Part 3

I think that where I really come on this issue is we should not try to suggest that doing things for a benefit is somehow less moral than appearing to do it for free. As in the case of Professor Baranick, of course, he is paid as a professor at Rice University. Many teachers who work in the public system look down at private companies involved in education but, of course, those teachers are paid for teaching. They don’t volunteer their services free of charge. Even volunteers…I remember speaking once to the head of Volunteer Vancouver which is the leading volunteer umbrella organization here in Vancouver, calling Kelly and she was very frank in saying that volunteers have their own -- not selfish -- but their own personal motives for volunteering. It may be to make contacts; it may be because they enjoy the social interaction. Different people are motivated by different things and, at least in my view, I don’t think we should make moral judgments on those kinds of motivations. We all derive great benefit and enjoyment from consuming products and services for which we pay. I think someone who works for money…it might be an artist who likes to be paid, it might be an athlete who likes to be paid, it might be a shoemaker…I think the fact that these people are paid doesn’t mean that they are purely motivated by greed and money, they are probably, in most cases, equally motivated by the desire to do a good job. Therefore, even the person who is being paid is, to a large extent, altruistically motivated; motivated to help others.

I know that in our lumber business we enjoy – we, me and my employees – we enjoy solving problems for people. We are happy when we can sell a good product. When we have a problem, perhaps a quality complaint that we deal with and resolve satisfactorily, we are happy to provide the service. Customer Service at The Linguist, Jill, if someone emails her or phones her with a problem and we can find a solution, we are happy. So, I think people are happy to provide value. The decision on what level of compensation, if any, they are entitled to for providing this service is largely up to them. It’s up to them and it’s up to the market. You know, how much money should Tiger Woods make, who knows? Why does Tiger Woods make so much more money than a school teacher? Maybe it has to do with the fact that there are many people who can teach school and not so many people who can play golf as well as Tiger Woods. But, Tiger Woods would probably play golf even if he were paid the same salary as a school teacher so there are other factors at play and that has to do with the mass market. People are willing to pay lots of money to watch Tiger Woods play golf. People will buy clothing that is promoted by Tiger Woods. If they saw clothing promoted by school teachers they probably wouldn’t buy that clothing. There are a lot of societal sort of behavioral type of considerations, as well as the market, that influence how much people get paid for different kinds of activity.

The main thing that I wanted to say here was that free education materials…probably a good idea. A big reason is that many professors and academics who write textbooks are very happy to publish and they, in fact, derive very little income from publishing their textbooks and academic books because there is a very limited market for these and there is a large cost for printing books for which there is a limited demand. I think the model of having professors produce many, many course books and somehow avoiding the costly printing and distribution process and using the Internet to distribute this at a much lower cost to people who want to learn, I think is an excellent idea. Using the Internet and the community of the Internet as a means of allowing the users of this material to choose the textbooks and the course books that are the most effective, this will very quickly establish which ones are the most useful and which ones are not and it will enable the very good professors and academics to reach a much, much, larger audience than would otherwise be the case.

I just wanted to comment on this whole issue of “free”. We are looking in our LingQ community to create a community of people who are learning and helping each other learn but we will reward people who help others. They will decide, to a large extent, how much they would like to be rewarded and the people who use their services will help decide how much they should be rewarded. So, that will be the nature of our community. I just think we should be a little careful when we use the word “free” because there are very few things that are genuinely free. The love of your family, breathing the fresh air, these things are free. Very often free simply means that someone else is paying so I think we should be careful not to assign tremendous moral values to free.

I have kind of gone on a bit here. I am going to have this podcast transcribed and so the transcript will be posted here later on. Once again, Steve here at thelinguist.blogs.com and, of course, our English language learning site is thelinguist.com. We are moving slowly, too slowly I think but these things take time, we are moving towards the creation of our new online language learning community which is LingQ; www.LingQ.com. Already, there is some information available on how this works at our LingQ Central Blog that we think is going to be very exciting. We think it is going to make it possible for a lot of people in a lot of places to access extremely efficient and enjoyable language learning material at really a very, very low cost. The cost will be low because we expect to get the enthusiastic participation of our community.

Thank you very much for listening. Bye, bye.