Last week we introduced the new ChinesePod Activity Stream. Now we’ll introduce a few recent updates to the feature.
First, we’ve added the much-requested teacher feedback into the mix. After you’ve written something and added to the stream, ChinesePod teachers can give you feedback on your Chinese: a light green background for correct, and a light red background for not-quite-correct. They can also reply to your message, telling you a better way to express what you wanted to say.
Second, we’ve added Twitter interactivity. Besides being a place to practice your Chinese, the Activity Stream also a place for ChinesePod users to exchange links, ideas, and views, in a simple, easily scanned place. Users of popular mico-blogging platform Twitter will be familiar with this concept. With the latest upgrade, the Activity Stream supports two-way interaction with Twitter: what you write on your ChinesePod Activity Stream can be published to Twitter, and what appears on Twitter can be displayed inside your ChinesePod Activity Stream. For this purpose, we use a short string of characters called a “hashtag.” For Newbie, that hashtag is #cpod1, for Elementary, it is #cpod2, etc. Click on the settings icon (a little cog) in the sidebar to enable this option.
We’d really like to hear what ChinesePod users think of the Twitter integration. Do you want to post what you write in the ChinesePod Activity Stream to Twitter? Do you find being able to post from Twitter into ChinesePod (using the hashtags) a useful addition? Is the post-to-Twitter functionality good as is, or would you prefer more granular control (for example, ability to post or not to post to Twitter on a per-message basis)?
We’re in uncharted territory here, but we see immense potential for learning. We’re excited about evolving this into something useful with you, the community.
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Posts that are published to twitter could do with some kind of link back.
Nice work, Chinesepod’s developers never sleep!
I like the Twitter integration – indeed, it’s only natural given the Twitter-like nature of the activity stream. What’s the canonical list of hashtags? Is there a general #cpod tag or do the tweets/comments need to stick to the lesson levels as described?
- @coljac
I really enjoy practicing my Mandarin using Chinesepod.com. I believe the twitter interaction will only enhance the learning. Thank you for having such a quality site.
Ken, John, et al., please have a look at this thread and provide some feedback. Thanks.
http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/4685
Calkins,
Sorry it took me a few days to get back to you. Here are my answers:
1. As JCKeithe surmised, the feedback feature works only on answers to the pre-determined questions. There are certain cases where allowing feedback on everything might be (1) unwanted, (2) confusing for learners, (3) confusing for our own teachers. We’re looking at how to expand this in the most logical way. It should happen very soon.
2. The community posts show up there because they’re another form of activity from people at your level. Practice is the major goal of the Activity Stream (getting people more active), but we also want to encourage all kinds of user interaction.
3. Yes, in keeping with our commitment to traditional characters, we will support them for the final release.
4. Adding pinyin to Elementary questions is definitely something we can do. Personally, it really bothers me that there’s no way to copy the text of the question, since it’s inside a drop-down box. This affects all levels. There are tons of reasons why I might want to copy that text.
5. We wanted to keep the interface as simple as possible. Subscribing simultaneously to multiple levels seems inherently complex, so for the time being we just support an easy switch from the sidebar.
6. There could be more “show only…” options, but it’s more complexity. Twitter is our inspiration here.
7. The pagination issue is related to the classic “AJAX loads VS. browser back button” problem. We’ll see what we can do.
-John
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