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Sticking my eyes to the desktop eight hours per day has been
thickening my glasses year by year. My flat-mate, who is working
for an E-commerce company, is also in the same situation but his
currently overjoyed laugh and cheerful voice in front of the PC
usually awake me at midnight when I am still in the mist of my
dreams. Surprisingly because he is not an "easy to hit it off"
type among my pals and hard to believe a young guy with the
motto "24 hours are not enough for a day" can be addicted
to online game or chit-chat. So what has oddly been happening to
him really inspired me to find out the reasons.
Going beyond all my expectations, it turned out that he has been
using Paltalk, a pretty popular online chat tool, to find
some friends in Asia to have an overview of this emergent mecca
before his adventurous trip to Japan, Korea and South East Asian
region. All of that information seemed not transparent enough
for a doubtful mind, I decided to install this chat tool and
explore by myself.
Visiting some forums of languages learning was an eye-opener for
me when I noticed that many people use Paltalk, Skype,
Yahoo messenger or AOL not only for fun but also for teaching
and learning. An English speaking room in Paltalk impressed me
much as the admin, a retired Australian teacher, volunteered to
teach English for some 10 people who are mostly from Asian
countries. When typing is as old as hills, talking over a
microphone in this kind of voice conference can help those
"students" listen and imitate the native accent. This teacher
asked everybody to browse a website, read an article, pick up
the microphone and raise hand to share ideas in the conference.
I also joined another one as the topic was about movies - my
favorite. When I was still wavering about going to see "The
memoirs of a Geisha" because I had never had a profound interest
in any Asian movie without Jackie Chan, one Japanese woman
helped me summarize its content from the Japanese original book.
From her talk, many splendid types of kimono and the ups and
downs in geishas' life really encouraged me to spend one night
at the cinema and helped me know that Zhang Zi Yi, Wanatabe Ken,
Gong Li, etc. are also brilliant stars. We exchanged countless
thank you's as I had a lesson about Japanese culture and she
could practice to brush up her English. I am not totally into
the definition of E-learning and its advantages because you can
search a huge mountain of information about this aspect on the
Internet. However, what I have told you is also called
E-learning, isn't it? My eyes would be a little tired but
that is worthwhile because I have received many useful lessons.
Oops, probably you are complaining of my verbosity and the
irrelevance to the title of this writing. Anyway, making money
is not like a knife through butter.
I read some very interesting news yesterday that a ninth-grade
Indian teaches Mathematics for a younger one in the U.S. This
talented tutor can earn 10 bucks for every hour, which sounds
very impressive. Here, long distance does not matter when they
can send word files by email or Instant messenger and do
exercises by talking in a voice chat conference. The interesting
thing is this Indian has to use a voice changer software to
enhance his voice quality as you know, Indian accent and dialect
are not so easy for everyone in the world to understand. That is
what we usually say "necessity is the mother of invention" and
earning cash is not something out of reach.
Definitely I will tell my flat-mate about those. A cool idea of
making money would pop into his mind, legally, why not?
About the author:
Chris Martin is an author with a profound interest in
education, E-learning and all useful tools for modern pedagogy
to "water the young generation seeds" Contact him at
huutrong@audio4fun.com
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