Educational Technology Musings

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I have been trying to teach myself Turkish through online tutorials. Recently, I found an interesting language learning site that i really like http://www.livemocha.com/. The site sets up an infrastructure for building digitally-mediated communities of practice. They have courses in many languages (unfortunately not Turkish). The lessons are “graded” by humans rather than a computer script. Members of a particular language learning community score and offer feedback to each other’s written and oral submissions. It also offers a platform through which people can text chat. Though there is no formal Turkish course of study, several Turkish speakers who are learning English have contacted me and offered to help me practice since I indicated that I am learning Turkish.  There is much more to the site but what attracts me is the communities of practice that develop even when there is no formal structure for learning.