kiwicarioca-esl

Well, in my pre­vi­ous post (which you may or may not have read) I was talk­ing about mov­ing my pod­cast to this site. Easier said than done.

Over the past week I’ve been try­ing to nut this out, and have been driven quite balmy by the entire ordeal.

If you go to the itunes sup­port file labelled ‘chan­ging urls’ they offer a simple set of instruc­tions to change the url’s, and you’re lead to believe that the entire pro­cess is indeed pain­less. Even for new­bies like me with lim­ited patience for com­puter code, script, tag’s, rss feeds, and the like. 

But alas it is not pain­less, indeed quite the oppos­ite. You see the link they provide never works. I must have tried in excess of 50 times, won­der­ing each time..‘what is the prob­lem here’, or ‘they must be over­loaded’, and ‘but this is a pro­fes­sional com­pany, surely they know what they’re doing’. But, any­way, it seems they don’t.

The altern­at­ive solu­tion provided by the linked screen, says “if you don’t have any luck con­nect­ing to this link (they know) then try con­nect­ing to the itunes store’. Right, well at least they provide an altern­at­ive one summises.

So, off I tottered to the itunes store, and under the pod­casts head­ing began my search for ‘sub­mit­ting a pod­cast’, or ‘adding a pod­cast’ or ‘pod­cast regis­tra­tions’ link. Some­thing, any­thing that might give a clue as to where to head next. But, alas noth­ing. Indeed the mighty iTunes web­site is a labyrinth of left and right turns, back­tracks, deadends and blind alleys that lead abso­lutely NOWHERE.

So, next I watched a video about how to change url’s with itunes, and was lead down the same dead dan­delion path. The video was old, and things had changed. So, what to do? Of course!!… I need itunes sup­port (why didn’t I think of that earlier?).

But, hang on a second. I for­got about nav­ig­a­tion rules imposed at the itunes website. 

1.Make it almost impossible to loc­ate the itunes sup­port sec­tion, and thus reduce the expendit­ure deal­ing with cus­tomer sup­port enquiries. 

2.Answer every pos­sible ques­tion that a cus­tomer could ever ask and include it on the web­site so that the doc­u­ment is so long and com­plic­ated that the cus­tom­ers will be too exhausted to ever want to con­tact us. 

3. Offer a link that doesn’t work, ever, that sends cli­ents right around the twist, so they never try to con­tact us.

You think I’m exag­ger­at­ing don’t you? Well, my chal­lenge to you is ‘go and find the itunes sup­port email address, in under half an hour’. No, to be fair I did loc­ate it within the half hour time frame, and with ecstacy flow­ing though my veins I dot­ted down my con­cerns in an email.

Within 24 hours upon check­ing my inbox I saw the words ‘itunes sup­port’ and grasped at the email. Unfor­tu­nately, the email was a stock stand­ard reply say­ing ‘go to the itunes sup­port page, entitled ‘chan­ging urls with itunes’ and fol­low the instruc­tions. Oh, dear…my worst nightmare.

Well, it was blatanty obvi­ous, whomever or whatever sent the email hadn’t read my tra­gic story of des­pair or had simply chosen to ignore it. And this is my point. 

One would have thought that a mega­lith of the com­puter world would have given more thought to the way in which they respond to cus­tomer enquir­ies. Don’t you think? After hours and hours of search­ing, utterly exhausted I decided to send them an email only to be fobbed off, and sent pack­ing to where I’d come.

As a human’s name was attached to words in the itunes email, I shot off a terse response explain­ing my dis­ap­point­ment and dilemma once more. Again, the response was stock stand­ard ‘thankyou for your enquiry, we do appre­ci­ate your con­tact and we can assure you we will do everything we can to assist you…blah, blah, blah’ but then below all of this hog­wash were the words…‘I did read your email and I’ve sent it to another person’. 

Great, I was mak­ing pro­gress. Another few emails later and I finally began a con­ver­sa­tion with a per­son. Yes, a real per­son, with thoughts and feelings. 

If you com­mand the title of ‘thought lead­ers in the 21st cen­tury’ wouldn’t it make sense to chan­nel some of that thought in to sup­port­ing the people who are keep­ing the till filled with cash. I’ve been com­pletely put off by the entire exper­i­ence, so I’ve pur­chased a Skype world plan which gives me 400 minutes a month to call these machines, with names. Should we accept robotic replies? I find it intol­er­able, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

So, ‘world’ get out there and fight these megalith’s and call them on Skype, nag them, cre­ate havoc for them until they under­stand ‘cus­tomer ser­vice and sup­port’. Sup­port doesn’t mean ‘fob off’ it means ‘help’ and genu­ine help, not a par­lance of dirth dis­guised as ‘care and con­cern’. It’s unac­cept­able, intol­er­able and it’s got to stop.

I’ve eaten humble pie, many a time. It doesn’t taste as good as the real thing though.

The almighty pie is as ubi­quit­ous with New Zea­l­and and Aus­tralian culin­ary his­tory as the ham­burger is to the American’s. Pies are con­sumed by the truck­load every day in Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and. They’re scoffed, hurled, trod­den on, frozen, gif­ted, marveled, com­pared, cham­pioned, premiered, bought, sold, chundered, ogled, eaten and finally passed. 

I don’t think a heart patient would be scoff­ing down too many pies given the fat con­tent, and cal­or­ific value (some­thing they share with their more famed Amer­ican cousin, the bur­ger), but that doesn’t seem to bother any­one else. 

So, let me intro­duce you to the ‘pie’.

In this les­son you’ll learn how to make a pie, com­pare a pie and say pie in 20 dif­fer­ent ways.

Ready? Let’s go.

This struck me as being per­tin­ent to the cur­rent eco­nomic, and global cli­mate, and…so I was moved to make a video about the subject. 

The story of The Blind Men and the Ele­phant is also strongly related to my views on edu­ca­tion and Per­son­al­ized Online Learn­ing and Teach­ing. Cer­tainly the move­ment towards online learn­ing is gain­ing momentum. In my opin­ion we will see big shifts in learn­ing and teach­ing in the com­ing years as online learn­ing, mobile learn­ing and web 2.0 tech­no­lo­gies gain popularity. 

Let’s face it teen­agers today twit­ter daily, sms by the second, and are in con­stant con­tact with friends and fam­ily through mobile tele­phony devices. It appears inev­it­able then that web 2.0 learn­ing will even­tu­ally be the learn­ing method of choice. Online learn­ing is ‘green’ and eco-friendly and that’s what the new gen­er­a­tion under­stand. At least I hope they do. Trav­el­ling to and from a learn­ing estab­lish­ment costs money and burns energy, doesn’t it? Am I wrong? So, why then jump in the car and go to uni­ver­sity, or your local lan­guage school? Learn online and save the planet. Sure, you need face to face con­tact, but that can be with peers, colleagues,and online teach­ers, can’t it? 

I’m not sug­gest­ing I have all the answers, but as far as Per­son­al­ized Online Learn­ing is con­cerned I believe its a valid altern­at­ive. Cer­tainly for informal learn­ing, such as learn­ing to speak Eng­lish. Per­haps, ESL teacher’s can take the lead then and inspire other insti­tu­tions to fol­low? What do you think? 

Part of the goal of online learn­ing should be peer col­lab­or­a­tion and involve­ment. Why? Well, in the spirit of The Blind Men and the Ele­phant it provides the oppor­tun­ity for stu­dents around the globe to get together and have a chat. Share stor­ies, and gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of each other. In my opin­ion that’s the big advant­age of online learn­ing. Cer­tainly, I’ve noticed people from Iran, Tunisia, Croa­tia, Spain, Ger­many, The United States, Uzbek­istan, Rus­sia, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Slov­akia, Chile, Brazil, Mex­ico, Venezuela.…and many more coun­tries vis­it­ing my posts. So, it’s my dream to have these stu­dents learn­ing together from each other, with the sup­port of qual­i­fied online instructors. 

In a world of global con­flict and con­stant mis­un­der­stand­ing, I think online learn­ing provides the plat­form to breach the divide, and provide a bet­ter world for future gen­er­a­tions. So, as teach­ers don’t we have a respons­ib­ilty to each other and future gen­er­a­tions to instig­ate the change?

Unfor­tu­nately the older gen­er­a­tion make the decisions that bind us. Am I right? But the older gen­er­a­tion were edu­cated 30 years ago, so really they’re not ‘with it’ are they? That’s why the stu­dents need to start design­ing the cur­riculums. If we involve stu­dents in the decision mak­ing pro­cess won’t they be more motiv­ated to learn? By cre­at­ing envir­on­ments that applaud cre­ativ­ity aren’t we change lead­ers rather than change pro­cras­tin­at­ors. Ima­gine stu­dents from Iran, Rus­sia, USA, and China con­vers­ing on a daily basis, shar­ing ideas and opin­ions? How would that shape the future? It would be look­ing pretty good, wouldn’t it? 

If we delay the move to online learn­ing we are only delay­ing the inev­it­able, aren’t we? I think edu­cat­ors should take it upon them­selves to move stu­dents online now. I’m try­ing to do my part. It’s dif­fi­cult, but I think it’s the right way for­ward. What about you, what do you think? 

Who are The Blind Men? 

I invite your opin­ions. Thanks for listen­ing, I hope your enjoy the video. Oh, by the way…this video is avail­able to stu­dent sub­scribers in mp3 format, with study notes. Best, Robert