PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD I've been doing a lot of running lately, both from a sense of existential dread and to lose a few pounds of baby fat. And as I run, I fill my quiet time with podcast lessons and dialogues in Mandarin from ChinesePod.com.
This is not your typical language-lab material ("Welcome to China, Mr. Jones! Would you like a cup of coffee?")—though if you follow their newbie lesson plan, you'll swiftly learn not only how to welcome Mr. Jones, but then how to direct him to the nearest Starbucks and ask him if he'd kindly stop on the way and see what caused that explosion across the hall a few moments ago. The ChinesePod podcasting team—co-founder Ken Carroll, co-host Jenny Zhu and a growing cast of Shanghainese and expats—teaches high-frequency spoken expressions in a high-energy style, producing (and then deconstructing) daily dialogues that cross the spectrum from linguistically interesting bathos to high drama. Traffic accidents, lovers' quarrels, people competing to see who has the coolest cell phone—it's all in there.
These days, podcasts are just the tip of the iceberg for ChinesePod. Carroll is an expat entrepreneur who, back in the '90s, founded the successful Kai En chain of English-language schools in Shanghai. He started ChinesePod in 2005 with several partners, ran it initially as a free podcast site, then gradually added textual course material along with personalization, social networking/messaging, threaded dialogue and other Web 2.0 features—with each improvement, bolting on a new facet of a tiered pricing plan that now ranges from "free" (podcasts only) to "corporate, teacher-led" (quite a bit more, but still exceedingly affordable and a terrific value). Sometime last year, they rolled their platform up into a new parent company, Praxis Language, and used it to spin up a suite of same-model businesses for students of Italian, French and Spanish.
ChinesePod's growth path is textbook for the post-institutional Web: Start with a passionate person doing something he or she loves to do (and does exceedingly well). Attract community, add features and keep the ones the community likes. Give value everywhere, while tiering intelligently. Put hard-core monetization at the center and an authentic human presence on the outward-facing side, and use that to forge a virtuous cycle of conversions from free to paid service. And then, having tuned the platform, use it to achieve scale.
It's a nice business. And Praxis is not only making a buck, but breaking significant new ground in online education by applying social media to create the motivation and opportunity for linguistic immersion. In a recent blog post, Carroll described his initial epiphany (in 1989) on reading Stephen Krashen's work on second-language acquisition:
I read Stephen Krashen and a new world opens up. One idea above all starts to sink in: He notes that most teachers are too concerned with structures and the what of language teaching: What are the structures of the English language? He suggests that the real question is psychological and concerns the how: How can we help induce the process of language acquisition? Suddenly, the world of cognitive psychology becomes relevant to the classroom. We can stop obsessing grammar, and look to a million other sources for creative ideas.
And you can look to a million people, and to the Internet itself, to help power the phenomenon of learning. In this unrehearsed video (very different from the meticulously produced podcasts), Carroll meanders through his theory of using Web 2.0 to study Chinese. It's worth a listen, in part because the ideas seem in many ways obvious, whereas we who work in and study institutional culture change around matters of technology know they're really not. In a way, I guess, the experience of virtual life itself induces a kind of immersion that—as it increases fluency in the new medium—may make it more difficult to explain the (ostensibly) obvious to those who remain outside the bubble.
#CloudForum 2012: “Spring Edition” on May 24 @ Utrecht, Netherlands. Don’t miss keynote of #IBM's Fiona Cullen http://t.co/yKHRMhTw [Dutch]Blog Post: #Cloud industrializes #ERP with IBM Lifecycle as a Service (LCaaS) for SAP Solution http://t.co/w0GoaY6z #thoughtsoncloudGood Morning Europe!That is it from Asia-Pacific! Over to #Europe!IBM Impact 2012 in June at multiple cities in #India >> Mumbai, Bangalore & Delhi. Details: http://t.co/rjnqO137 #IBMImpactCustomWare & Australia-based GLiNTECH collaborates to deliver IBM Cast Iron #cloud integration services http://t.co/Q2tEhdQN #ibmcloudBlog post: IBM discloses #SmartCloud advances & its rapid adoption http://t.co/xsl54fYx via @ToolsJournal #ibmcloudIBM's Vamsicharan Mudiam will keynote @cloudconnect_in on May 24 in Bengaluru, #India. View his profile: http://t.co/FwA5teCm #CloudConnectJapan-based Okasan Securities running on #ibmcloud adopts "bulletin board system for disaster recovery" http://t.co/aujlDcJo [Japanese]IBM builds smart tech center in Hainan, #China to develop cloud computing & the "Internet of Things" technologies http://t.co/lxtz3I2b
Like us on Facebook 
Follow us on Twitter 
Get the Smarter Tech Newsletter 
Register to view the archived "Data Center Optimization Techniques: Stop Wasting Time & Money" eSeminar
Register Now > 
