His lectures have been viewed over 16 million times with more than 2 million exercises done, but this buzz of activity isn’t in a traditional classroom. Instead it is a series of videos designed to help students with lectures on the internet from Salman Khan, founder of the non-profit Khan Academy.
Duolingo is a new free language education website, currently available for testing in Spanish, French and German.
Its slick website contains a community for language learners and free lessons. These lessons are the combination of images with their foreign language words and quick translation prompts. Even including a speaker of the language pronouncing words. For example, in the first Spanish lesson, Duolingo takes users through two words, boy and girl, then asks the user to translate “soy un niño [I am a boy]”.
One of the most exciting catch-points of Duolingo is that it will help to translate actual websites. Users are given collected snippets of websites and asks them to translate the phrases, for example from Wikipedia articles. Duolingo compares your translation to others and allows you to rate and view the best translations.
The service is currently in private beta.
Tumblr has announced their new Storyboard website. It’s a magazine-style blog covering the “tales behind the dashboard”.
Storyboard’s star team includes Chris Mohney, former senior vice president of content at BlackBook Media, and Jessica Bennett, senior writer at Newsweek and the Daily Beast.
As well as Mohney and Bennett taking up editor roles, writers from Tumblr’s new “Department of Editorial” will craft “stories are told with words, pictures, video, music, charts, animation, or any other voice these creators choose to speak with”.
Submissions can be made to #storyboard.
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Original photograph by OiMax - Flickr.
