While we very much believe in utilizing user feedback to make ChinesePod better (e.g. UserVoice), we also feel that we have the opportunity to use new technologies to help make learning Chinese easier.
From the broadest perspective, I personally see the ChinesePod experience as a blend of instructor-directed learning (the podcast lessons) and informal learning (all the student-student, student-teacher conversations on the site) all customized for one’s individual needs and then pumped out through various tech pipes, or, learning on your terms.
To help improve the informal learning on the site, we are testing a new Activity page on the site to help centralize all the relevant conversations into one ‘activity stream.’
At its most basic level, the Activity Stream is simply a way for ChinesePod users to contribute short messages by sharing something or asking a question of the broader student community. Clearly, Twitter is an inspiration here and we have maintained the 140 character limit to help maintain the ’scanability’ of the overall learn Chinese activity stream. This way people can hop in and out of the conversation as they see fit.
Just as the ChinesePod Wizard (slated for release next week) will help users to filter through and make sense of the 1200+ lessons on the site, the Activity Stream leverages the Academic Level in your profile page to only display the conversations published by other people at your level. If you change your academic level, your Activity Stream will change as well to better tailor your learning experience.
In addition, we wanted to inspire the creative fuel of the community by adding question prompts (h/t to Plinky here). In the drop-down above the text area there are a number of options that help add some semantic context to the text entered. There will always be the option to ‘Share something’ or ‘Ask a question’, but there are also additional question prompts that are tailored for each academic level. A default choice is randomly selected each time the page is loaded.
If you are an Advanced student:
If you are a Newbie student:
We recognize that there is some overlap with the existing Conversations section of the website by adding this new Activity section which is why we have decided to launch it initially as a “beta” feature to get feedback. Adding new learning tools is our goal, not adding complexity. There are likely to be things that could be improved so please let us know in the comments.
Next Steps
At Praxis Language, we have been using Yammer for a few months now. One thing we have noticed is that the tighter the connectivity between the user and the activity stream the more one tends to contribute. In other words, forcing people to return to the website to follow the activity stream is much less effective than linking the stream to your IM (e.g. GTalk) or a desktop app. Look for these developments in the next few weeks.
More immediate is Twitter integration. At the moment our thinking is pretty basic, (a) simply providing the opportunity to publish into Twitter as well as on to the site and (b) pulling in related Twitter conversations with the relevant “#CPod” academic level hash tag. Please let us know if you have other ideas.
Thanks,
Hank.
Ivor on 
Sandra Rosenzweig on 
13 Comments
If you get an error message when posting try logging out and then logging back in. There seems to be a small problem with session variables storing academic levels of some users that are already logged in.
This feature looks very promising. This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for to help practice reading and writing (er, typing). The fact that it is tailored by level is very helpful. Thanks and keep up the good work!
Pinyin would be helpful. On the Elementary level, the questions don’t include Pinyin, and my Firefox plugin (Chinese Perakun) doesn’t work when I mouse-over text in a combo box.
Is the RSS feed for this functional? I tried to add it to Google reader and it simply did not want to know….
Otherwise I like the concept of this, despite initially misposting….
@Trever
RSS feed is ‘functional’, but not Google-friendly. Will get that fixed and let you know.
Adding tools to make entering Pinyin seems to be a no brainer and we will look into that as well.
Thanks.
While I can red simplified characters to some extent, I can only type in traditional characters. Pinyin I can’t handle at all. It seems to me that a switch to change from simplified to traditional would be very useful here. Is there any chance of such a switch
Great feature. Certainly has the potential to stimulate active language production.
Also perfect for realistic self-assessment: it showed me my current reading level in a very merciless way…
One more thing. At my elementary stage I know a bunch of Hanzi but am not sure of the grammar of chinese sentences. Presumably many of the other eles are the same so how can we be sure we are not misleading each other?
For example 我说的中文不好 vs 我中文说的不好 if nobody knows which is the correct grammar to use we could be convinced we know it when actually we are incorrect. Trivial example I know but we could happily branch out from there to a totally new form of english without Changye or someone to pull us back as they are sectioned off in a higher level area.
It would be good if some kind hearted individuals from higher levels could be employed as mentors or moderators to our content…..
Four new updates:
(1) line breaks added between the question and the answer text
(2) RSS feed can now be viewed in Google Reader
(3) Our teachers now have a ‘marking’ function. If the target language text is correct the background will be green. If it is incorrect the background will be red.
(4) There is a new tone converter button. Now you can enter text like ‘ni3 hao3′, click on the ‘Convert to Tone Marks’ button and it will change the text to ‘nǐ hǎo’.
The new tone converter button is a dream!! Can you also add a button to convert PinYin to Hanzi and vice-versa? Or is that too ambiguous?
Quick suggestion. It would be helpful if the dialogue displayed the text that you’re replying to.
wwolfeld,
Converting pinyin to hanzi basically amounts to an input method. It’s quite complex, as it necessarily involves a lot of choosing by the person doing the typing. Since most operating systems have their own Chinese input methods, we’re not going to try to reinvent the wheel in that case.
very nice program i have just enough knowledge of chinese language
and wish you one day teach you my somali language thanks again and again for your brave and great full helping and taking lions share for the development of this most populated chinese language
xie xie nimen panju meaning thank you for your help
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