Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Since all of my blog buddies, Brian, D'Arcy and Scott have successfully released their stress on the blogs in the past few months, I guess it's about my turn. I am leaving for China in 2 weeks and there are 113 items on my todo list before the departure. This is not funny. So, please excuse me for the lack of blog postings recently and wish me luck of completing this gigantic to do list.

A joint effort between the local television companies and the wireless service providers, Cell Phone based television programs is now spreading out in China. Many Chinese now have an option of subscribe to monthly TV programs which enables them to watch TV programs (mostly news and entertainment programs) from their mobile communication devices (PDA, Phones etc.) any where, any time. Cell Phones like Motorola A780 (like mine) has a built in Real Media player which support streaming and progressive downloading media that belong to the standard Internet formats. Have I ever mentioned about many (over 50% in the major cities) of the public transit systems (Taxis, subway, bus, ferry) have Plasma TVs installed in them and broadcasting TV programs at all times?

Open Source for Education in Europe 2005 is taking place at Open University of the Netherlands today and tomorrow. As the name indicates, this conference focus on open source developments in the elearning communities. The topics cover learning with Open Source, Open standards for e-learning, sustainability strategies and open content, issues and implications. My friend Brent Simpson is in the conference to demostrate on using eXe. For those of you who are in the conference, I highly recommend this workshop. For more information on the eXe project, refer to this post.

ETS launched the new version of TOEFL this summer and the first online TOEFL test took place at the end of September. So far the test has been taken place at the Thomson Prometric testing centres across the United States. According to ETS, the online testing environment will be launched in China by May, 2006. This means millions of Chinese scholars will be able to take the test online within China by then.

Web based TOEFL is the first Internet based English qualification and certification process. What's worth to mention is ETS has nicely incorporated the oral testing components into the online testing environment. This is aimed to increase the participants' communication and expression skills. ETS does not differentiate the oral tests from the rest of the exam. Instead, all four (reading, writ in, listening and speaking) topics are evenly balanced together. For example, participants are asked to read an essay and listen to a recording, then to answer the question via voice recording or writing an essay. A standard online TOEFL will take approximately 4 hours.

For the new TOEFL voice testing, instead of a face to face interview, ETS requires participants to record their vocal answers and the voice recordings will be scored by 3 to 6 qualified markers. I am curious to find out the recording technology they are using and how are the file compression effecting the quality of the recording thus may effect the participants' final TOEFL score.

According to a new statistics from ACNielsen, 63% Chinese internet surfers shops online. This means there are over 63 million buyers online in China (over 100 million internet users in China). Read this post to get the updated information on internet users in China. In the study, the number indicates the most popular item in the online shopping industry are books (56% of Chinese online shoppers buy books); the second most popular item is Entertainment contents delivered via DVD, CD and online gaming (24% of Chinese online shoppers buy DVD, VCD and online games); the third most popular items are music CDs and clothing (23% of Chinese online shoppers buy music contents, cloths, shoes and hats). This trend is somewhat similar to the American online shopping developments over the last few years. (Especially when Amazon and eBay just took off)

However, there is one huge difference between the online shopping behaviors between US and China: over 34% of online shoppers pay upon receiving the product they selected; 31% uses fund transfer via online banking; only 26% Chinese online shoppers use credit cards.

The majority of the shoppers are university students. My guess is that wait till this generation graduate and earning a stable salary. Their online shopping budget will be increased gradually. Plus the rest of the Chinese population (92.1% of 1.4 billion) slowly understand this concept, China is going to have the largest online shopping community in the world.

Ever since Apple launched their video iPod, Video Podcast started to gain popularity. However, believe or not, the most excited group about this new technology is the Pornography industry. According to a porn web site, it's subscriber downloaded over 500,000 movie clips to their video ipod (a special format, possibly mp4) within 24 hours.

Studies show two out of every five Internet users log into pornography websites on a regular basis. 3% of the overall Internet bandwidth is taken by pornography contents. The Internet based pornography industry has reached 2.5 billion US dollars in 2004. There is a clear indication that this number will increase because the new video Podcasting technology. In the meanwhile, pornography companies have also launched specially formatted video clips for the popular hand-held game device - PSP. Matter of fact, I wonder how is the huge profit driven industry going to improve the video distribution technologies including media repository, media meta-data, wireless media delivery and mobile device media distribution technologies. According to the professionals, people love to be able to carry pornography contents using mobile devices. One thing we should be careful with is there seems to be lack of regulations on the pornographic contents being delivered to pre-mature audiences.

Remember the sushi USB storate devices? The same manufacturer, Solidalliance has recently revealed their newest product, iDisk Diamond - The World Smallest USB Storage Device. It only weights 1 gram and comes in an dimension of 27x12x1.9mm. iDisk Diamond supports USB 2.0 but there is only 1 version of it-128MB. Careful, DON'T LOSE IT!

Qian Mao, director of the Chinese Fiber Optical Communication Consortium recently revealed some new numbers of the high speed Internet usages in China. According to Mr. Mao, according to the data collected till end of June 2005, there are 103 million Internet users. Among them, there are 53 million high speed Internet users. The rest 50 million are using dial up Internet access. There are over 67% of the high speed Internet users use ADSL technology, which is approximately 33 million accounts. However, many users are not satisfied at the speed of the ADSL services. According to Mr. Mao's number, 5% of the high speed Internet users are not satisfied with the surfing speed, 17% of them are less favor and 40% feels acceptable but not great. My expectation is that the Chinese ISPs will boost the speed dramatically within the next 2 years to accommodate the growing VOIP industry and media deliver services. China has the largest high speed Internet service market in the world, but the government is still very much regulating who can provide these services. The room to grow in this industry is much bigger than other Asian countries such as Korea or Singarpore.

From Brent's Blog, eXe version 0.10 is released today. This release is a remarkable milestone of the project. The current version uses TinyMCE as a rich text editor which has some great WYSIWYG features. eXe 0.10 comes with multiple language interfaces such as English, German, Chinese, Greek and Spanish. There is also an experimental Cloze iDevice as well as the External Web Site idevice. There is yet more exciting improvements coming in the following months.

Here is a wiki on iDevice.