Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

A friend of mine created a web site to promote Chinese language learning. She uses lots of multimedia components to make the learning experience more pleasant and straight forward. There are currently 21 free lessons where learners can learn the language at their own pace. There seems to be a total of 37 free lessons that covers many daily living subjects such as, "greetings in Chinese", "Chinese names", "shopping in Chinese", "rent an apartment in Chinese" etc... According to the owner of the web site, the remainder lessons will be completed by the beginning of 2009. Then a synchronized learning platform will be introduced so multiple learners can "meet" in a virtual classroom and learn directly from the content creator on each of these lessons. I am looking forward to see what they will come up with in the new year. In the meanwhile, I am recommending this site to my co-workers and friends whom have been bugging me on wanting to learn Chinese on their own...

Simple-chinese.com, Learn some Chinese online for free!

An exciting opportunity has come up for us here at the Faculty of Arts, UBC. The Vancouver Olympic Committee has contacted our faculty with a request to contribute expertise from the Language & Literature Departments to assess the linguistic skills of hundreds of multi-lingual volunteers to the Olympic Games in Vancouver-Whistler 2010. What's unique about this initiative is that the language assessment is carried out completely online, which means our support team here at Arts ISIT is responsible to develop an online environment to accommodate the language assessment needs.

I think this is the first time in the Olympics history that volunteers' language skills are being assessed via the web. Including 2008 Beijing Olympics, volunteers have been interviewed either in person or on the phone. Starting later 2008, the Vancouver Olympic committee will use the system we are putting together using voice board and learning management systems, to develop a pilot for the expected 900 volunteers to be assessed in Asian and European language skills.

Today is the New Year's eve, bye to the monkey year and hi to the year of Rooster! Here is my hand writing of the word "Rooster" in Chinese, check it out. It is using the learning tools created here at Arts ISIT, UBC for JSK language learnings. The tool will record the calligraphy and play it out as a flash movie. Check it out: