts tell me that Premium accounts are geared — and very clearly, since V3 — towards people who are using CPod as their only (or at least their principal) resource for learning Mandarin. Another factor is HOW individual subscribers learn languages, eg. offline vs online. It has occured to me that most of the features which set Premium apart from Basic are not suitable for OFFline learning, which may be more important to some of your subscribers than you expect. The kind of subscribers who print out pdfs and carry them with them to work, who burn CDs rather than organizing their playlists in iTunes. I know that one reason why I haven’t upgraded, is that I actually do most of my learning offline; that’s just how I learn best.
Basically, what I am appealing for is for you to be truly flexible — and innovative — when it comes to trying to understanding what makes your clients tick. The answers will be surprising, some of them will not dovetail neatly with your grand innovative vision for CPod/Praxis, and they will certainly be more diverse and fuzzy than you expected, but that is what will keep you well ahead of the competition.
Thank you, CPod, for the brilliant lessons –
Auntie
Jeff Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Fantastic about the Pimsleuresque lessons you have planned. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t planning on writing CPod a long letter asking for such a feature. I think the key is that you make it PORTABLE. Sure, the premium exercises are nice, but useless unless you’re at your computer. Give us some audio exercises we can take with us, like the podcast lessons. I’ve always been a fan of the Pimsleur lessons, especially since they force you to speak and think in Mandarin on the fly, something that CPod at the moment is noticeably lacking.
Keep up the good work.
Ken Carroll Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 10:03 am
It’s interesting that people talk again and again about Pimsleur, but rarely about Rosetta Stone. Does anyone have any comments on RS?
Ken Carroll
FuDaWei Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 6:28 am
Funny you should mention it, Ken.
I found “Rosetta Stone” virtually useless initially, but now that I have a bit of a basis in Mandarin (thanks to CPOD & Pimsleur) I’m finding more value in it — but only as a secondary source. This flies in the face of what they’d have you believe — that they are a solid primary source of instruction. I don’t believe for a second that you can intuit a language from pictures. I see a picture of a man and a woman — how do I know it isn’t “brother and sister” or “man and wife”? And how in blazes do you intuit “measure words”?
And I don’t believe the hype that this approach approximates the way a child learns (a child has immediate feedback and constant correction), nor do I believe their grand thesis that learning a language “the way a child does” is even a linguistically sound approach (even IF they could achieve this dubious goal).
In one sense, Rosetta Stone is like taking a multiple choice test. They give you a long series of sets (each with 4 pictures) and describe the images. Then they repeat the description and expect you to chose the appropriate picture. But, hey — as long as I know the Mandarin word for airplane is /feiji/, I KNOW it’s not gonna be the picture with the elephant or the car. In most cases, I don’t even have to listen to the whole sentence, much less understand it. I just zero in on /feiji/ and click away.
This is NOT to say that I find RS useless. On the contrary, I’m actually growing quite fond of it. They do supply a lot of contrastive stuff that I crave; “the boy is on the plane”, “the boy is under the plane”, “the boy is in the plane”, etc. You can switch between pinyin, simplified and traditional hanzi. In this sense, it’s like a flashcard program on steroids — and I find a great deal of utility in that alone. It’s quite good — as a supplement.
Also, RS has a VERY pronounced Beijinghua bias. That annoying terminal epenthetic /-r/ is everywhere.
Now, turning to Pimsleur.
We all know the strength of Pimsleur is the repetition of material and the way they build on earlier stuff. The drawback is that Pimsleur purposely cultivates a very small vocabulary. If you work through all 90 lessons of an average Pimsleur course, you won’t have a stellar vocabulary — but you’ll know how to use what you have quite effectively. The idea seems to be that adding vocabulary is something you can easily do on your own after you’ve laid a solid foundation. I tend to agree. The nicest aspect of Pimsleur is (as noted) their repetition. Most language learners are perfectionists and don’t want to move ahead if they can’t nail down every jot and tittle of a given lesson. You freeze up and kick yourself for not absorbing it all immediately. Pimsleur breaks through that. It’s very liberating to know that you don’t have to fret and fuss over every item — because it will be coming back in later lessons.
On another note, Ken … have you ever heard of Michel Thomas?
He was a colorful character (he died a few years back) who was sort of the “language teacher to the stars”. He got big bucks for tutoring celebrities in French, German, Italian and Spanish. He distilled his approach into a series of audio tapes, about which he’d brag that it involved no notes, homework, heavy technical terms or rote memorization. He’d just “explain” the language in a manner that would stick in your mind. Sounds like snake-oil, right? But I’ve heard his Spanish and German tapes and was surprisingly shocked. I “did” recall his lessons without much effort.
His style was clever: Lessons were short; 6-10 minutes. He brought in two beginning students and taught them on tape, explaining that you were to imagine yourself as the third student. As he methodically explained the language (one topic building on another) and quizzed the students, you tended to put yourself in their place; answering for them when they were too slow, feeling relief when they made the same mistakes and had the same questions you had, measuring your progress against theirs, etc.
Thomas’s strength was the way he broke down language into constituent units and then shuffled them around like cards. The net result was that he had you reconstructing new sentences — quite often very long and complex sentences — after just a few lessons. (By lesson three, when most other courses are still drilling “hello” and “goodbye”, Thomas has quietly slipped in enough material that the students — and you — are generating sentences like: “Lo siento, pero no es aceptable para mí así.”) Even with his heavy German accent, he was really quite good. If you ever get a chance to listen to his tapes, you really should.
Ken Carroll Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
FDW,
Thx for all those smart insights. I had never heard of Michel Thomas but I’ll certainly try to find out more about him now.
I think Pimsleur and RS are positioned differently in the market. Do you think RS appeals more to a business executive? They appear to be more aggressive in their marketing.
Obviously I think both of those products have flaws. For Pimsleur to rely completely on audio, for example, is to limit the learning to a single dimension/modality at a time that the internet is making it possible to use a multiplicity of them. Meanwhile you’ve pointed out the problems with RS clearly enough. I find their logic very unconvincing.
For me, there is a world of difference between both of those products and ChinesePod. This is not to say that ChinesePod doesn’t have flaws. You yourself have never been shy to point those out. And this is precisely the thing that differentiates:ChinesePod isn’t static. It’s morphing, growing, and finding ways to make the learning deeper in every way we can. That innovation - based on feedback like yours - will continue.
I’m not sure that the old world companies get the idea of user collaboration. This is Pimsleur’s attempt at a blog: http://iblogit.com/pimsleur-language/
Ken Carroll
FuDaWei Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Ken …
To be fair, that blog you cite is simply one Pimsleur vendor out of dozens (nay, hundreds). I don’t think they speak for anyone but themselves. They’re selling a product — an expensive product. I would expect to hear a bit of hype.
You’re right that RS has recently been promoting themselves very forcefully with a series of commercials here in the States and (I assume) elsewhere. And, given the price tag, they are aiming at upscale markets and institutions.
I’m always leery of any company that claims or insinuates that their product is wildly popular with diplomats or various government agencies. First off, if you’ve ever dealt with any of those groups you know that their language skills are minimal (and routinely mocked), so that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Second, those agencies that truly need language skills generally send their people to places like Monterey (the hyperintensive full immersion language school run by the Defense Department). I’ve had several friends go through Monterey; it’s the high watermark in this sort of thing. They make the “Goethe Institute”, “Instituto Cervantes” and “L’Alliance Française” look like an old CCTV lesson.
Pimsleur and RS suffer from a bit of artificiality. Both companies devised a basic template back in the (what?) 80’s, then just plugged in different words for each language they teach. Many of their phrasings evoke the same response from native speakers: “Well, technically that’s correct, but that’s not really how we’d say it.” THAT is where CPOD probably outshines’em both. You have a conduit to Mandarin as it’s actually spoken today and a flexibility to incorporate new terminology on the fly. Try talking about LANs, routers and Internet Cafe’s after going through RS or Pimsleur (both composed in the days before Internet really hit).
FuDaWei Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Oh, I was wanted to add: Rosetta Stone isn’t entirely blind to new technology. Instead of buying their pricey wares outright at a hefty expense, you can subscribe to them on their website and access the material online for considerably less. Not an astounding use of tech, but at least its movement in the right direction.
Pimsleur, on the other hand, is running on fumes. They might add a new title here and their, but they are in a rut. On the other hand, the deficiency you cite — the lack of written supplementary material — has been somewhat ameliorated by people online writing up their own transcriptions and passing them around. They are often hard to find, but they exist for all the major languages.
Henning Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
The main reason I never bought RS was its price tag. I did not want to waste so much money without knowing how far it could carry me and if I would stay motivated enough to click through all those pretty pictures. I tried out a demo, but that was once again of the “newbiest” sort.
I tend to agree with FuDaWei that the “under the table” “on the table” stuff is helpful for precision. Actually I looked at the HSK demo test papers yesterday and some of the questions looked similar to RS content …
Speaking of which: From all I read here I am not fond of the HSK, but I would really like to become more confidend with those “which fits better: 才 连 还 就” type of questions. The HSK questions are much more challenging than the exercises here and really hit at the soft spots. Wished CPod would add some drill questions like those - detached from the lectures. Maybe this comes with the Grammar Guide?
Ken Carroll Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
FDW,
You are incredibly well informed about all of this, like the true linguaphile that you are. If RS is more dynamic at the moment, is it simply because they are advertising? The consensus seems to be that Pimsleur are better.
Henning,
We will be able to look at some drills after the grammar stuff comes online. It’s time to inflict that masochism upon the unsuspecting ChinesePod public.
Ken
FuDaWei Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Oh, Pimsleur is hands-down better than RS. You can slap it on your iPod and take it anywhere.
When we speak about reinforcing vocabulary (or grammar) within Pimsleur, we’re not talking about simply repeating things at random. They have a preternatural knack for bringing it back just exactly as it’s starting to drop from your short-term memory.
Henning Says:
May 18th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Ken,
I am really looking forward to all this.
Susan Says:
May 19th, 2007 at 3:47 am
I am also a Pimsleur user and agree about what has been said. I would also add that what I find helpful about Pimsleur is the constant quizzing of the student. This is what keeps me thinking throughout the 30 minutes and this is how I can finally get my 45 year old brain to manage to retain the vocabulary (after several listenings - thank god I can go at my own pace!). I would love it if Chinese Pod did some premium audio content that followed their podcasts but was geared toward pushing the student to test their recall.
Paul Says:
May 29th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Premium suggestions:
Extension of the cpod material (Inspired by availability of inexpensive human translation on the web):
1. Related content (drills, dialogs, interviews, video etc) produced by native language “cpod contributors”. Of course would have to be approved by cpod, but you could hugely extend the volume and variety of material (tagged, related to the controlled cpod lessons) with little extra cost to cpod.
2. Similarly, a Skype conversation-partner matching service, midway between your existing super-premium “live teacher” service and the hit or miss ability of anyone to find their own “talk-pal” on Skype. Again would involve some management (approval) of the partners by cpod, but not much.
Various:
3. Grammar tools:
While any extra tools are always welcome, I have a feeling that grammar is available in book format, which is quite suitable. Even if I am sure that cpod’s grammar will be a superior product. But it would seem to be a challenge that robs time from cpod staffers’ development of tools that are unique to cpod.
4. I find the current 12-month premium subscription rate reasonable.
Pure fantasy:
5. Pronunciation feedback tool?
I have such a thing on my “Instant Immersion, French”, don’t know if they have it on their Chinese. A word is spoken, learner speaks it, instant feedback on how closely it matches model. Don’t know how high-quality the speech recognition is, but I find it helpful (or am willing to be convinced).
But how to do it online? Why not through Skype as a channel, connecting to a “fayin server”? For lexical units, or even phrases. Tone drill with teeth.
I said it was pure fantasy …
Useful links:
6. Not necessarily premium, but would be good to exploit complementary sites out there, with auto-links. I have in mind for example chinese-characters.org (useful for quick lists of most frequent words in which a character figures, in initial or any position; also interesting etymological and mnemonic notes) and Animated Chinese Characters (stroke order) function at http://lost-theory.org/ocrat/chargif - I envision a discrete box at bottom of cpod pages in which pasted hanzi links to relevant page at these sites (or even just a button taking a selected character on page). Assuming same character coding across sites, and permission obviously. Just lazy I guess, saving a few clicks.
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
May 30th, 2007 at 1:53 am
I have to agree with Henning there, CPod expansion exercises are everything but challenging. The first of every series of 3 certainly is a no brainer, difficulty level / pattern is the same across all levels. This may just be because I always do the examples first and then exercices, but while I find them of some use, I still think it’s the weakest link.