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.

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.

"HungryForWords.com" provides a free vocabulary learning service for English, Chinese and Japanese languages. One can subscribe an email address to this free service by going to the web site and choose the category of vocabulary that he/she is interested in. The categories cover Business and Financial, American Slan, Inernet and Technology areas. Then he/she will receive one email every day where a "easy definition card" being attached to the email. The card contains one word in different languages plus the sound of the word. The receiver can then repeatedly memorize and practice the word. Over time, the users will benefit from this free service and build a large vocabulary database of their own in their own interests.

I remember a few months back, there was a news about BBC collaborating with Sina to create a "one word a day to cell phones" service where the millions of cell phone users in China will receive a free English word on their mobile devices and then have the option of further exploration from the web. Great ideas, good initiative, hope they won't attach advertisements with the services.

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: