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.