I think various reputation markers can help, but only to some extent. Comments at Amazon or ePinion are useful to a point, but for an awful lot of purchases I rely primarily on Consumer Reports.

A tangent: in skimming some of the comments at French Pod (and to a much smaller extent at Chinese Pod), it seems the site attracts a fair number of people who want to learn several languages. Not to go after any proprietary information, is there anything you can say about that? I’m wondering if such people tend to be (speaking descriptively but not derisively) language hobbyists: learning language is what they like to do.

I like the sound of:

“the wisdom of crowds� combined with “the insight of experts.�

One downside of the multitude of learning options and channels that are being opened up by digital technologies is that it creates ’search costs’ for the learner in being able to put together a study curriculum, mixing and matching the most suitable learning from various sources. Some kind of guidance is clearly necessary here.

“Centering on the learner” to me has to do with the individual’s goals and interests. I like your perspective of the object-oriented network (with “language” being the analogue to Flickr’s photos, as I understand you).

Your comment has stirred a couple of ingredients that were on one of my mental back burners: the realm and role of expertise (e.g., FrenchPod’s writers and presenters); the learner’s need and ability to locate, evaluate, and choose resources; metacognition and goal-setting; and maybe something like “the wisdom of crowds” combined with “the insight of experts.”

What’s impressive (or even disconcerting) about FrenchPod and the other Praxis Language sites is the way they center on the learner, rather than the content.

Dave,

I would like to push the conversation around this point a bit. While Ken & I definitely do see the service as a language learning toolkit in the student’s personal learning environment – again, the learning on your terms – we believe the best way to achieve this is to aspire to become an object-centered (think Flickr) social network, as opposed to a social network more focused on connecting people (e.g. Facebook). In our PLS release we have opened up more conversation objects in addition to our lessons (e.g. user posts, grammar points, vocab terms, etc) all of which can be commented on now. We believe that by focusing and improving the object of people’s attention it will make the service more compelling in the long run.