Super Editable Lists

The list system was overhauled for many reasons, and still has some tweaks and bug fixes to go through yet, but here we've come to pretty much the ultimate feature that really brings it all together: published list editing.

We've kept published lists (those that anyone can access and study) immutable up until now because the system simply wouldn't have accommodated the changes previously. Prior to the list system upgrade, if someone edited a list that a lot of people were using, there was a good chance those changes wouldn't have propagated much. If you added a word to a list, people who had already added from that section wouldn't get that new word, and conversely, if a word was removed, it would still be studied by those who had already added it. It all depended on where on the list the word was added, and where on the list it was being added from by any given person. And it would have been even more disorienting if sections were removed, added, or shuffled around.

But now, with the system automatically handling changes to lists and updating your studies accordingly, you can be assured that everyone will be studying from the same page, as it were. For example, if someone reports an error in one of our textbook lists, we can make the change and everyone studying that list will get the fix. If you're gradually building a particularly large list yourself, you can publish it early and have people get new words as you add them. All these changes will be reported to everyone studying the list on the given list's page or on the study nav, so everyone is aware of the changes being made, and it won't come as a surprise when your studies change because someone else edited a list.

In addition to this oft-requested feature, we're also putting into testing the ability to give editing powers to other people, or even making a list editable by anyone. If you and a few other classmates want to put together a textbook list for your class, you can work together on it easily, each editing from their own account. And we'll be interested to see what sorts of extensive lists get put together by the community as a whole.

Both published list editing and list editing permission controls are currently only available to beta testers.

Reflections on a Summer of Teacher Training in China

  I'd like to share with the skritter community a little bit about the summer Chinese teacher training program that 高健 (Jacob Gill) and I attended in Beijing this past summer (the ACC K-12 Chinese teacher training program).  The program was organized jointly through ACC (associated colleges in China) out of Hamilton College (in NY) and Hanban.  Hanban is the Chinese organization that builds Confucius Institutes all around the world to promote the Chinese language and Chinese culture.  ACC is well known for its academic rigor and intensity among College students who study abroad in China.  All of its programs have a language pledge, so that the participants all commit to only speak Chinese for the duration of the program.

The goal of the summer program was to improve the Chinese proficiency and further the professional development of non-native speaking Chinese language teachers from the US.  During the six weeks of the program we lived in a hotel on the campus of 北京民族大学 (Běijīng Mínzú Dàxué, Beijing Nationality University).  We spent an average of 3 hours in Chinese language classes on weekdays plus a bunch of extra group discussions on teaching theory, guest lectures on Chinese culture, and visits to schools in Beijing to observe a whole variety of teaching situations.

The student/teacher ratio was ideal with only 10 students and 7 teachers.  On weekdays we started with an hour long 一对一 (yī duì yī, one on one) session with one of the Chinese teachers.  During the 一对一 we had a structured conversation with one of the teachers to practice using the grammar patterns and vocabulary covered in the day's lesson.  Then we moved on to 小班课 (xiǎo bān kè, small class) and 大班课 (dà bān kè, large class).  Both the 小班 and 大班 classes had only five students each.  高健 wrote a great post on the 填鸭式 (tiányāshì, stuff the duck) teaching style there.  Basically we spent a full two hours mimicking every utterance of the teacher in military unison, drilling the patterns into our brains through rote repetition.  I agree with 高健 that this approach was very effective for learning large amounts of grammar patterns and vocabulary quickly.  I probably wouldn't have been able to handle the full six weeks of stuff-the-duck style classes if it hadn't been for all the other opportunities during the day to express my own opinions.  For one of the teaching demonstrations 高健, another classmate, and I created a the short video to practice teaching bargaining skills.

One of the highlights of the program for me was visiting the 海外学年 (Hǎiwài xuénián, Year of Study Abroad) school in Beijing to talk with the Chinese teachers there and observe classes.  The program is really unique because it brings American kids, junior high through high school students, to Beijing to live with a Chinese host family for a full school year and take Chinese language and culture classes.  The program usually hosts several trips throughout the year as well.  I was really impressed by the Chinese language skills of the students there.  Some of the students who go through the program there will probably stick with Chinese and by the time they get to college they will already be fluent speakers of Chinese.

Another highlight of the program for me was our visit to 北京师范大学 (Běijīng Shīfàn Dàxué, Beijing Normal University) having the opportunity to answer questions in Chinese about the teaching situation in K-12 schools in the US.  The ten students from our program served as "experts on the US education system" and answered questions individually from a group of 100 Chinese teachers who were all preparing to spend the next year in the US through Hanban teaching Chinese in k-12 schools.  Above is a picture of the crowd of Chinese teachers.  It was really a rush because I've never had a chance to speak to such a large group before in English, let alone in Chinese.

If you are currently teaching Chinese in the US or considering going that direction, I'd definitely recommend applying for the ACC K-12 Chinese teacher training program.  It is a great opportunity to be funded to spend a summer in China doing intense language study.  If the six week stuff-the-duck extravaganza in Beijing isn't your bag, you might consider one of the other summer Chinese teacher training opportunities cropping up.  Hamilton College in conjunction with STARTALK hosts a two-week long Chinese teacher training program at their campus in New York.  The Confucius Institute in Indianapolis has a weekend workshop every September.  There is also an opportunity for three weeks of teaching practice and professional development at the Confucius Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Skritter Vacations

Here's something that's long overdue: you can now suspend your account when you go on vacation! If you're to be gone for a week or a summer vacation, you can put your account on hold so you don't get billed while you're away. To do this, go to your account page and click "go on vacation" on the right and then let us know how long you'll be gone. You can set this up early, as well, since your account will be suspended two days afterward. And you can always reactivate your account even if you return early.

One thing this does not do, though, is change your the scheduling for your studies. Suspending your account only affects your payments. To make sure you don't get too far behind on your studies, do some overpracticing before you go.

In other news: the Skritter October Newsletter just went out. Check it out!

100,000,000 Items Studied

It's official, Skritter users have studied 100,000,000 items on the site! That means that where you sum up the number of tone, reading, definition, and writing prompts studied, you get 100,000,000.

Nick, Scott, and I are incredibly proud that our little tool has had such a huge impact on learning. And since we're all geeks by nature, we can't wait until we hit the next numerical milestone!

Introducing the Beta Site

Skritter is getting on in age and size. It's been over three years since we started this project, more than four if you count Nick's honors project where he developed the stroke recognition algorithm that's quite central to the system. Given that we're no longer just a scrappy startup, but a company with people who depend on us to be accessible and in good working order for their studies, we're changing the way we work on the site to increase up time and minimize bugs.

Up until now, we've been putting up changes to the site as soon as we make them for everyone to have. The problem is that these changes produce bugs. We have to make changes to improve the site, but when we move things around or introduce new features, bugs invariably crop up, and sometimes they can make things unusable for some, which at this point we very much to avoid. Making bugs is part of the programming process and can't be entirely avoided, and doing extensive in house testing would slow development to a crawl.

So to solve this problem, we're going to start having two versions of the site available at any time: a stable version and a beta version. The stable version will not have the latest updates, but it will be less apt to break. The beta version will have all the latest goodies that Nick and I are working on, but don't be surprised if things act in ways they shouldn't. It's up to you to decide what you would prefer, but know that if you choose to be a beta tester, you can always switch back to stable if things get hairy.

The beta version will constantly be on the move, and is where we will introduce new features and non-critical bug fixes. It will work in monthly cycles, where at the beginning, for the two or three weeks after a newsletter, we'll announce and implement the next version's upgrades, building up to the following newsletter when we'll aim to release them. As the release date approaches, changes will slow, and we'll focus on making sure everything is working right. Beta testers, it's up to you to provide feedback and bug reports to make sure the stable version of the site is as good as it can be.

So how is this different from alpha testing? Alpha testing was good for focusing on particular things we wanted to make sure were done right or we knew were particularly prone to error, but the way it was set up, it does not suit our needs now. To alpha test something, we had to purposefully build it to be available only to alpha testers, and errors could still affect everyone as changes produce tangential bugs. So alpha testing has been turned off and replaced. Since all changes will, by default, go through the beta testing process first, testers will find themselves with a lot more to try out than ever before.

To become a beta tester, go to your general settings and mark yourself down as one, or simply go directly to beta.skritter.com or beta.skritter.cn and confirm that you live for danger and excitement.

Quick Add Bar

Quick Add Bar Blog Post

And lastly, there is the Quick Add Bar.

It's really a very specialized popup. It's temporary and out of the way, and draggable as well. With it you can add new words really quickly, much faster than with the popup where you choose what list to add to each time, but it also allows you to easily make changes and customizations.

What happens now is that when you click the Quick Add buttons in the word popup, or you add through the Quick Add shortcut or page, the bar will show up nearby and inform you whether adding worked or not. It checks to see if you Quick Added the word before, or if you're already studying it, and by default prevents adding these duplicates, though you can always override this. The bar also allows you to undo the change, or choose a different list to add to. And finally, it remembers what list you chose last, so you can in a pinch change the default.

This wraps up our Quick Add feature set addition. We're almost done with the new list system entirely, save for one last big change: editing published lists. It's very nearly ready for prime time, though some optimizations and tests need to be done first. Stay tuned!

Quick Add Page

Now for part two of our Quick Add feature extravaganza. We have just released a Quick Add page, dedicated to getting those words into your studies as quickly as possible. This way, you can bookmark the page and get to it from your browser wherever you are, in case you're not already on Skritter and the Quick Add shortcut isn't available. It works the same as the popup, along with the ability to press Shift-Enter to instantly submit your word for adding to a list. You can get to this page from the vocab lists page and clicking 'Quick Add'.

This page also stores a changes list, and this is the really new part. It gathers all your list changes together into one table you can browse, and it allows you to undo your latest change to any of your lists. Simply click the blue 'Undo' button next to whatever change you want to revert, and the list will go back to the way it was before. This is also available from the list changes popup that's accessible from individual list pages. And being able to undo changes is a key part of the upcoming Quick Add bar, the last and greatest of the three new features. Coming very soon! Or if you want to try it out right away, you can check it out now by enabling Alpha Features here:

General Settings

Simply add from the word popup or the quick add page here and try it out!

Quick Add Shortcut

Okay, it's time to start releasing all those improved quick add features that were decided upon about two weeks ago! The first of the three new features to be finished is the Quick Add shortcut. This is so that you can add words from anywhere on the site, rather than having to go to a specific page. It's pretty simple; you press Shift-A and a draggable quick add popup box appears on the screen. It's designed to make it easy for you to copy and paste text from the site as well as simply typing the words in. And this popup has another shortcut: Shift-Enter submits the words you've added, even waiting for the words to finish processing if necessary. So to summarize, you can add a word to your studies on the site by following these three quick steps:

1. Press Shift-A
2. Type or paste in the word
3. Press Shift-Enter

And the Quick Add popup comes up asking you what list to add the word to. And once that popup gets replaced with the upcoming Quick Add bar, you won't have to even use the mouse to go from start to finish through the whole process. Speedy!

We chose Shift-A by the way because we kind of have to reach to try and find a shortcut that no one else is using. Most every contorted combination of Ctrl and Alt and letters are taken by one browser or plugin or operating system or another. We'll try this one and, since it doesn't use Ctrl or Alt, it probably won't conflict with anything. However, this means that you can't use this shortcut if you're typing something into the site; it's disabled in that case. It's hard to find a good keyboard shortcut to claim!

Now back to work on the other two: a Quick Add page and that Quick Add bar. Both are getting pretty close.