Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: A few thoughts about Livemocha

A week ago I decided to go to 
www.livemocha.com
 and sign up. The first 
thing I noted is that you need some kinds of virtual coins to buy 
yourself the access to the courses available on the site.
There are two kinds of points: mocha points and teacher points. When you 
make progress on the courses you're taking, you earn mocha points. When 
you review and correct other learners' submissions, you earn both mocha 
and teacher points. Mocha points also counts as virtual coins. The only 
difference is that mocha points are cumulated whereas virtual coins go 
down when you buy new items.
The bottom line is that you don't need to spend real money if you're 
willing to help others with their writing and speaking tasks.
Livemocha is not perfect, in fact it suffers from a major flaw: it 
favors quantity over quality. The same task - reviewing a particular 
submission - can be given to more than one person. The first one to 
complete the review gets 30 mocha points while the others only 20. In 
the beginning, I used to give detailed reviews. For instance, a Spanish 
learner once sent a recording, I listened to it a first time to get a 
general overview and then I listened to it again and jot down a few 
notes regarding the problems that needed to be addressed the most. I 
earned 20 mocha points. The first review, whose author earned 30 points, 
read "Good! Keep up the good work.". Both our reviews were voted "very 
useful" by the asker.
After I'd had enough of all this, I gave in to the dark side and started 
to give crappy reviews as well. Now I have a lot of points and have 
access to any feature I like.
By the way, I've even been awarded a virtual medal for my numerous 
contributions to the community as a teacher.
Ah... it feels *so* good to be useful!
 
Kiuhnm

 complete the review gets 30 mocha points while the others only 20.
 
Yeah it can be a bit of a lottery -- sometimes you get a good 
thought-out review and other times you get a simple "good job" even 
though you've made several mistakes. Awarding more points to the first 
review makes sense, because you want at least one native speaker to 
review each exercise, but I agree that the system could be improved upon.
 
Two suggestions if you want consistent high-quality reviews:
 
a) you can use your points for a "professional review" (I don't remember 
exactly what it's called, but you always have the option to select it 
from the exercise page)
 
b) make friends with active users. Every time you complete an exercise, 
you can choose to send a message to, I believe, up to 12 of your 
contacts. As long as you're giving them detailed comments, they'll 
reciprocate. I'm learning Spanish and this is working very well for me. 
I like to leave voice messages using my headset - it's quicker, easier, 
and much more useful to them.
 
-- 
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
will eventually recreate the complete works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
~> 
http://www.wysinnwyg.com/
 

 and much more useful to them.
 
I'll try that.
 
Kiuhnm

 You can ask a teacher but it'll cost you 120 coins!
 
By your own admission, you can get 120 coins by writing four to six 
half-assed comments. That doesn't sound like a lot of work. And from 
what I've seen, the teacher's comments are always very thorough.
 
But I prefer using friends. It's way more fun, you practice whenever you 
talk to them, and the exchange is 1:1 instead of 4-6:1. You just need to 
shop around for people who will give you great feedback when you do the 
same.


 same.
 
Yeah. Everyone should learn how to use friends :)
Jokes aside, I'll start "shopping around"...
 
Kiuhnm

On 8/22/2012 16:49, Kiuhnm wrote:
[...]
 
Another major drawback is that I can't search for native American 
speakers. The "suggested patterns" list is totally useless. Why should I 
be interested in speaking with a person whose English level is 
intermediate??? And what if I want to talk only with Americans? Sorry, 
but Egyptians won't cut it for me.
 
Kiuhnm