lastlanguagetextbook post-mortem

[Jim Garrison]

Here is the post-mortem (from my perspective) of our
lastlanguagetextbook.org news release. There's a lot to learn from here
(especially since it is our first time doing such a thing), so I made a
list of all things that came to mind. There will be a couple more news
days during this project, so it's certainly a good idea to reflect and
figure out what we can do better, even if it is a bit painful ;).

If you are new to the list as of the past 24 hours, welcome to the project!

* all in all, good response, especially considering that the news of an
english textbook is not directly relevant to most people
** unexpected success in /r/technology (by counting the number of
visitors from there)
*** comments there are encouraging
** edtechtimes picked up the news release
* we did not effectively leverage people and get them engaged
** out of over 200 visitors to the site, we got not one contribution
** not having the five-second-widget ready with english phrases ready to
be recorded was a mistake
*** RecordAudio: "The audio recorder is being finalized as we speak.
Expect to see it here in the next few days."
**** why did we list it in the blog post if it was not being linked to?
**** this would have (by far) been the most effective way to get people
engaged
*** Lack of clear delegation was the issue here, I think
**** I didn't get the widget deployed until minutes before the announcement
**** I thought there would be stuff in the queue for people to do once
it was deployed (but there wasn't any for English)
**** nobody revised things to link to it
** most of the stuff on the participate.html page is relevant to less
than 1% of out actual site visitors (i.e. it targets people who live in
NYC and either need a job or work for an organization that might want to
partner with us, and for non-NYC visitors it is difficult to find the
relevant ways to get involved)
*** only the Build section gives ways to contribute; the other sections
merely ask people to contact or subscribe to us under certain circumstances
**** if potential partners got in touch with us, those sections of the
site certainly did their job
*** however, even the Build section lacks ways to contribute right now
**** "We will have the curriculum outlined in June and then it will be
time to start building..."
***** it is June now. It should be time to start building. Why did we
announce if it isn't time yet?
**** "If you want to get started sooner..." at the point of reading
this, we shouldn't expect anybody to take the initiative to help
*** seriously, think of the profiles of various people who might have
visited participate.html (especially in hindsight now that we know that
most people so far came from /r/technology), and try to give a reason
why they would come away from that page feeling engaged.
* i don't think this hurt us much in practice, but it was an oversight
not to figure out that duolingo would be launching the same day,
especially when the date had been announced on techcrunch an month
before. (the counter on their web site implied they were launching
today, not yesterday.)
* Other thoughts (things that are easily fixable):
** we created this group at
https://groups.google.com/group/thelastlanguagetextbook but so far there
are zero messages there.
** the storybook lesson is not currently linked in the blog post

Alrighty, off to work ...

Cheers,
Jim

[Ian]

On 06/20/2012 01:10 PM, Jim Garrison wrote:
> *** however, even the Build section lacks ways to contribute right now
> **** "We will have the curriculum outlined in June and then it will be
> time to start building..."
> ***** it is June now. It should be time to start building. Why did we
> announce if it isn't time yet?
> **** "If you want to get started sooner..." at the point of reading
> this, we shouldn't expect anybody to take the initiative to help
> *** seriously, think of the profiles of various people who might have
> visited participate.html (especially in hindsight now that we know that
> most people so far came from /r/technology), and try to give a reason
> why they would come away from that page feeling engaged.

I think you have a cached version of the Build page or we are looking at
different pages. As of launch time the content of this page:
http://thelastlanguagetextbook.org/participate.html

Says this:

>There are many ways to get involved, regardless of your skill level or
experience with >teaching. Lessons develop in three stages. First there
are example sentences that >illustrate some of the learning goals from
the curriculum plan. Next comes audio to match >the sentences, and
finally those source materials are organized and explained in a full
>lesson. Click on the relevant link to learn more and get started
writing the Last Language >textbook.
>
>Write sentences <--- these are links
>Record audio
>Build a lesson

[Jim Garrison]

On 06/20/12 10:40, Ian wrote:
> I think you have a cached version of the Build page or we are looking at
> different pages. As of launch time the content of this page:
> http://thelastlanguagetextbook.org/participate.html

Haha, yes! A reload in my browser fixed the participate page, thus
fixing all my issues with it.