Search Find Learn

While in Amsterdam for the Maemo Summit 2009, I met up with Marina Tognetti, founder and CEO of Myngle.com

Myngle.com is a global language platform, where teachers and students from all over the world can teach and learn new languages. Myngle launched in December 2007. As of autumn 2009, it covers 51 languages with over 300 teachers and has 36000+ users from 162 countries.

Marina, an Italian who loves learning new languages, studied business and economics in Italy and then got strong corporate experience with stints at Proctor and Gamble, Philips and Sara-Lee. She left her role in eBay to create ‘an eBay for languages.’ She believes that everybody should have a chance to learn any language, no matter where they are located.

And Myngle does just this. Any student can learn any language online with live classes and real teachers. All teachers are carefully selected and trained by Myngle.

So how does Myngle work? Well, the student is king. You choose your teacher, your lesson time and price. You can try before you buy with a free trial. After that, you buy a learning package. You can opt for individual lessons or group.

Myngle was born while Marina was working for ebay – she’d been trying to learn Chinese. She’d been to school for 3 months for 2 hours a week, in a class of 25 learners. It just didn’t work. But private lessons didn’t work either – Marina had to select teachers by trial and error – unlike ebay, where you know what you’re getting, and the feedback is recorded.

Marina believes you really need a person to interact – to learn and correct. You don’t learn in a normal exchange. She believes your teacher will push you in one-to-one interaction. However, Myngle teachers adapt to your needs – if you like to learn by focussing on grammar rules, they’ll work with you on that.

Myngle is very selective when choosing teachers. Anyone can apply, however, teachers are personally screened – and Myngle guarantees that every one of their 300 teachers is good. All Myngle teachers have great experience in offline and online teaching.

Marina explained to me that Myngle students tend to be older and more serious than your average social learning network student. They’re often learning for business purposes. They’re spending money and want results – language learning is a serious investment for them.

Myngle’s try before you buy approach is really working for the website – according to Marina, a huge majority of those who try, buy. They love the service. But then Marina’s philosophy on customer service is to ‘always overdeliver’.

Myngle was started up with Marina’s personal finance. It has since secured two rounds of funding, and is in the process of securing a third. Marina and her team spent 2008 getting the site features just right and ensuring quality would be high. They spent 2009 focussing on marketing and customer service. 2010 will be all about the customer – reaching out to as many more language learners as Myngle can.

Interestingly, Marina observed that ‘Education is the only non-consumer centred industry in the world’. She believes this is wrong – and indeed can explain many of the educational failures we experience. She believes that the education sector is changing. The customer is taking control. They can now choose the teacher, method of learner, the time and place.

This approach leads the learner to eventually only needing an independent assessment as a means of certifying the learners knowledge – Donald Clarke has an interesting post on that here.

I’ll be testing Myngle out while I’m in Paris – I’ll review how I found their system.

You can follow Myngle on twitter @myngler

That's the title of a BBC article telling the story of 16 year old Babar Ali - the world's youngest headteacher. Every day, he teaches hundreds of students in the village of Murshidabad in West Bengal.

Babar is a student himself. Every morning, before school, he has to help with household chores. Then he catches an auto-rickshaw to travel part of the way to school. He walks the last mile or so.

Babar's school is free, but his family have to pay for a uniform, books and transport - which all adds up to £25 a year. This is £25 too much for a lot of families.

After Babar finishes his school day, he comes back to his small village, and teaches what he has learned to 800 children who are too poor to afford the school fees. Babar is not alone. Ten teachers have joined him - students like himself - to teach what they know to other children.

This is an awesome story. Children who are hungry for knowledge feeding what they know to those who are even more deprived than they are.

But the title of the article is misleading. Children across the world are not hungry to learn. Time and again I've heard teachers comment that their biggest problem is in motivating students to want to learn.

Seeing as motivation is one of the key factors in effective learning, this is a worrying problem. So what is it about the kids in our schools? Why aren't they hungry for knowledge? Is it because they live 24/7/365 in the middle of an information feast, and they're gorged to the point of indifference?

Yesterday I had to go from Belfast to the East Midlands of England for a business meeting. The travel arrangements had been hastily done, and were not ideal. At 7am, the airport security man looked at me strangely and said 'No mobile?' as I flung my netbook, keys and 'liquids' out for scanning.

No mobile. Indeed I hadn't. And no time to go back and get it. I knew I'd most information that I needed on my netbook, so I didn't panic. In fact, I was a bit curious to see how I'd get along. A case of planes, trains and no-mobiles.

As it turned out, I didn't get along terribly badly, but not terribly well either. I'd 2 main problems. (a) boredom and (b) anxiety

Let's look at (a) boredom first.

I use my iPhone for listening to language learning MP3s (loving Michel Thomas at the moment), gaming, reading books, twittering, email and browsing the web. And these are all things that fill those endless endless snatches of downtime when you're travelling.

Standing in the slow coffee queue waiting to put your breakfast order in? Check tweetie. Sitting eating your breakfast in the cafe? Check emails, browse tweets. Waiting to board the plane? Catch up on news. On the plane? Plug into Michel Thomas French while playing Bejewelled and you land in England a wiser woman than you were in Ireland. And so it continues.

I was deprived of all this. So I bought a magazine. Scientific American Mind, to be precise, at the ridiculous cost of £4.70. An hour later, I'd read everything in the magazine, even the pointless letters to Editor that all talked about articles I hadn't and couldn't read.

Reading this magazine really brought home the fact that print is dead for me. I bought a magazine that looked relatively interesting. But in fact only maybe 30% of it was something I enjoyed reading. The rest of it I would've skipped over online. And the bits I enjoyed were stymied by the fact I couldn't learn anything more - I couldn't click deeper.

After finishing the magazine I was still left with about 12 hours of travel. If I wanted to read something educational on my iPhone, I could have read for HOURS and not paid a penny. If I wanted to spend £5, I really would've got a whole lot more value for money on the apps store.

Now, let's look at (b) anxiety.

I get anxious when I don't have enough information. This is particularly true of travel. Without a mobile internet connection to check my travel details, I had to go from coach to train station to train station to taxi just *hoping* that things would be OK. They weren't as it turned out - I missed most connections by five minutes, and spent hours sitting around waiting for the next one.

Then when I got onto a train I'd no real clue where I was, how long it would take me to get to the next point, or what was going on. I spent a lot of time being anxious. And what with having nothing to distract myself, I had a lot more time to be anxious!

The *sort-of* upside

The *sort-of* upside to all this was what happened when I had to ask people for help or information. I was shocked at how lovely everyone was. Everyone was hugely helpful, funny and kind. One gentleman told me I had the loveliest accent. Another wished me Bon voyage. I entered into little mini-conversations with strangers.

Of course, I have spontaneous social contact with strangers all the time online, but that's not such a novelty.

iPhone fail

Incidentally, I forgot my iPhone because it hadn't charged properly *again*. I woke up at 4am to find a very hot iPhone with a quarter charge. I had to disconnect it, let it cool down, and try again that morning as I got ready to go. This has happened twice now. And both times have been directly before I had to fly to England for an all-day meeting. What's going on?

by someone who hasn't got an invitation...

BBC news reports that the most UK police forces are to be equipped with smartphones by March 2010.

Gary Cairns of the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) explains that officers with smartphones spend about 30 minutes less per shift in the police station than officers without smartphones - leaving them free for frontline duties.

The cost of the scheme is £80million - and it costs about £270 per officer, per year. 85% of officers offered smartphones take up the offer - although the BBC reporter seems to think this is a bit weak, I think it's pretty impressive. I wonder what the figures would be like if every UK teacher was offered a smartphone? Or every student?

So what's smart about these phones? Well, the article doesn't mention what type of phone the officers will get. But they will enable officers to access key databases, like the Police National Computer and other information like criminal records, vehicle details, briefings and photographs of wanted or missing people. And they'll let officers transmit information back to base.

Officers are interested in how GPS technologies can help them do their job - for instance, tagging streets with 'useful' information about who lives there, and what they're known to the police for.

A bit big brother? Yes. While I can imagine how useful a googlemaps-police criminal database mash up app would be in the fight against crime, I know that people make mistakes. And how am I to check what information a police app might have on me? How can I correct inaccurate information? And how is information police might gather by mobile validated?

Each phone is password protected, and can be remotely wiped, making them fairly secure - but not impregnable. It would be scary to think of what would happen with a smartphone in the wrong hands. But the pros probably outweigh the cons here.

Finally, I wonder do these phones have facebook and twitter disabled? Officers might be spending 30 minutes or more in the frontline, but how useful is that if they're sitting in a parked car, eyes glued to a little glowing screen?

I'm delighted that my social learning network, www.talkirish.com, won the Best Education/Third Level website at the Irish Web Awards last night.

A huge thanks to the judges and organisers and of course the Talk Irish team and community. It's so cool to have won something like this - hope it helps us get decent funding so we can grow the site faster with even better content.

I'm really excited because both this blog and my social learning network www.talkirish.com have been shortlisted for 6 Irish web awards between them!

www.talkirish.com has been shortlisted as:

- Best New Web Application/Service
- Best Discussion forum
- Best Education and Third Level Website
- An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear (Best Irish Language Website)

And www.searchfindlearn.com has been nominated both as Best Technology Website and Best Education Website.

Unfortunately, I can't make the awards ceremony this weekend, as I'll be at the Maemo summit in Amsterdam (annual get-together of the Maemo Community. Technology enthusiasts, apps developers, and platform developers meet to network, share their latest innovation, learn about future trends and just have fun).

And tonight I'm in London, getting ready for 3 days at the Handheld Learning conference - I've got my shiny new iPod touch ready to play with. I'm so excited about getting my hands on other handheld learning devices and getting to chat to as many other learning geeks as possible. Anyone fancies meeting up just tweet @michellegallen