A (very) informal (unofficial) BBC experiment
I am the Technical Project Manager for the Languages site on bbc.co.uk. This is a great resource if you are interested in languages and especially if you want to start learning a new one. If you want to learn French, German, Spanish or Italian we have interactive courses to get you started. If you want you can also pick up some basic Chinese and Portuguese you can also find some starters here.
The site has a strong community of people who use it, in support or preparation for taking a course, about to go on holiday or just interested in languages. It's audience is also global, with visitors from everywhere.
A quick search on Technorati showed, at the time of writing this post 2,189 blog links to the Languages homepage. That is not bad.
What I would like to do is try and get the two joined up a bit. The team at the office know about the weblogs and are thinking about cool things to try but I want to run a small pre-cursor experiment.
I am not very good at learning languages, my wife is Iranian and our six year old son is bilingual. He does not use Farsi that much now he is at school, but it is still there and was there from an early age. Now I know we do not have farsi on the Languages website, I keep asking though :). Maybe need to stretch my Language learning muscles a bit so should start on one of the languages on the site.
The courses are designed to be taken in short modules, part of a lunch break for example.
I am sure this is similar to lots of people, trying to fit some learning into a busy life. What I want to do as well is record my progress and of course the place to do that is a weblog. So all the posts on this will be tagged
bbclanguages
My request is, if you are interested in learning a language and using the BBC languages website or already do and you are blogging it then could you:
- Let me know, either an email or a comment here would be great.
- Tag your posts with bbclanguages when you blog about your experiences learning a language, it does not have to relate directly to the website, maybe a story of you using some of your new language skills in the real world.
- If you are not already, get your weblog registered on technorati.
If you know anyone else who is interested in language learning or might be interested in this idea then let them know and get them to drop me a line. If you want advice on setting up a weblog, what to do and what it entails then also let me know and I will prepare some notes.
I just want to see how well a weblog community can interact with a BBC website. At the moment I know loads of you are out there but I want to make sure that we are as much a part of the community as possible, if you have been reading some of my earlier posts about the Social Bar, you will know that I have some ideas on how the BBC should start to interact with the rest of the web more (it already does in pockets).
There are already interesting group blogs on topics BBC based, one of the best being Speechification, by Russell, Dan and others, which blogs about the interesting programmes that have been on radio 4. The idea here though is to build out more of a community (or old webring) of sites that share the common interest (at least for some of their posts) at hand.
And like I said, its just an experiment. I will report back on both my language learning progress as well as the progress of the experiment.
