Fav News: Hundreds of Wyoming teachers are teaching conversational skills to Koreans and Japanese

July 6, 2010 by Cathy Healy //

Finally! Major media have discovered Eleutian, 14 years after its founding. I hope this is the start of a blitz of stories about a company that teaches English to Asians via the Internet.

My back story: In 2003, at the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) conference in Japan, I learned that the Japanese government had declared a crisis with with English language because their university students were fluent in written English, but most could not communicate in English. This the era when courts were ruling in favor of parents who sued US universities because their children couldn’t understand the Asians who were teaching classes, particularly science courses.

At the same time, I knew a number of people in Wyoming who would like to work part-time. Most of us in Wyoming speak with a TV news dialect, which is in demand in the outside world. Clearly there was a cottage-industry business there. But I only mused. That’s why I was thrilled, delighted, impressed and enthusiastic when Kent Holliday started Eleutian in Ten Sleep, which is less than 30 miles from my hometown of Worland. That was in 2006. I drove right over to see what was happening.

CNN’s story is attracting a lot of negative comments about how Eleutian’s teachers are training competitors who will take more jobs away from the United States. Perhaps…but to my mind, Eleutian helps ensure that the world can communicate with us and that business is still being conducted in English. I’ve read that all Chinese are supposed to begin English lessons in the first grade. I assume these commenters are not ready to mandate that all US students begin Chinese in the first grade.

And no one — except CNN readers in Wyoming — gets it about the impact of the Eleutian experience on the people in the Big Horn Basin, where Ten Sleep is located. Think of the Basin as a valley shaped like a round washbasin adjoining Yellowstone and surrounded by mountains. The Big Horn Basin was the last place in the continental United States to be settled. Yet hundreds of its residents now are living in a virtual global crossroads. Their experience has moved them from geographic isolation into personal experiences with the world. Talk about people-to-people progress. This is it.

New global outsourcing hub – Wyoming?

By Lara Farrar, for CNN

July 5, 2010 10:08 a.m. EDT

Students in classrooms across Asia can take real-time English lessons from American teacher

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

A Wyoming company is employing hundreds [700] as long-distance English teachers
Thousands of students in Asia learn real-time English from laid-off U.S. teachers
The company pipes teachers into 500 classrooms across Korea and Japan

(CNN) — When it comes to call centers filled with English-speaking employees, India likely comes to mind. Not a tiny town in Wyoming called Ten Sleep, population about 300.

What Ten Sleep has is not, exactly, a call center. Instead, the town is home to a teaching center that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, American teachers provide real-time video English lessons to thousands of students in classrooms across Asia via high-speed fiber optic networks…. (Full Story)

Fav Daily News: Reading is fastest on paper

July 5, 2010 by Cathy Healy //

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CH Note: (Jakob) Nielsen-Norman ranked National Geographic’s Intranet as one of the 10 Best in the World in 2007. For us, this was winning the Oscar, so I’m always eager to read his studies.

Personally, I haven’t noticed a decrease in reading speed on my Kindle or on my iPad, although the virtual-book look with “real” pages in iPad’s e-book makes it easier to read. Also, I was wasting time on the Kindle by clicking to the next page before I finished the last two lines and then I’d have to click back, read and click forward.

Reading on Paper is Faster **than iBooks on the iPad (PC World)**

It will take you longer to read a book on an iPad or Kindle compared to the printed page, according to a recent study. Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group–a product development consultancy that is not associated with Nielsen, the metrics company–compared the reading times of 24 users on the Kindle 2, an iPad using the iBooks application, a PC monitor and good old fashioned paper. The study found that reading on an electronic tablet was up to 10.7 percent slower than reading a printed book. [Note: Kindle was 10.7 percent slower; iPad 6.2% slower.] Despite the slower reading times, Nielsen found that users preferred reading books on a tablet device compared to the paper book. The PC monitor, meanwhile, was universally hated as a reading platform among all test subjects.

Complaints about the Kindle 2, iPad’s iBooks, and PCs were predictable, says Nielsen, and I agree. It’s hard to tell where you are in a Kindle because there are no pages and lack of color; the iPad is heavy to hold [even at less than 1.5 pounds]; and it is lousy to read on a PC. Test participants complained that it felt like work.

Wrote Nielsen:

This study is promising for the future of e-readers and tablet computers. We can expect higher-quality screens in the future, as indicated by the recent release of the iPhone 4 with a 326 dpi display. But even the current generation is almost as good as print in formal performance metrics — and actually scores slightly higher in user satisfaction.

More on Reading and Tablets

The qualitative findings on users’ reactions to reading from screens are presented in our 2-day seminar on Writing for the Web at the annual Usability Week conference.

The conference also has a full-day seminar on designing touch-screen user interfaces , including mobile phones and tablets.

UC Workshop Report: Five Easy Multimedia Tips

June 30, 2010 by Cathy Healy //

One can never get enough of “easy” tricks to improve multimedia reporting.

Dr. Susan Currie Sivek, a mass communications professor at Cal State Fresno, has blogged about her recent Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at UC-Berkeley, which was sponsored by the Knight Digital Media Center in the Graduate School of Journalism. [The Knight Foundation has been funding initiatives at a number of universities to retrain print reporters and journalism professors in multimedia. Cal and USC are prominent recipients, with Cal specializing in bootcamp skills.]

Sivek detailed five easy tips. One was obvious — the damn tripod (“damn” is my word — easy to use for interviews, but hard out in the world, especially since a tripod makes people in public places nervous, and evokes security guard attention. By the way, ditto video cameras. Guards put my video camera into a locker at the entrance to the Taj Mahl, but still cameras, which of course shoot video, passed through with no take-over.]

Here are briefs of what I learned from what Sivek learned–her full stories are worth reading.

1) Audio: Don’t have “constant loud noise, include ‘breathing room’ so the viewer could relax into the experience.”

2) In Front of the Camera: Limit gestures when you’re being taped. Use only one gesture to accentuate only a main point. While gesturing hands look normal when you’re talking, they are distracting onscreen.

3) Tools: iPhone has limits but you can get reasonable pix and video and the iTalk app records decent sound if you put the phone right up into someone’s face during the interview. Sivek quotes instructor Richard Koci Hernandez, Cal professor, and links to his page on the tools you need for good video with an iPhone (and this was before the 4.0 came out with a better camera.) Hernandez’s page includes links to buy such gadgets as grips to hold your phone/camera steady and little tripods with wrap-around arms. Wonder if they’d work with my new still camera (Panasonic’s Lumix, which has a Leica lens) which I bought to use for video.

4) “Storytelling: It’s worth getting slightly injured to get an element of the story that grabs the audience and makes them persist through the rest of the story.” Um. Maybe ;-))