Talking with Angel

Here is my conversation with Angel. Please give feedback.

Exue Service - Sub-Groups

The community also allows its members to organize and establish their sub-groups. Since this service was just launched recently (06/02/06), more time are needed to see how it evolves and how it can be utilized for educational purpose. For the most active discussion sub-groups, the community rewards with e-money. There is one post for the announcement of this service inside Spoken English Dedicated Zone. Members need go to http://group.exue.com to register for their groups. Anybody can register groups. There is no restriction. Currently, there exist just a few groups. For instance, one group, called "Friends Learning Group," focuses on the TV series "Friends."It has 9 members now. Discussion topics range widely from which character they like, the plot, to where they can find the video. The service the sub-group can provide is very simple, currently just textual posting.

Exue Service - Blogging

Exue also provides blog service to it members. Since the service is just recently (05/29/06) launched, its educational use has not yet been fully explored by either its members or the management. The management team has not disclosed their vision how it should be used for educational purpose. Currently, it has the following functions/features:

• Journal: users can write text and insert image, flash, video/audio, and links into the journal body.
• Photos: user can upload and share their photos with others.
• Files: user can upload and share actually any type of files with others.
• Buddy List: user can add and delete their buddies
• Social Bookmarking: user can book and tag the websites they might want to visit later and share with others
• Favorite Websites: users share their favorite websites with others.
• RSS Feeds Input: users can input RSS feeds from other websites into their own blogs
• Forum Post Input: members can input their own forum posts into the blog and keep posts synchronized at both places.
• Comments: the blog allows readers to make comments.

Final Paper Outline

Please click here for the final paper draft/outline.

Exue Service - Online Dictionary and Others

The community provides several online dictionary tools to assist learning: Online Dictionary (kind of mush-up between two free web applications), Grammar Dictionary, and Idiom Dictionary. Another service provides by the community is short message/email by which users can communicate to each other privately to exchange ideas, share information, and build friendship.

There is a ranking mechanism to put the best contents on the top, but the rank is decided by community administrators. There are some mechanisms to encourage participation. For each posting and uploading, members are rewarded e-money and points. The amount of e-money and points awarded depends on the quality of postings and uploading which are determined by how they are ranked and whether they recommended to be put on the top positions. With the e-money and points, members can access some restricted and core contents. Users can subscribe to the site. There is RSS feeds listed on the website.

Exue - Is It a Web 2.0 Application?

Based on the previous analysis, this online learning community does demonstrate some web 2.0 features. First, the community is a platform providing learners services to share learning materials, reflect and comment learning strategies, and to practice spoken English through the chatting room. In a sense, it harnesses collective intelligence, though there is much room to improve. Although most of learning materials are just electronic version of officially published books, video, and audio files, they are provided by members and therefore user-generated. It is two-way communication with the user: both read and write. It uses RSS for subscription and mash-up to take advantage of online free web applications.

Final Paper Abstract

Exue - Online Conversational English Learning Community

1. Identify a specific learning community and users whose needs might be well served by an online learning community using Web 2.0 technologies.

Exue.com.cn is online community for foreign language learning, including English, French, Japanese, and Germany. Users are Chinese who are interested in language learning. Within this big community, a sub-community called "Spoken English" is for a group of users who want to improve their spoken English. My analysis will concentrate on this sub-community (http://bbs.exue.com.cn/forumdisplay.php?fid=40). All content are user-generated or the stuff they find somewhere else and then upload to share with others. It is free and uses Web 2.0 technologies.

2. Articulate their learning needs, how the community is addressing those needs today online

Their learning needs is "learn to speak English and speak English to learn" which is ignored by the formal school education in the field of foreign language learning in China. The community offers a discussion board, online dictionary, a voice chatting room, and other tools to address this need.

3. Propose design recommendations for improving the community (with constructive critique of current online approaches).

I am still interacting with the community to get more experience as a user. At this moment, I would like to make four recommendations: (1) more user-friendly interface; (2) Embed pedagogical principles, especially principles related to language learning, into the program so that the learning can be more effective (3) attract native English speakers to join; (4) provide tools to facilitate users to easily generate content for language learning such as annotating and archiving audio interaction.

4. Provide what grounds you argue your suggestions would work, and how you could evaluate the success of these changes.

Rationales behind recommendations will be based on learning theories and scientifically valid research studies.
Evaluation index: increase of members, increased participation time, more social interaction, user self-reported evaluation of community experience through survey, log data, observation, and interview.

Exue Service - Chatting Room

Exue's "Spoken English" community provides a chatting room (both text and voice) for members to practice spoken English (one to one or many to many) with a dictionary tool. Most of real online learning happens in this chatting room. Members are allowed to chat in English only, either publicly (many to many) or privately (one to one). The idea of a community of learners is based on the premise that learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity. However, there is evidence that more experienced members seems not willing to chat with less experienced ones. One member said that: "good English speakers usually do not want to speak with us less competent speakers." There is another problem associated with the chatting room. Base on my observation, the learning happened in the chatting room is not effective. The common scenarios are that two members meet and start chatting; then two minutes later they stop. The part of the reason is that, in most cases, they are not pedagogically trained, therefore do not know how to effectively teach and learn from each other.

Exue Service - Uploading and Downloading

Exue's "Spoken English" community also provides uploading and downloading service. It was mentioned previously that one way for users to share information is through attachments. When users post message they can attach various types/formats of files including text, audio, video, graphic, and software, actually any type/format of files. Most of attachments are learning materials which are usually officially published and either have an electronic version or digitalized by users. Only a few of them are really created by users themselves in a strict sense. The uploaded materials have been divided by the administration team into different levels with each level having different access restriction. But the mechanism of how to level them is not clear or transparent. More actively users participate in the community activities (will address how the community determine activeness of participation later), more levels they can access. There is a downloading center for users to download available information. It is actually an aggregator to hold all posting with attachments – the links to the postings which have attachments. Users can also locate these postings on the general discussion board themselves but it requires more efforts.

Exue Service - Thread Discussion Board

The community provides a thread discussion board for members to post ideas and comments. Generally, users can post any ideas they are interested in and make comments. But most postings focus on three areas: sharing learning strategies/reflections on learning, recommending/presenting learning materials in the message body or as attachments (will address this issue later), and making request for learning materials/learning strategies.

The web is not only readable but also writable in two levels: users can read and post message and the postings are editable and can be modified later. But only message owner can edit their own postings or comments. There are some postings regarding how to effectively improve spoken English and members’ reflection on learning experience. But most of them are not in-depth and intelligent discussions. One thing worthy to mention is that users are allowed to insert multimedia files into the message body.

In lieu of web 2.0 technology, the thread discussion board is a service and read/write web. It does use collective intelligence. But, the postings and comments do not reach a (tentative) final product based on collective intelligence, while in online communities using wikis technology such as wikipedia, there is usually a tentative final product at one time based on collective intelligence. Therefore, spoken English users need more efforts to make decision on which learning materials and strategies to use than in the situation that there is a consensus based on collective intelligence.

Under this general discusiion board, there are three sub-forums/aggregators: Downloading Center - holding links pointing to postings with downloadable attachments, Highly Recommended - holding links points to postings highly ranked by the administration team (still not clear how they rank the postings), and English Pronunciation - dedicated to English pronunciation topics (not sure it is sub-forum or aggregator collecting pronunciation related postings from the general forum.

Exue - Learn Conversational English Online

I realized that the chatting room I am participating in is just a part of a larger and complete online community "Spoken English" (http://bbs.exue.com.cn/forumdisplay.php?fid=40), though it can exist standalone. Another community (English Water Corner) I am participating is basically a discussion board with very limited features. Therefore, my analysis will be focusing on the community "Spoken English."

Based on the definition of communities in general and online/virtual communities in particular as well as those identified features of current web 2.0 applications covered in readings and class discussion, "Spoken English" can be classifies as an online community for learning conversational English using some web 2.0 features. Users are Chinese who are interested in learning English.

On the highest level, the users' need in this community is to improve their spoken English. Reading and writing are also important as English language ability. However, this community is solely dedicated to spoken English. The community is basically a forum with some other complementary tools or services. It is a very common business model of building online community now in China, which is referred as BBS. It is like a message board but with some enhanced functions or Web 2.0 technologies. In next few postings, I will analyze the system's services and content generated and how it addresses the user's needs in the context of web 2.0 technology.

Online Learning Community

The online community I am engaged in now is called "English Water Corner". It is an online community for people in China to practice and improve English. It is free and open for everybody. All the content are user-generated. I just recently joined this community and am still learning what's happening there. The followings are Game Rules of English Water Corner posted on its website. Some of them are very interesting:

1.Speaking Chinese is not allowed here , dont say I am a traitor! You wanna improve English, dont you?
2.Special Attention: Any ribald words are to be banned, those who dare try twice will be pushed into the hell!
3.Meaningless posts (GUAN SHUI),if in English,are not necessarily forbidden,but you had better not waste energy that way!
4.Any forms of advertisements,friendseeking,if in English,are not necessarily forbidden but usually transferred to another forum
5.Any intelligent English fans are to be awarded(plz see "Awarding Systems in EWC") in honor of his/her excellent performacne.
6. We do not encourage "up"ing posts that was opened more than 2 weeks ago. Hope you can realize the inconvenience caused. Thanks 4 your cooperation. ^^

I am also participated in another online community aimed at practicing and improving spoken English. It is actually a English chatting room, but all users are Chinese. It is free too. More than two users can talk with each other simultaneously. Most free messenger software only support one to one communication by voice. More participations are needed to find out the learning problem there (I am sure there is something wrong).

Web 2.0 - a Social Revolution

Web 2.0 Definition

It refers to a set of principles and practices that use the web as a platform for services that enable users to control their own data and media, and with a central focus on participation so that collective intelligence can be harnessed from distributed user communities.

Web 2.0 Features

Web 2.0 applications demonstrate one or more of the following key principles/features, but may miss others.

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability.
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them.
• Trusting users as co-developers.
• Harnessing collective intelligence.
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service.
• Software above the level of a single device - compatible with other devices such as iPods, PDA’s, cell phones, etc.
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models.

More specifically:

• As a platform - the collection of pages still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full-fledged computing platforms.
• Provide services not products.
• The Network Effect: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. User adds value as a side effect of use.
• Architecture of participation: It is a community emphasizing participation, sharing, and collaboration with self-service.
• we, the media - a world in which the former audience, not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.
• Not places to go but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons - where we live.
• Two-way communication with the user: reading and writing.
• User-generated content - with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
• Live Web - continuous changing
• Organizing the content by user tagging or folksonomy - a naturally created classification system which arises as a result of user-based tagging. A user tags an object such as a bookmark in order to remember it later, that information is then added to the global tag cloud and helps to create a folksonomy.
• Harnessing collective intelligence (using the wisdom of crowds) - turning the web into a kind of global brain. A collective intelligence is achieved when a critical mass of participation is reached within a site or system, allowing the participants to act as a filter for what is valuable.
• Can be administrated by just a few people (thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing)
• Data as building blocks for Web 2.0 applications
• control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage
• AJAX is also a key component of some Web 2.0 applications to enable rich user experience as rich as local PC-based applications: interactive, participatory, as well as social.
• Easy to use: the entry bar is low.
• End of the Software Release Cycle: there is no need to install programs and patches; software is delivered as a service. Upgrades and future versions happen seamlessly, most without the user's knowledge.
• Spreading by word of mouth - viral marketing
• The Long Tail: Web 2.0 applications are designed to serve not only popular but fringe interests.

Web 2.0 Examples

• Blogging (weblogs) - just a personal home page in diary format with permalink to build bridges between weblogs - Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, WordPress
• Vlogging (videoblogs)
• Wikis (for online group information editing)
• Social bookmarking (store URLs with personal comments and descriptive tags that will help users identify Web pages they want to find later.) - del.icio.us
• Photo uploading and tagging (Flickr) - can be found more easily later
• Video uploading and tagging - YouTube
• Podcasting (amateur audio sharing and downloading the audio file into iPod)

Others:
http://www2.writely.com/info/WritelyOverflowWelcome.htm (Web Word Processor)
http://www.housingmaps.com/ (Mash-up with Google Maps)
http://www.craigslist.com/ (Free Classifieds)
http://www.sxip.com/ (Identity Management)
http://evdb.com/ (Events Finding)
http://www.37signals.com/ (Simple Applications)
http://www.digg.com/ (News Stories)
http://www.friendster.com/ (Finding Friends)