If you’re an italki member, and you think you’d like to organize a meetup in your city, please contact Toffler (at) italki (dot) com or visit the italki Member Events Group.  As always, let us know what you think — and keep on sharing languages and cultures!

The italki.com team

Meet some of the people you chat with
Find new language partners
Meet the italki team
Learn about different cultures, and
Indulge yourself with a Dunkin’ Donut!

We’ll have activities to help you mix and mingle and meet new people. Speakers and students of all language welcome!

We look forward to meeting all of you at Dunkin’ Donuts!

Date: Wednesday, November 18th
Time: 7- 9 pm
Location: Dunkin’ Donuts – ShiMen Yi Lu 239, near Weihai Lu 石门一路239，近威海路
Metro Line 2: Nanjing Xi Lu

(If you’re interested in holding a similar event in your city, please leave a comment below or contact us!)

SpeakENG is an online course for learning English, and any italki member can win a 1-Month Subscription just by replying to this group post! The SpeakENG program includes access to the Online Course for a full month, plus a 15 minute session with Eleutian’s certified ESL teachers.

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What you need to do to enter the sweepstakes:

1) Log on to italki.com or join if you’re not already a member.

2) Go to The Great English Giveaway group post

3) Read the rules, and then reply to the post with three things:

• How you found out about italki
• Why you’re learning English
• A funny or embarrassing English mistake you have made

4) That’s it!

The contest will begin on September 8, 2009 at 12:01 am China Standard Time, and will end on September 20, 2009 at 11:59 pm China Standard Time.  italki will choose the winner before September 30th.  Full contest details are available here.

If you’re looking for other products to help you learn English, check out the italki Marketplace.

Good luck!

Kirsten has written a more detailed review of the conference, and the presentations are all embedded on her blog. If you’re interested in the specific comments, you should definitely take a look.

Overall, we thought the attendees were positive on the value of communities for language learning, but much more skeptical about the potential in crowdsourcing. The sense was that people could rely on help from other members in a community, provided the community was well run and focused. However, the product of collaborative work from the community was generally lacking in creativity and often of very poor quality.

At italki, we have tried crowdsourcing in many areas of our site, and we are well aware of the difficulties in crowdsourcing. As we mentioned in our presentation, you don’t always get the perfect answer when you want it. However, we are definiely positive on its long-term potential. We have just updated our community-based site translation feature, for example.

In addition, we do think it is possible to collaboratively create language learning materials, particularly if the license for the content is under the Creative Commons. Our inspiration here remains Wikipedia. We agree that art and literature designed by committee sounds awful. However, we think it is too pessimistic to say that basic materials for language learning can not be created collaboratively. It seems to run contrary to experience of impressive resources being released for other academic subjects (see MIT Open Courseware, and Connexions).

It was an interesting conference, and the discussion gave us a lot to think about. We want to give special thanks to Kirsten again for organizing it, as well as Wiziq for hosting the event with their virtual classroom. We’re definitely looking forward to the next one!

Kevin and the italki team

We were definitely impressed with the potential in virtual classrooms, and we’re sure that as the technologies mature, we’ll begin to see more of these classrooms gain wider acceptance.  There are many important features which are not presently integrated or handled well by standard communication tools like Skype, such as whiteboards, direct document viewing, shared screenshot viewing, and group / class management.  One thing that is clear from the conference is that virtual classrooms are being designed with significant input from teachers.

If you’re interested in following this debate, you can follow Kirsten on twitter (@KirstenWinkler) as well as the ETCon twitter itself @ETConference.  We’re definitely looking forward to the next conference.

Kevin and the italki team

Barcamp Shanghai was on Sunday, and about 120 people attended this un-conference for presentations and networking.  We even got a chance to do a short presentation about how we think connecting people over the internet is leading to major changes in language learning.  Many thanks to the organizers, which includes one of our team members (Toffler).  We had a great time and met a lot of interesting people.

On Monday, the Geeks tour was present at TEDx Shanghai, where there was a full day of presentations (you can catch the videos here).  We managed to meet a few of the Geeks after the presentations and also at the Geeks and Glamour after party.  Here are just a few of the people we wanted to give a mention to:

Dave McClure
Mark Hendrickson
Benjamin Joffe
Dan Martell
Dug Song
Adriana Gasciogne
Larry Chiang
Marcus Nelson

Overall it was a really exciting time to be in Shanghai and in the technology space.  Hopefully, it won’t be another year before we see an event like this again!

The italki team

China Travel 2.0 is bringing a number of travel editors for a two-week trip through China in early June. Their trip will look at the changes China is undergoing and how technology plays a role in that, with a specific emphasis on technology’s affect on travel. When traveling internationally knowing another language is incredibly useful,  so when we were asked to help them learn Chinese, we were ready and willing!

While Shanghai and Beijing are relatively foreigner friendly, a little bit of travel Chinese can go a long way for enhancing the experience. Imagine not being able to express thanks (xiexie, 谢谢) or say that you don’t want to purchase that tourist trinket (don’t want, buyao, 不要). Specifically, italki is helping the travelers find Chinese teachers through our Language Marketplace. We’re also helping the travelers find friends in each of the cities they are visiting, so they can get a local perspective on the best things to experience.

When the tour returns to Shanghai, we’ll get our chance to meet the travelers: Craig, Linda, Donna, Julie, Janelle, Marina, and the team at Trip Films. We’ll be curious to hear all about their experience in China, and we hope they learn some Chinese along the way!

Last week bloggers and other tech people from North American and Europe come to China as part of theChina 2.0 tour organized by The China Business Network, Web2Asia, and CNReviews.  We were privileged enough to be included in their busy schedule when they were in Shanghai on Thursday and Friday.  Among the tour participants we were fortunate enough to meet were:

Robert Scoble
Shel Israel
Mike Butcher
Melissa Sconyers
Sheila Scarborough
Ernst Jan Pfauth
Bart Lapers
David Feng
Ryan McLaughlin

As well as many other awesome people!

You also can watch videos of italki’s presentations to the China2.0 groups on Kyte.  To find out about more events or videos with italki, follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/italki

This photo was taken at our office with the China2.0 participants last Friday.