New Japanese Marriage Law Causes Instant 6% Divorce Increase
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
I came across an article that caught my eye this morning about a new law in Japan which allows married women to receive 50% of their husband’s company pension upon divorce. The immediate effect of the law has been a 6% spike in divorce filings throughout the country.
The fact that a wife can now get 50 percent has ignited guys to think about their fragile marriages…
This news should raise eyebrows for anyone who is familiar with Japanese society. The country has a long history of being a ’salaryman’ society in which for a majority of city-dwelling men, work always comes first and husbands come home late at night, rarely talking or interacting with their wives and families.
Men near the end of their corporate lives, he said, are especially edgy. “To be divorced is the equivalent of being declared dead — because we can’t take care of ourselves…
…When his wife told him eight years ago that she was “99 percent” certain she was going to dump him, Amano said, the only things he then knew how to do in the kitchen were to fry eggs and pour boiled water over noodles.
It is apparent to me that this new law will have a lot of deep social implications within the country. I won’t go into details about my personal opinion of the new law, suffice to say that I think it will eventually force a sea change in the attitudes of Japanese corporations towards their male employees. I predict that as laws which give more rights to women such as these become more prevalent, we will see a greater emphasis on work-family/life balance in Japan.
Former JETs, Check-Out Your Local JETAA Branch!
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
Lately we have been working a lot with the Jet Alumni Association here in Seattle. Kevin, one of the Co-Founders of Speekit participated in the JET Program as an ALT last year and had an amazing experience with it. For clarification, the JET program is the Japan Exchange Teaching Program. Participants of this program travel to Japan yearly to teach English in public schools across the country. It is a great opportunity for recent college graduates to travel to Japan and experience the culture first hand as well as to gain a valuable life experience.
Something that a lot of returning JET participants do not know is that there is an excellent alumni organization for them when they return from their experience in Japan, the JET Alumni Association. One of the JETAA’s goals is to “strengthen and maintain the bonds of friendship developed between JET Programme participants.” Beyond this, it has been our experience that the JETAA and provides many opportunities for their members to grow professionally, meet new people, grow a close circle of friends, and stay involved with Japanese-American relations.
If you have ever been a part of the JET Program, become a member of your local JETAA branch. Our friends at our local chapter (Pacific North West) have given us many opportunities to meet new people and spread the word about the upcoming launch of Speekit. Thanks guys, and keep up the good work!
Startup ideas Paul Graham wants to fund
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
I just caught an interesting post over at the EduFire blog which essentially says that Paul Graham would be interested [in investing] in their company. I really have no idea if he would be interested in EduFire, but their post did get me interested in checking Paul’s blog post on the topic.
Down at #13, he mentions “Online Learning”:
13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.
One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there’s already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.
I would argue that Speekit fits nicely into this framework- e-learning as it stands now (with the exception of a few innovative new companies), is still stuck in version 1.0 where learning platforms mostly consist of texts copied onto some type “LMS” or Learning Management System. I envision Learning v2 as involving all of the media types that the web has to offer, not just text on a page.
Several new and innovative companies are attacking this head-on. EduFire, Tutor.com, GlobalScholar, and TutorVista are pairing tutors with learners in live video conference, LiveMocha is enabling students to teach each other, and Mango Languages is using an online flashcard approach. Software like Rosetta Stone and Instant Immersion are the 800 pound gorillas in the room as far as language training goes, but still offer a fairly outdated mode of delivery– primarily the CD-ROM.
What ALL of these companies lack, however, is a strong pedagogy. I would venture a guess that most of these companies are being built by by technophiles and business people with a flair for education. I wonder if they sought-out advice of field experts, in this case respected career educators and researchers, before jumping full-on into the education industry. If they did, in many cases, it is not apparent (especially for some of the currently hip ’social language learning’ sites).
Kevin and I realized when embarking on the current version of this project that while we have had experience tutoring and teaching others, we were far from experts in education. Because of this, we recruited a small team of internationally respected foreign language professors who we tasked with coming up with a strong pedagogy for our service.
The relationship has been working beautifully thus far, and we hope to share the fruits of our labors with you all soon. The teaching methods we have built into our service are based in science and have a proven track record as the most efficient way for students to acquire foreign languages. Not being a know-it-all has been proving very rewarding indeed!
Can People Learn a Second Language the Way They Learned Their First?
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The reason I am curious is because certain language training programs (like Rosetta Stone) claim to teach you a new language the same way you learned your first. It seems like a nice concept, and a highly marketable one at that, but I wonder whether these methods have their roots based more in science or in marketing.
In thinking about this question I have reflected on my experience studying Spanish, French and most recently, Japanese. Since I don’t remember how I learned English, my first language, I can only base my reasoning on what information the people who make these claims provide me with. Since I already mentioned Rosetta Stone, have a look at this page to read about their method: http://www.rosettastone.com/personal/howitworks . For a far more in-depth look at the topic, you can read the Wikipedia article on language acquisition here.
After talking with a friend who has been a language educators and researcher for more than 20 years, along with my own small amount of research, I have come to a conclusion that adults acquire new languages far differently from children because our brains are developmentally at different points. This isn’t to say that people acquiring a second language are not benefited from being immersed in it to some degree as children are, nor that we are not aided by situational learning experiences.
What I am suggesting is that adults have different ways of learning, memorizing and remembering from children. Focusing too much energy on crafting a method which attempts to teach adults as if their brains were the same as those of children is probably a waste of time from the standpoint of educational effectiveness (especially since humans do not completely understand the science of language acquisition yet). If science can prove me wrong, I will change my mind.
What we’ve been up to lately
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
We’ve had a lot of momentum building for us lately. Kevin and I have been working on expanding our network of lesson designers / educators as well as building strong relationships with institutions that also recognize the potential for our exciting e-learning platform. We have some great institutions supporting us so far and we are working on gaining traction with more of them. If there is anything I have learned from the past, it is that support from established players or lack thereof can be the crucial element which can make or break a young company.
In terms of development, the platform is coming along at a steady pace as well. We plan to launch our initial service early this coming fall in Seattle. Stay tuned!
A Vision for Bettering Language Learning
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
So, what is the ultimate goal of Speekit? We want to help people from all walks of life to elevate their understanding of the world through the powerful medium of language and culture. Of course this goal is not easily achievable, especially through any traditional means of education such as offering traditional classes, opening a language school, selling books, or anything like that.
Up until now, a relatively elite few of the world’s citizens have had access to the vast knowledge and expertise contained within the walls of the world’s best Universities. With the advent of certain modern technologies like DVD, and the Internet, people from all ages have been able to access knowledge and education which might have otherwise been unattainable to them through traditional avenues. Despite this, both institutional and self-guided courses have remained relatively expensive, inconvenient, or not up to par in terms of quality of instruction.
Specifically, the current state of non-institutional education and e-learning still leaves a lot to be desired, but also reveals a huge opportunity. We believe that we can make the biggest impact on the world by offering a high-quality service through non-traditional, non-institutional avenues.
Kevin and I think it is possible to utilize the Internet to create economies of scale in education which will make the highest quality learning obtainable to more people than ever before. Speekit aims not simply to offer an accessible education, but to create an entirely new standard for language learning.
Congratulations to GlobalScholar.com!
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
A post on TechCrunch.com on Wednesday announced that GlobalScholar.com closed a $27M investment round. Wow! There are more than a few interesting startups in this space offering everything from pre-paid tutoring to on-demand tutoring, to one-off homework help and more. These startups along with Speekit see the gap between where education currently is and where it should be. Education as a whole lags far behind other industries in terms of innovation and technology adaption which has created a HUGE opportunity for all of us.
By some estimates, education is a $3 trillion global industry and foreign language learning alone makes-up about $20 billion of it. Kevin and I are confident that Speekit can find a little room in there somewhere 
LaunchPad is Well Received
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
In order to create Launchpad, we collaborated with a medium-sized English school named English Circle in Osaka, Japan. They were able to get set-up and ready to teach online this past weekend. So far, they are very pleased with the system.
If you are interested in checking-out Launchpad for yourself, you head on over to www.OfferWebLessons.com and sign-up for a free 30-day trial. As always, please let us know if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.
Speekit Launchpad Coming Soon!
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
So what have we been up to over the past couple of months? An exciting new service called Launchpad! Launchpad will allow language schools, tutors, companies, or anyone at all to offer live online language lessons using online video conference.
The best part about Launchpad is that customers can choose to use either their own teachers to teach lessons or to use Speekit’s teachers. If you are in the tutoring business and have more requests for lessons than you can handle, simply use Speekit’s tutors to pick-up the slack. You can also use Launchpad for offering make-up lessons or to start your own online school.
Here is a short list of features:
- Offer live, online lessons to your students.
- Customize your Launchpad site’s colors and logo.
- Free signup, pay only for time spent teaching with the video-conference.
- Upload Powerpoint presentations, and share your desktop with students.
- Â Maintain control of your prices/billing process.
- Use your teachers or ours.
If you have any questions or comments about Launchpad, please let me know. We will be releasing the beta version next week (Oct. 29th).
Steve Markowitz joins Speekit as Senior Advisor
Posted by Aaron Lovelace
Speekit has a new Senior Advisor! Steve Markowitz officially signed-on as co-founder and Senior Advisor to Speekit today. Steve is a valuable person to have on board and we are confident that he will contribute a lot to our efforts. Steve founded MyPoints.com, a loyalty rewards website which he took public in 2001. He later sold for cash to United Airlines. He is fluent in Japanese and is a lecturer at UC Berkley. Steve has extensive management experience and is currently Executive Chairman of Aquea Scientific and Stockton Funds LLC.
Welcome aboard, Steve!
