I have 2 suggestions that are rattling around my head so I will just put them here:
On January 1st of every year the top LingQer in terms of activity would be awarded a free basic year. I do not think anyone would game the system for this. If it is non transferable what would be the point? On the other hand it would be a small incentive for some ini the second tier of activity to step it up a bit.
EDIT: the activity would be of course aggregated over the entire previous year, not just the last day of the year
LingQ should really look at making the flash cards more motivating. I suggest introducing a customisable timer to speed people up. I also suggest a feature where the four types of vocab exercise can be used in a single flashcard session. (dictation,multiple choice, fill in the blanks and cards). The type of exercise chosen could be based on the level of the word (1-4) in order of difficulty. New words would be dictation, 1: multiple choice, 2: cloze etc.
Interesting topic. Personally, a timer would kind of stress me out. I dislike vocabularly cards enough, as it is.
My suggestion, if enough people were on the system, would be to have a book club. 30 days to read a work of fiction (or non-fiction) in the foreign language, and then set up a web chat to discuss it.
I suppose that could be fairly easy to monitor. Besides, if it were so easy to trick the system, and there is only one prize, it would be a monumental task trying to ensure you got your chance. I do not see how anyone would be motivated.
I say try it for a year and the most LingQ can lose is one basic membership.
@dooo - Some interesting ideas there dooo! I’m not sure the annual prize is going to do any better than when we had a monthly prize. There is an incentive to game the system and then you may have the case where someone runs away with it early and it loses its motivational appeal. As for mixing up the review tests in some fashion, that’s an interesting idea and one to consider in the future.
The way I see the contest, someone would have work very hard to game the system because it would be the highest average activity score over the year, not just the highest one on Dec 31st.
I have been trying hard to time my flash carding with my watch at 5 secs max. It is working well at motivating the flash-carding along.
I like the idea of gift incentives, but I just want to point out that gaming the system would not be difficult in the slightest. If I were so inclined I could reach a score that is untouchable by non-cheaters within a week (shoot…maybe even in a single day). No bot needed.
I don’t think you’re thinking it through…I made the point that so much is possible in one day just to say that it’s not difficult at all to get more points than non-cheaters. But someone trying to avoid detention can easily spread it out, making it even less work. I don’t want to draw up a how to rack up points strategy for people, but let’s just say it’s not difficult to devise a very simple plan that takes very little effort that isn’t detectable.
Hmm… I don’t think it would be easy to spot. I could game that system in about 10 minutes with a few simple tools. Run a simple task every morning that pulls down a random number of words from maybe 80-150 words from a dictionary then automatically upload a CSV file with this data. To make it even less obvious, write a script that “runs through a 100-200 flashcards” using their API and “learn” a good 40-50 words a day. I think there’s even an API to create LingQs. There are so many ways to disguise your actions here.
Assuming you are correct, what would be the motivation? First you would have to pay for a basic account for a year. Then you would have to run tasks very regularly.
Maybe there could be a rule saying that you have to have a certain % of activity from speaking and writing.
I really don’t care about this that much either, but I don’t understand how you can’t see anyone doing it. The motivation would be, pay for a year (or half or whatever), get one year free. Presumably such a person values the free year, so it’s not like they are doing it just to mess things up. They could do their regular studying and then, in five/ten minutes, boost their score by hundreds when they felt like it so that they could stay ahead and then study the next year for free. Ultimately my point is that, while this is possible, a prize for highest activity score is, unfortunately, not practical.
Web chat would be really awesome. Some people don’t like studying much, but they like chatting. As we found on sharedtalk. com. But there, there is no content item for to study. So it could be the lingQ site more famous…and the visitors can spend the time listening one or two lessons, at least.
If they could integrate the LingQ reading window with a chat window (ie, be able to lingq words and phrases)… I think that would be very enjoyable for a lot of people
Something that might also be interesting and it occurred to me right now is a voice forum. There is an applet called NanoGong which works in Moodle, I wonder if that or something similar could be used in Lingq; after all, listening is the most emphasized skill in Lingq, right?
I was actually thinking the same thing but slightly different. What if LingQ had a place where people could coordinate google hangouts? I don’t know much about Google’s hangout technology but it seems that maybe LingQ could be continuously hosting session that people could join(???)
There is some uncomfortable thing in new Lingq - if im not mistaken its a new feature in Linqq 2.0:
in the tab Details there are two counters - Times Listened and Times Read.
Now if you need to increase/decrease these counters you must open a list in it by clicking and choose new value (the same result you will get if you set mouses focus on this counter and press up/down or Pg up/Pg down keyboards button).
But (and this is not only uncomfortable but it can work wrong also) if mouse`s focus remains on one of these counters (Times Listened or Times Read) and you, for example, try to scroll the page to read it - in this case every press on Page up/Page dn button will increase/decrease the value.
Your statistic will change. I fairly often faced it.
In my opinion, it`ll be more useful to create +1/-1 buttons near each counters. It will get more control on statistics and prevent accidental changing.
Any feedback on that?