I have always been a firm believer that language and culture are inseparable. If you start teaching or learning a language the culture will play a major role from day one. Often the culture of a certain part of the world is even the reason why we want to learn a new language.
This week Livemocha and eduFire added some nice features to their platforms, both very different from each other but both emphasizing the cultural aspects.
On Livemocha students from across the world can now share stories and pictures from the country or city they live in with the community. It reminds me a bit of Dailybooth, a platform were people from across the globe share one photo per day with the community.
According to the Livemocha Twitter account the community shared over 5000 pictures in less than 20 hours after the launch, pretty impressive.
Today I received an email from Marco at eduFire. He pointed me to an interesting class that will take place on Saturday 19th at 2pm PT / 11pm CET and is called “LIVE FROM Egypt: Learn about the Egyptian Revolution from a Teacher Located in Alexandria, Egypt“. The class is set up by Gihan Elsherif, one of eduFire’s long time Arabic teachers with more than 2250 sessions under her belt.
This class talks about the Egyptian revolution which is the most powerful one in the history of the world. This class talks about:
1-The regime in Egypt, what has led to this revolution.
2-The details of the Egyptian revolution.
3-The tools that the Egyptian regime did to overcome the revolution and how the people dealt with and conquered it.
4-The gains of the revolution and the gradual government concessions and what after the revolution.
Again, culture meets language and vice versa. To hear the story of the Egyptian revolution and being able to interact with Gihan by asking her questions about what she, her family and neighbors feel and have experienced takes citizen journalism to the next level and I think this could be a very interesting niche for eduFire to explore further.
You can still join this class, just follow this link: http://edufire.com/classes/20509
Related Links:
