Hi there, well, ahem (clears throat)...this is odd writing normally (I mean informally) in this CMS (backend of the website) as I have spent what seems like forever working inside the website but I think the site will develop to be a bit more relaxed and conversational than it is at the moment.  When you build something like this you do get a bit flushed with your own self-importance and become a tad corporate in the way you write, don't you think?

Anyway, I do hope you like the website and what I am trying to do, which is basically claw back some of the investment that has gone into the materials by enabling teachers and learners around the world to use the them inexpensively and also enable them to earn some money from them and the Out There concept.

Being able to help teachers and learners to become part of an Out There community and make money from their membership and connections with us has only just become possible and is down to the development of a few amazing online services such as language teaching and learning websites like www.myngle.com and www.babbel.com, free virtual classrooms like www.wiziq.comand www.twiddla.com where you can teach online using our materials and, in the case of wiziq.com find students and charge them effortlessly.

A week or so ago I was thinking about how to encourage teachers to use the teacher driven lesson plans to set up their own summer schools or small language schools and then I came across www.meetup.com whilst reading an article about how Barack Obama won the US presidential election. The site was a revelation to me, check it out.  I have set up a couple of trial groups in London using it.  Basically the site enables anyone to set up, schedule, provide materials for and charge for meetings around any interest (think English lessons or language exchanges). The crucial thing it does is enable you to use public spaces to meet (pubs, clubs, museums, galleries, parks etc.), which is ideal for us. I think we are the first people to actually schedule a proper taught English lesson on there, which will be taught in the coffee bar of a well-known shop on Oxford Street on Friday (early days, there may be just a few of us)! So you don't really need to even have a school with classrooms now, amazing eh?

If you are a teacher and want to use our lesson plans you can become a member for just £28 (first 500 members) and then you have the following options:

1.   Teach the teacher delivered lesson plans to classes in your school and either go outside to practise (English speaking countries) or get your students to go online to find practice partners on Skype or language exchange websites

2.   Sign up to meetup.com then schedule and teach our group lessons anywhere at any time and charge for them online beforehand.  You can also effortlessly recruit students via meetup.com itself (14,000 registered users are on it looking for English practice)

3.   Recruit students, charge beforehand and teach our group lessons online using wiziq.com (or twiddla.com, which is cool because you can write on pdfs inside it but it doesn't have the in-built marketplace and charging of wiziq.com)

4.   Start an Out There language exchange - use the self-study lessons to prepare learners for a more focused language exchange experience face-to-face via meetup.com or organise one online

5.   Teach one-to-one lessons online using our self-study lesson plans and the websites above or Skype prime or many other websites that have students looking for teachers online

I think the reason our lesson plans are so flexible and fit so well with new technology and websites is because we had to build them to work in an environment over which we had very little control, i.e. the real world.  So they can work within any medium pretty much and all focus on communication tasks. Which is very much where most progressive people in education AND technology appear to be heading anyway (think: experiential, active, kinesthetic teaching and learning).  Also testing is less of an issue because you have actually, practically, proven you can do it and you can record it and send the proof to anyone via email.

I won't bang-on here now (because I need to keep working on the site and get it live), but what I will finish on today are these thoughts.

This website is based upon a template with a custom design, it cost relatively little to build. Meetup.com, wiziq.com, twiddla.com (and others that will come along very soon) cost very little to use and/or customise and will only get better at what they do. To create this website and the services and individual earning opportunities I described above would have been impossible two months, let alone a year, ago.

I want to use this website to explore the future of language teaching and learning as it happens and I will try to keep on adding things to this site, recommending software, widgets or other websites and try to continue innovating on behalf of learners and teachers who think they need something a bit different.

I have a recorded interview with a guy who learned fluent Thai in just over a year at a very different type of school in Bangkok and will post it soon, I also have some interviews with polyglots about how they personally set about learning a language and when I travel or see stuff that interests me I will post about it (such as the English for Progress - 2nd Dialogue conference that I spoke at the invitation of the British Council in November this year).

Cheers for now...

Jason