Education 2.0

We may have passed on the opinion of one blogger earlier in the week that Web 2.0 was dead in China. I was very pleased, though, to see in this week's Economist how Skype and other decidedly Web 2.0-ish features (podcasts, RSS, etc. etc.) are being used to transform language teaching by one Shanghai entrepreneur.

I'm a big fan of Ken Carroll's ChinesePod service and use it to help brush up my Mandarin which has never been good enough to have got rusty. It's certainly making good use of the both the global interest in China and new technologies. Interesting to see that his company, Praxis Language, has also now turned its attention to Spanish.

This isn't a new story and ChinesePod's success has been well-reported. It's good, though, to see it hitting mainstream media and to hear that they now employ 35 people. Good for them!