learningonyourterms
Praxis users on Twitter, and community support
The Praxis user community, spread out across five sites (welcome to the fold, EnglishPod!) is without a doubt our company’s biggest strength. One of the things we’re trying to do more of is help our users connect and build relationships with other users — we do, after all, believe that learning is a strongly social activity.
One small step to that end is the new Community page on this blog. Right now it has a small but growing list of our users that are active on the microblogging service Twitter (message @chinesepod with your Praxis username to get added to the list!), but will expand in the future to help bring our users together.
If you have any ideas of what we can do with this page, or other efforts to support the Praxis community here on LOYT, let me know in the comments are directly via e-mail.
Reset and reconnect
On my personal blog, I wrote recently about idea mills — blogs in which ideas are presented to readers with the goal of enticing the reader to mull over the idea, chew it up, spit it out, and help refine the raw idea into something more useful, both for the writer and for the reader. It’s an idea that I have spent a lot of time pondering.
My goal for Learning on Your Terms has always been to connect with and spread ideas through our user community. We are lucky enough to have thousands of really bright people visit our sites and learn from our products every day, and I think that it is from them — you! — that we can learn the most.
Ken Carroll, when he was writing heavily for the ChinesePod blog in 2006 and early 2007, often referred to the user community we had then as “the Big Brain” — a nod to the pure and simple truth that as a group you are far smarter than any one of us. I hope to over the next weeks and months plug back into that Big Brain, put out the ideas that are bouncing around our heads, throw them out for everyone to chew on and pick apart, and then learn.
I’m looking forward to it.