Help me with Steve Kaufmann's Wikipedia page!!

After hearing about Steve's run-in with a little Napolean over on Wikipedia, I thought I'd insert myself into all this fun, so I started a Wikipedia page on Steve himself. I've gone on there a few times before to check out Steve's bio, only to find myself surprised that no one had put anything up yet.

The same is actually true of LingQ as well. I do think that if Livemocha and Lang-8 get Wikipedia pages, then there's no reason why LingQ shouldn't have one. However, let's let that one cool off for a little bit and focus on Steve's entry for now.

Here's how I started it:

Steve Kaufmann is a Canadian polyglot linguist, author, award-winning blogger and the founder of the language-learning website LingQ. He currently speaks twelve languages to varying degrees of fluency: Cantonese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

I modeled the text after Michel Thomas' Wikipedia entry. I made lots of citations, but as the article's not so long, I marked it as a stub in the hope that you guys would step in and expand it.

To keep this from getting deleted, remember to cite! cite! cite! Steve's book is up on the web completely for free, and it's full of good, citable information (Wikipedia loves citations to books). And feel free to dig up any information that might be floating around the internets, especially on official sounding stuff (wasn't there an NPR interview a while back?).

Also, Steve, you're not allowed to edit your own entry, so please don't! But if you've got links to media coverage, that'd be helpful. And, of course, if "anonymous" comes along and edits the entry, hey, who's the wiser?

Online students outperform those receiving face-to-face instruction

A video entitled Social Media Revolution has been making the rounds via, ahem, social media. The video makes the case that social media is "the biggest shift since the industrial revolution".

The video, which tosses out a couple of interesting things for language learning, after the jump.

Read more... Probably the most interesting fact they toss out in respect of language learning is this (at 1:00 in the video):

2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction... 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

So, if you've run into a language teacher who's skeptical about your use of eduFire, Lang-8, LingQ, Livemocha, or any of the rest, hold your ground because you've got some good statistics on your side.

At 2:00 in the video, it points out a language-learning resource that has certainly not gone unnoticed by language learners:

Wikipedia has over 13 million articles. Studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of these articles are non-English.

That means there's a pretty darn good chance that you can get materials in your target language on Wikipedia (and, of course, for you English learners, that means that 22% of the articles on there are in your target language).

With no further ado, here's the video: