Ebaby! Blog

With many sources of information blocked in Iran, englishbaby.com, a social network for people who are learning English,  offers a unique breadth of voices from the country’s English-speaking youth. Unlike Twitter and Facebook which are monitored by the state as well as the media and can so full of posts on Iran they are chaotic, English, baby! is home to unfettered and well-thoughout discussion among the site’s 10,000 Iranian members and the million more around the world.

This forum begins with a list made by a 16-year-old named Payam of all the good qualities of Iran, which he hopes are not forgotten during this time.

In this forum thread, the longest on the topic on Ebaby!, Tufan, a 24-year-old Iranian man, says that many people’s opinions of the current regime have changed since the election: “Now even people who voted to Ahmadinejad are regret for their decision when they see how he treats to demonstrators.”

But 19-year-old amirlashkari22 (pictured above) says he thinks the violence against protesters in his country was necessary to prevent further chaos: “If they don’t [shoot protesters] you ppl would fire much more stores, supermarkets, banks and buses.”

Many of the participants of the discussion are Iranian, but people from around the world frequently chime in and give their thoughts. Sali, a 27-year-old Algerian is disappointed to see Iran come undone, because she looks up to the nation. “We are prouvd of iran as mulim and devloped country,” she says

English, baby! is glad to provide a place where people from all countries can share their thoughts on this crisis in a common language. We hope our site continues to evade censorship in Iran.

All last week, the world watched the news unfold about Iran’s election and the subsequent protests over the results. But with traditional reporters on lock down in hotel rooms, social media sites have become the main source on this story. With more than 10,000 of our one million members based in Iran, Ebaby! has seen several forums pop up complete with Iranian voices from all sides of the issue.

Kristian Foden-Vencil, a reporter for Oregon’s NPR affiliate, OPB, took interest in the increased political activity on our site and stopped by the office on Thursday for about an hour. He spoke with Ebaby! CEO John Hayden as well as our resident English teacher, Alexis Nelson, about how the site work helps people learn English and is home to some very unique dialog on Iran. The four-minute piece (which contains a clip from our latest episode of EXTREME English, baby!) aired several times yesterday.

To join the discussion about the Iranian election or see what our global user base has to say, take a look at the forum mentioned in the story as well this one, the longest one on the topic on our site. English, baby! is glad to provide a place where people from all countries can share their thoughts on the situation in Iran in a common language.

When my Blazers and their Spanish Armada was defeated by the Houston Rockets in the first round of the NBA playoffs, I started rooting for the Rockets to go all the way. Yao Ming is a great player who has never won a championship and how huge would it be for China if he won.

But did you know the Lakers have a Chinese player too? His name is Sun Yue. He hasn’t seen any post-season minutes, but he’s a rookie. Give him time!

In fact, in the final match up between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Orlando Magic, there are lots of foreign players. Pau Gasol is pretty famous for leading the Spanish Olympic team to a silver medal last summer in Beijing and he and Kobe make a great combination.

One of the Magic’s leading scorers in every game of playoffs has been Hedo Türkoglu of Turkey. Apparently, back home he’s known as “the Michael Jordan of Turkey” because he’s so versatile and unstoppable.

In game one of the finals day before yesterday, Didier Ilunga-Mbenga, a center for the Lakers from Congo made an appearance in the final minutes of the game. He hasn’t seen much playing time lately, but when Andrew Bynum was injured earlier in the season, I remember seeing him a lot. He always looks confident to me when he gets in the game, which says a lot about him. It’s hard to come off the bench for a couple of minutes here and there and not be nervous.

How do I know so much about the Lakers? Because I’ve been watching them all year, rooting for Sasha “The Machine” Vujacic from Slovenia! You’d think he’s a starter for how much attention he gets. All the announcers know his nick-name and some fans made a special series of popular videos just for him! He’s also one of only 5 or so NBA players with a signature shoe in China and also sort of my close personal friend (sort of).

Rounding out the international players in the finals are Mickael Pietrus from France and Marcin Gortat from Poland. Both of these guys see significant minutes for the Magic and Pietrus in particular was deadly against the Cavaliers with his three-pointers earlier in the playoffs.

I can’t decide who to root for because I’ve got Sasha on the one side, but the Lakers are the Blazers’ rival and I also want to support my friends in Turkey by rooting for Türkoglu and his magic. Which team do you support? I better make up mind soon–game 2 is tomorrow!

While we were working with our local newspaper on this story they just published about us (click here for more behind the scenes info on this story), one idea that came up was to do a “hot and not” list of our slang lessons. That is, a list of recent lessons on cool slang and a list of older, out-dated slang lessons.

The idea was ultimately scrapped, but not before I spent a couple of hours creating just such a list. While I am proud to say that we never actually did a lesson on “gettin’ jiggy wit it,” here are six slang lessons that either because of the context or the ever-changing nature of slang, are now rather amusing.

6. “old G” -  First off, the quote in this lesson comes from rapper Jadakiss. Um, who? But furthermore, I think even old Gs realize it’s not 1992 anymore and have quit talking about how gangsta they are.

5. “dope” - While this term is still commonly used (although not around anyone’s grandmother, of course), what dates this lesson is one of the example sentences that was used: “Mark bought a dope CD yesterday. It’s by this group called the Gorillaz. Have you heard of them? I think they’re from England.”

4.  “girlie men” - This one probably hasn’t seen much use since Hanz and Franz were on SNL, but the kicker here is that the quote for this lesson comes from none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger,  of Terminator and now Governor of California fame.

3. “wife beater” - I’m glad this one went out of style. I haven’t heard anyone call an undershirt a “wife beater” in several years. It used to be kind of sketchy to walk around wearing a “wife beater.” Now it’s probably sketchier to use the term “wife beater” to talk about anything other than a criminal.

2.  “off the hook” - This phrase truly died only recently when Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele starting using it in interviews frequently. Nothing kills slang like someone who is completely and totally uncool using it to try to be cool.

1.  “the three R’s” - I’ve come to learn that some crazy stuff happened before I started working here two years ago, but even I am surprised that this phrase became an Ebaby! lesson. I mean, most of our out of date stuff comes from the ’90s. I don’t know how far back you have to go to get to when this was a cool phrase. Maybe you could ask Donald Trump, who gives us the lesson’s quote.

So there you have it, the “not” list. The “hot” list isn’t nearly as funny. That’s probably why this idea never made it into the newspaper. But nonetheless, here’s what I came up with.

5. “bail out” - If you wanted to read a newspaper after October 2008, you needed to know this one.

4. “Joe six-pack” - It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a year since the US presidential election launched an unknown plumber into fame. Give this one 5 more minutes and it will be in the “not” pile.

3. “such as” - While not really slang, this one counts as “hot” because it was inspired by the incredible and viral misuse of this term by Miss South Carolina.

2. “dialed in” - Maybe it’s just me, but I hear this one all the time now.

1. “watered down” -  And finally, in the age when any band that was popular at any time can come back and make money on a tour with one or even zero original members, this one comes to us from Rage Against the Machine, who reached their prime back when most of the “not” list was in style and remained dormant until last year.

With both free and Super Memberships, user generated lessons and celebrity lessons, social networking and direct help from a live Ebaby! teacher, English, baby! does a lot of things for a lot of people.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been working with Ryan Fleming at Willamette Week, our hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning newsweekly, on a story that hit the streets of the Portland area this week. Often when Ebaby! gets mentioned in the press, it’s for a specific thing we do (like when the LA Times featured one of our celebrity lessons). And that’s great! But Ryan did a wonderful job of exploring many aspects of our site.

The article features quotes from one of the members we met in Beijing and one of the most active teachers on our site, as well as an excursion into our archives of more than 3000 lessons. And the illustration by Jonathan Hill that accompanies the article is probably the best visual representation of the Ebaby! mission created to date. So head over to wweek.com and leave a comment!

I am being published! I will have to give you more details as they come. But as luck would have it, about six months ago an educational researcher and professor at Columbia University, Lori Langer de Ramirez, Ed. D., found my students’ wiki and loved it. She asked me to write a narrative about how I used the wiki in my ESL class and why. Well, it is getting published in her book about Web 2.0 in language classrooms. I am so excited. My little teaching narrative will compliment the more theoretical, research-based chapter on wikis in her book.

This achievement inspires me in a few different ways. First, as a fairly new teacher, I feel empowered by the Internet’s ability to level the playing field. What are the chances that the author would have found me and been able to peek into my classroom like that without the Internet? Second, it inspires me to try more new things because people notice! They noticed me! Not like being noticed really matters. (But we all know it does.) Anyway, I will keep you posted about when and where to buy the book.

And P.S. thanks for all the encouragement you guys gave me to teach abroad. I am excited about that too.

Image:  Zoha Navehebrahim

Portland’s NBC affiliate, KGW, recently opened a Today Show-style studio in Pioneer Square, right in the center of town. Every night at 7 local news rock star Stephanie Stricklen broadcast’s live in a show called Studio on the Square, and since Ebaby! hit a million members, Ebaby! CEO John Hayden was one of her guests last week. Watch the video here.

It was really fun to see what goes on behind the scenes of a broadcast from the Studio on the Square. We were amazed that it took so few people to run the studio–only Stephanie and one crew member were on site! They communicated with people at other locations through headsets.

Since one of the main things John and Stephanie talked about was our celebrity English lessons, John decided to demonstrate the concept by asking Stephanie to give a lesson. She’s pregnant, so John had her define “bun in the oven” on the air! We’re going to make a full lesson out of it and post it on English, baby! so stay tuned.

Here’s a photo of John getting his microphone before the broadcast.

And here’s a view of the studio you don’t see on TV.

English, baby! is kind of a crazy business. In our press release about reaching 1 million members, we mention almost a dozen features or services we provide, and since 95% of the people who use those services are outside the US, it can make our business seem even weirder to people here at home.

Barry Moltz, who hosts a popular small business radio show called Business Insanity Talk Radio took note of these facts and invited Ebaby! CEO John Hayden to be one of his guests for an episode called the “The Weird Business Show” alongside the entrepreneurs behind Fantasy Baseball Sherpa, ParkingSpots.com, a home staging company, a phone company for people who have had their phone disconnected and more (a clip of just John’s portion of the show is on our press page). It was a lot of fun to learn about other “weird” businesses.

The April issue of Successful Promotions not only features Miley Cryus on the cover, it also has a five page story on viral marketing dos and don’ts by Kenneth Hein, a managing editor at AdweekMedia. The article outlines lessons that can be learned from the elven efforts of OfficeMax, a Carl’s Jr. mobile campain launched at a Lakers game, as well as anecdotes about 7-Eleven, Burger King, Axe, and a company you might have heard of called English, baby!

Kenneth tells the tale of our bonus guerrilla marketing sucess at the Beijing Olympics (we thought we were just making videos for marking later–turned out we were marking on the ground as well). Take a look at the portion of the article that’s about us here and the whole thing here. We’re really happy to have been included with such good company in such a good story.

So you might remember that I went to the TESOL Convention. But you might have forgotten that I had a job interview while I was there.  Turns out I got a job offer! So the Ebaby! teacher might go abroad. The job is on the beautiful coast of Turkey at a university with small class sizes and motivated students.

I am super excited about the opportunity, but as I was cleaning my house it hit me: where is all my stuff going to go? And what will I do without the fifty teaching books that I regularly reference like Zero Prep and my huge file cabinet of lessons (which of course I only have paper copies of)? I have heard EFL teachers talk about bringing one boo abroad (usually Azar).  But I just can’t imagine it.

And then I start to think about my other stuff: My poor furniture, clothes and colorful dishes that I’ll have to leave behind.  I know that is silly. I have lived aboard before and it is actually surprisingly easy to pack a years worth of stuff in two bags. I know that is really the least of my worries.

But truth be told, I am so excited about the opportunity and not really worried. I know it will be perfect. I still have a few weeks before I have to sign the contract, but I think my mind is made up.