Ebaby! Blog

Gordon Brown had some interesting things to say about the English language on his recent trip to the U.S. According to The Press Association he is trying to encourage more people around the world to learn English.

The Wall Street Journal reported Brown saying that he’d like to see the US and UK work together on the initiative and “strive to make the international language that happens to be our own far more freely available across the world.”

It seems that Brown sees multiple advantages to the US/UK initiative, including a reason for the two countries to work together, encouraging use of the language we already know, and “bringing people together.”

What the article didn’t mention was the benefit to the learners around the world who might actually get more access to English as it becomes more “freely available” through a cooperation of this nature.

Hopefully learners get the most value in this deal and are given the opportunity to drive the process. Has the British council asked them how they would like more access to the English language? If this partnership materializes, we’d like to see the groups begin with feedback from learners, then provide what’s most needed.

We’d also love to help.

We were happy to discover that over the weekend we were named one of the top three sites for learning conversational English by Larry Ferlazzo, king of ESL website reviews and best of lists.

This is our first appearance on one of Larry’s lists and it makes sense since it’s a pretty general category, and like Larry says, we offer “the works.” A lot of the rest of the top eight was new to me. One site I particularly liked was ELLLO (English Language Listening Library Online). Their dialogs are pretty similar to ours and I think they’re improvised too. But their cast speaks a heck of a lot slower!

A commenter on the post brought up a good idea that I’d like to see on English, baby! someday: live chat rooms. Our chat rooms are one of the most popular features on the site, but they’re for typing. What if we had chat rooms that used a Skype-like platform so people could talk in real time? That would be cool.

Image: Larry Ferlazzo’s mug as seen on his site.

We’ve been very interested to see what the international community thinks about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. After years of watching global opinion of the U.S. slide, there seems to be a good amount of optimism for the future.

We ran our first U.S. Presidential election poll back in June of 2007 and saw that 55% of our members favored Hillary Clinton as the next president, with 22% favoring Obama, and 7% favoring Giuliani. The Clinton name is very recognizable around the world and it’s understandable that she would be the favorite among our members.

We posted our second U.S. Presidential election poll in February 2008 and the numbers flipped. We now see 55% of our members in favor of Obama, 35% for Clinton, and 7% for McCain. It seems as though there’s something about Obama’s message that’s resonating with the world.

I had the opportunity to see Obama speak in Portland the other day and was definitely impressed. Even got a nice handshake from the Illinois senator. Clinton is coming through town this weekend and I look forward to watching her as well.

We’re going to keep close tabs on our members’ opinions as the democratic race continues, and then follow the general election. It should be an interesting ride and with the world getting flatter, international opinion matters more than ever.

Check out the Ebaby! lesson about the election.

I read an interesting article in today’s Taipei Times that addresses the value of the current trend of teaching English to children at an earlier age. It seems as though many people believe that if they can just start studying earlier, students will have more time to learn and end up better speakers. The author of the article describes this trend in Taiwan, but questions its validity and concludes with this point:

“Perhaps the issue of how early EFL students start to learn English is not that pivotal. The crux of the matter is whether or not the students will continue to acquire English after school. I’ve interviewed numerous adult learners who began to learn English after 13 and now have a native-like proficiency. The one thing they have in common is that they use English every day, whether it be watching TV programs or movies, reading English newspapers or popular novels, or other methods.

Therefore, English teachers need to ponder a more crucial issue: how to make their students still willing to involve English in their lives after leaving school.”

We believe that a classroom education is a crucial component of learning English. But turning that foundation into natural language use requires another step, which is lots of practice in context-rich environments such as having conversations with native speakers, listening to native speakers having conversations with each other, and being exposed to native English speaking culture.

The easiest way to get this experience is by living in an English speaking country where access to speakers and culture isn’t a problem. The challenge is that cultural immersion is only available to a small percentage of people.

English learners who can’t make that move must find a way to make English part of their daily lifestyle. They might be harder to find, but there are plenty of ways to simulate immersion such as reading English news, finding a language exchange partner, or spending time in environments where native English speakers hang out.

We urge all of our members at Ebaby! to actively participate in school, but to help them reach the next level and truly grasp the English language, we do everything we can to make practicing English fun and engaging in an effort to make using it part of their lifestyle.

I feel very strongly that learning should be much more bottom-up than top-down. Now that information is so widely available and easily shared, students should be empowered to make more choices about what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, including from each other.

Steve Hargadon had an interesting blog post earlier this month about Web 2.0 and how it’s the future of education. He makes some great points and here are clips from some of my favorite:

“Trend #4: The New Pro-sumers. The word “pro-sumer” is a combination of the words “producer” and “consumer.” More and more companies are engaging their customers in the creation of the product they sell them. The nature not just of how knowledge is acquired, but how it is produced, is changing”

Absolutely agree here. Who is better at describing what they need from a product than the consumer? What we’re seeing now with technology is one step further. The consumers are not only providing input, but they’re often creating the product. Check out this vocabulary game our members started on their own. It’s such a simple concept but it works so well and is one of the most popular threads on our site.

“Trend #7: The World Gets Even Flatter and Faster. Yes, and even if that “flat” world is “spiky” or “wrinkled,” it’s still getting pretty darn flat. That anyone, anywhere in the world, can study using over the material from over 1800 open courses at MIT is astounding, and it’s only the start.”

Right on. That someone in Zimbabwe can easily ask for English advice and become friends with someone in China is absolutely amazing.

“Trend #8: Social Learning Moves Toward Center Stage. …JSB discusses a study that showed that one of the strongest determinants of success in higher education is the ability to form or participate in study groups. In the video of his lecture he makes the point that study groups using electronic methods have almost the exact same results as physical study groups. The conclusion is somewhat stunning–electronic collaborative study technologies = success?”

The best teachers I had in school were the ones who naturally led us to learn from and share information with each other. The teachers I learned the least from were those who pushed information down to us and asked for regurgitation at test time. Students want to actively learn. Just take a look at one of our recent lessons where we brought up the topic of taking time off before college. We produced one page on the subject, then our members created 9 more.

Technology has been influencing education for years. But now it’s doing so at a faster pace than ever seen before, mostly because students are finally getting a voice.

There is no shortage of stories out there about “the dangers” of social networks and how they’re banned in various workplaces and countries. So it’s really nice to see a story in the mighty New York Times about one worthwhile use for social networks that we here at English, baby! know a lot about: language education.  

The story focuses on a couple of sites that specialize in bringing foreign languages to Americans who want to learn them. It also focuses on the innovative technologies these sites have developed. 

But to me, what’s most exciting about the combination of language education and social networking is the fostering of a global community. Even though with 650,000 members, Ebaby! is huge, it feels like a group of friends. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the most active users through seeing them commenting on the lessons every day. The light-hearted and current topics make for fun dialog that’s hard to get on a hardcore language-learning site.

I mean, I don’t think any other social network or language eduction site would attend the wedding of two of its members or host a game show for a half dozen others.

But the best part of Ebaby!’s community is the massive cultural exchange that’s enabled by people from all over the world learning a language together. Since Americans are lucky enough to have our native tongue as the global language, it’s great that there are opportunities online to learn a foreign language and become a better ambassador. But for a lot of people, English is what enables them to make friends outside of their home country and social networks are where they come to do so.

And since the vast majority of our members are not in the United States, the discussion of language learning and social networking is only beginning in the US. So once again, huzzah to Anne Eisenberg and the New York Times for bringing the discussion to the front line of American media.

It has been interesting watching the evolution of social networks here in the U.S.  A few years ago sites like Facebook and MySpace wanted little to do with international users and analysts pointed to Friendster as a miserable failure because of the huge number of users outside of the U.S.  What was most important then was U.S. advertising dollars, which meant traffic from the U.S. was what mattered most.

Then came News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace and its international charge into countries such as China.  It seemed they realized that their product could be used worldwide and expansion beyond the U.S. was a tremendous opportunity.

Over the past year Facebook has gotten into the international game and is touting its growth in other countries.  We’re now watching a race to grab customers outside of the U.S.

USA Today recently posted an article about the global expansion of social networks as well.  Things are heating up.

As one of the few social networks concentrating solely on the international market, we’ve recognized the huge potential of users around the world from Day 1.  And while other social networks seem to be focusing their international efforts on establishing country-specific sites, Ebaby! has a rare opportunity to have one site for everyone, effectively connecting the world.

Stay tuned for more activity in the social networking space as our world gets smaller and smaller.

Many articles have been written about social networks and education and how teachers can leverage websites such as Facebook and MySpace to help educate their students. We’ve seen some good examples of using these sites to support classroom teaching and believe there can be some crossover. However, the reason students are using these sites isn’t to learn - it’s to network with their peers, and that’s what they’ll do.

This doesn’t mean that social networking doesn’t have its place in education. We actually believe that using the core concepts of interactivity and user-generated content can produce a highly educational environment. Students and teachers agree that some of the best learning happens when students have the ability to practice the skills they’re learning with their peers, which is exactly what can happen in a social network.

To make a social network educational, it should start out with that goal in mind. The early adopters will quickly start building a culture of their own and set the pace, but they need the correct foundation to build from. And the beauty of a social network is that a site doesn’t need fancy features to accomplish its goal - it simply needs the right people contributing content.

There should be social networks for every educational topic imaginable. Students of English, math, science, history, economics, psychology and computers would benefit from an online environment where they can learn, practice what they’re learning, and meet other like-minded individuals. The markets will vary in size, but where there’s passion for learning, there’s a website waiting to be built.

If you’re considering building your own educational social network, check out Ning. Lots of interesting sites are popping up, as shown by Steve Hargadon in his blog about education and social networking.