Week 3 - Blog Posting #5 -Social Media

From Faculty Meeting to Over Two Million Served

"This video clip said that China would soon become the number one English speaking country in the world." I announced the new finding to my husband Rick. He rolled his eyes and gave me a look.

I like this presentation "Did you know-Shift Happens". I think it is a great wake up call. It should be listed as one of the best "thrill" video clips to scare most Americans to work harder in order to keep the number one position in the world. The statement: "China is going to become the number one English speaking country in the world" started me thinking: who is the author? Where did he collect his information? And is it accurate? I thought it was time to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and start to find the clues.

Information Collecting
The first clue came from Vipeness who uploaded the film in YouTube on Feb. 8, 2007. He provided the author's name, Karl Fisch. I found Karl Fisch's blog, Fischbowl which is an award winner blog. With all the links in Fischbowl, I got the following information:

•  "Did You Know" was created for his high school staff meeting in Aug. 2006.
• Scott McLeod remixed the video which was the one I saw. 
• "Did You Know 4.0" is going to be shown in The Economist Media Convergence Forum in Oct 20th and 21st. 
• In his updated post "Did You Know", Fisch gave a quick link to "Did You Know Sources (Word, PDF)" 

Bingo! The word file was what I was looking for. How much time did I use to collect the information? Less than 3 minuets. How long would Sherlock Holmes take?! 

Snowball Effect
This video had more than 2.3 million viewers in Feb. 2007. Fisch described how this snowball started in his blog post "Over Two Million Served":

• Early August 2006 – ... showed the presentation in a faculty meeting
  
  
• August 15, 2006 – ...posted the presentation on The Fischbowl. ..some of my staff members wanted to show it to their families at home...at that time, The Fischbowl did not have a very large readership
  
  
• August 17, 2006 – David Warlick blogs about it. ... The comments and emails began.
  
  
• August 23, 2006 – Bud Hunt blogs about it.
  
  
• August 25, 2006 – Will Richardson links to it in a post.
  
  
• End of August and throughout the fall - It spreads fairly quickly and widely through education circles, ..and some non-education specific bloggers also link to it.. over 100,000 people have seen it at this point, but that’s a very rough guess.
  
  
• January 19, 2007 – Scott McLeod, who had been using it in some of his classes and presentations, posts a remixed version of the presentation,..and improves the look quite a bit. He also posts it in multiple formats.
  
  
• January 19, 2007 – Sacretis posts it to YouTube (he’s a student and knows Scott).
  
  
• February 8, 2007 – Vipeness posts it to YouTube (for some reason this is the one that takes off first).
  
  
• Late January/Early February 2007 – Somebody, somewhere, starts sending an email that goes semi-viral with a direct link to Scott’s WMV version.
  
  
• Late January through early March - Gets posted on a lot of other video sites, and lots and lots of links to it from blogs, mostly blogs outside of the education arena.
  
  
• March 13, 2007 – Gets posted on Break.com

This is a perfect example of what Social Media can do. In 7 months, a presentation was viewed from a faculty meeting to over two million people. In 3 years, this video has 4 versions and the influence is still going strong.

Should I Pop the ballon?
Let's go back to the very beginning of this post. The reason for me to start this research was because I had serious doubts regarding China being the number one English speaking country in the world. Let's see the source Fisch got: http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/more-musings-from-milken/ 

From the useless statistics dept: 67% of Americans can name the Three Stooges. Only 17% can name three Supreme Court justices. 87% of college educated Americans can’t locate Iraq on a map. 65% can’t find France. China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world. In China, kids with college degrees make nine times more than those without. In the US, they make less than twice as much.

Apparently the author of weblogg-ed, Will Richardson went to the Milken Conference and heard one of the speakers give the statement. The problem was I couldn't find any information from the original source website concerning who gave the statement and how he/she said it. Unless I am willing to order one section of the 2006 conference DVD for $29.95 or the complete set for $795.00. 

Our family lived in China around high educated Chinese in 4 different cities (include Beijing). Yes, Chinese tried very very very....hard to learn English. The problem was most mainland Chinese (and Taiwan too) learned using the wrong methods. Some English teachers in our university avoided speaking English with our British friend who was a English teacher in the same university. Because they were too embarrassed. When I attended English classes taught by the Chinese, I had trouble understanding their English and they were.....English teachers!! 


Believe it or not, for students to memorize the whole English dictionary is not some thing special in China and Taiwan. A lot of students tried to carry on conversation with my husband Rick and Rick had no clue what they were trying to say. They were so frustrated they ended up spelling out most of the words for him. Poor Rick had to type the words in his brain to figure out what they were trying to say. Rick said most of the words were rarely used vocabulary. Average Americans wouldn't use those words. The biggest entrainment for native English speakers in China is walking on the street and reading all the English signs. 

You can see more examples here.  


I may be wrong. China changes so quickly and we haven't lived there for ten years, but I need more evidence to convince me. 

Why should I even mention this problem? Because of the speed of the new Social Media, wrong or misleading messages can spread very quickly too.