Chinswing: create asynchronous conversations for EFL & ELE

To sum it up, Chinswing is a short of audio-based discussion board: it’s a place where you can post your question or thought to create a conversation (or to answer an existing one) and wait for others to reply in the same fashion. Besides, it gives you the option of keeping a watchlist and get updates via RSS subscription. Conversations can be downloaded as podcasts. Every piece of discussion is searchable by categories or tags (what they call ‘keywords’).

Image 1 from Chinswing FAQ:

Image 2 from Chinswing FAQ:

This a tool with a lot of potential benefits for the foreign language learning environment:

• Learners can trigger their own discussions in an authentic environment.
• They can engage with the speakers of the target language.
• It can turn podcasts into a more interactive activity.

There are many applications, that’ll depend on our imagination (taking into account learners’ level and their language needs):

• Storytelling: chain of events, follow this story (unguided or guided).
• Storytelling: reverse storytelling.
• Agreement/disagreement: practicing agreement/disagreement expressions over hot issues.
• Literature classes: guess the work, a learner triggers the chain by reciting or reading some poetry or prose from a famous literary work, the rest of the students have to first guess where that comes from and continue.
• Independent, autonomous learner: give it a try on your own, find a category or channel you like and take a plunge! (you have to be a risk-taker, languages are not  -only- a dead set of grammatical rules, it’s about speaking and understanding).

What I miss or dislike from the technological point of view:

• Embedding: that we could embed that box in our spaces (WP, Facebook, etc.)
• You can’t share it with other social media sites.
• No private threads.
• Can conversations/replies/comments be deleted?
• There’s no option for text answers, or notes. This would be a useful option for those at work, for instance.
• APIs: Chinswing could be integrated in free/open content or learning management systems in order to substitute textual forums. That’d probably give this app a boost.
• Terms of agreement: why can’t I be the owner of my own content? why can’t we choose from a set of Creative Commons licenses?

Final thoughts:

Despite I do recommend using this tool from the FL perspective, from a general one (i.e. not educational), I wonder if Chinswing has gained ground when people are using Twitter to raise questions, carry out polls, etc. Of course, Chinswing offers that added value of going beyond the textual world, but that can be its own setback. On the one hand, we can  use Twitter at work, home, etc. However, not everyone can record messages from their workplace.  On the other,  text works as a shield for shy folks, whereas voice doesn’t. Voice is identifiable and definitely less neutral than text. And last but not least, time crunch. If we seem not to have time to leave comments anymore, or to keep up with our social media connections…if we are definitely backing up that (in)famous 1% rule (are we really engaged or just nuggetized?), will we have time to record our own questions or will we just twit them? In order to answer that question, it might be interesting to know that Chinswing was launched 2 years ago and it hasn’t reached critical mass…

*Cruel* network effect is the darwinian filter of current flurry of 2.0 technologies.

Or isn’t it?

(Chinswing via Twine “Conversations, Learning and Change“, item added by Levy Rivers on 10/25/08)

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