The Face of Wikioics

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Back in December, Jim, Laurent, and I spent a week in New York examining every part of Wikiotics, what those parts look like and how they fit together. We have been working behind the scenes all this year to implement the design from that week and I am proud to say that the most public element of it is now visible; Wikiotics.org has a new face. We hope you will agree that this rebuilt page is both more functional and more attractive than the last version. We had some help with that from Pei-Jun Tan, a great web designer whose contributions have helped give us some more style.

While we have been busy putting together the new site, the good folks at Linux Format magazine have been putting together a feature spread on Wikioics for their May issue. This is our first magazine article and I think it looks great. All of you in the UK and other areas where Linux Format is sold can decide for yourself, and catch up on all of their other great free software coverage. Don’t feel shy about letting us know what you think, of the article or anything else in the project, using our new email: contact /at/ wikiotics.org

SCALE 10x

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I’m happy to announce that Wikiotics will be presenting at the tenth annual SCALE, the Linux Expo of Southern California, this coming January. Those of you in the LA area or who, like myself, will be traveling in should stop by January 20-22nd and see the presentation or stop by our table on the expo floor.

SCALE is actually the first conference that Jim and I went to as Wikiotics so I am especially gratified that we get our first exclusively Wikiotics focused presentation opportunity here as well. Thanks to the organizers for making that possible and for all their support of us and other community non-profits.

Those of you with an education background who have not been to a technology conference before might also be interested in the “Open Source Software In Education” day happening in the middle of the conference. With a full day focused on education and a Wikiotics presentation, now might be the time to start thinking of your own mid-winter trip to LA.

Speak and the world will listen

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When Jim and I founded Wikiotics almost four years ago, one of our goals was to make it as easy to exchange native audio recordings as others have made it to exchange flash cards. Our first step towards that goal was adding audio to our existing picture and text “picture choice lessons“. Now, I am proud to say that we have built our first specifically audio focused lesson type, one who’s materials can be collaboratively edited and then streamed from the site or downloaded for offline practice.

Many of you may already be getting lessons like this from language podcast sites and know the value of the format. Podcast are a widely used source of explanation and new practice audio for students looking to grow beyond language fundamentals. Adding this existing format to the Wikiotics toolkit would, by itself, have been a useful addition but we’ve gone one large step further by making it as easy to create or re-create these lessons as any other wiki page. This capability opens up interesting possibilities for collaborative creation, editing, and remixing.

For example, what if you like a lesson but want the practice audio in a different dialect, or perhaps from a speaker of a different age or gender? With static files you are simply stuck and have to look for other sources entirely or try and make do with materials that are of marginal use in your studies. If those lessons are in Wikiotics, you can replace just the small bits of audio you want to change and save a new version of the lesson, all while leaving the rest of the instruction and explanation material intact. Similarly, if you want to take a lesson designed for French speakers and give it to students who only speak Hindi, you can replace the instruction and explanation audio while preserving the practice audio and the way that material is gradually introduced and repeated over the course of the lesson, making it possible to directly collaborate and share materials across national and linguistic lines.

You can see three examples of this new lesson type on the site already. Two (1 and 2) are part of the introductory Mandarin Chinese unit and cover greetings and polite forms of address. Both of these are actually portions of the static audio lesson from this public domain FSI lesson that I converted into our more flexible format. The third lesson comes from a kindred project wiki-babel and covers polite forms of address in French. Take a look and don’t forget to hit the ‘edit’ button to see how simple it is to create and re-create these lessons.

This makes four basic lesson types and the first to build on top of our new flashcard interface which will be the basic system for creating and editing lessons going forward. As always, please feel free to send any ideas and other feedback straight to me or start up a new conversation about them with the group, and thanks for being part of Wikiotics.

Crossposted with churchkey.org.

MeetUp and MobilityShift

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September was a very social month here at Wikiotics, including discussions with the folks at P2P University and the first gathering of our MeetUp group NY teaches language to the world here in New York. We are planning to continue that trend in October, including new meetups and my participation in MobilityShifts, a conference on the future of Education going on in NYC all this week. I’ll be speaking on a panel this Friday discussing the issues involved when you move learning online and into the public.

Over the next month we are going to focus on supporting groups of peers who want to study language with each other in true peer-to-peer fashion. We are planning out some extra technical support for that, but what we really need are some interested people. If you know at least one language and are interested in being part of a language exchange to learn a new one, just let me know. You can leave a comment here or join our meetup group and say hi to everyone there. If we can find a few people who want to learn each other’s languages, we would love to help.

More to come this week about that group and the ongoing MobilityShifts conference.

Taking OSCon by Wiki

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OSCon was a wonderful experience, and not just because the weather back home was 30-50 degrees warmer. During the three days that Jim, our volunteer Jamela, and I ran the Wikiotics booth, we were almost constantly busy talking to interested people and showing off the site on our lovely borrowed monitor. (Thanks for the loan Kenny!) It was a great turnout, especially since our fledgling resources kept us from offering the kinds of swag, food, and other tempting prizes that always move so many feet during conferences.

Two moments in particular jump out at me from the conference. The first happened on Thursday when Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki and the man who coined the term, stopped by our booth to find out about the project. Finding out that he likes what we’re doing and now has us on his mental list of wikis felt like winning a nerd merit badge. I actually yelled “Lexical validation!” after he walked away, which might qualify for some sort of nerd award all by itself.

The second moment actually happened regularly throughout the conference as people walked past our booth. It was the moment as they walked past, read our sign, and you could all but see the curiosity grow until it forced them to swing around and walk back to the booth to find out more. That felt amazing every time.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead if we’re going to keep that kind of interest building. Thankfully the rest of the summer pilot promises new lessons, new lesson types, a new interface, and a new method for creating and saving lessons. Those should all start turning up one by one over the rest of the summer weeks.

Before I head back to that I want to extend a warm welcome to all the new friends and potential collaborators we talked to last week. Also, a great thank you to O’Reilly for the non-profit booth, to Jamela for helping out, and again to Kenny for the monitor loan that let us demo the site to so many people.

Crossposted with churchkey.org.

OSCon and the Unconference

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Jim and I are in Portland, Oregon right now, in the midst of two great events, OSCon 2011, which begins on Tuesday, and the Community Leadership Summit, which just wrapped up this evening. This brief space between the two seemed like a good point for an update.

New blog

First of all, welcome to the new blog! After the drumbeat project’s spring re-design removed blog functionality from all the project pages, we’ve been a bit too isolated, and too busy to build new communication infrastructure. That all changed at the Community Leadership Summit where I found enough time during coffee and lunch breaks to migrate all the old content onto this, more permanent blog.

Community Leadership Summit

The stolen moments I took for blog work were surprisingly in keeping with the general theme of the Leadership Summit, which is an unconference specifically focused on the issues of community building and management in the Free Software context, where blogs are a commonplace tool.

We met a lot of great people and will hopefully see many of the over the coming week at OSCon.

OSCon

Since we were lucky enough to get one of the non-profit/community booths at OSCon this year, what we manage to see of the event is going to depend a lot on who comes by our little corner of the exhibit hall. We will be over in booth 224, if that ends up meaning anything for navigation purposes during the actual conference. More importantly, we’re right near the restrooms and across from the Wii lounge so we expect both foot and virtual tennis ball traffic to be high. If you’re at the conference, we’d love to meet you.

New interface

Anyone who does stop by the booth will get a sneak peek at the new interface design Jim has been working on for the past few months. The existing design was built with the picture choice lesson type in mind and does little to make use of the flexible backend that really makes Wikiotics a different kind of wiki project. Jim and I are both very excited about the new interface and would love to show you some of the new potentials, either at the booth, or in August when we push the final changes to the site.

You flattrd’d my paypal!

Finally, we’ve opened up a couple of new convenient donation options: payal and flattr. While you are no doubt all familiar with paypal, many of you may have not seen flattr before, which is a social payment system that has been growing in popularity within the free software and free culture communities. As always, contributions are warmly appreciated, whether those are financial or otherwise

Crossposted with churchkey.org.

Wikiotics Monthly Update (March 2011)

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SCALE 9x

Ian and I hosted a booth at SCALE 9x in Los Angeles on February 26 and 27. We had live demos of picture-choice lessons (with audio!), and we showed people how to edit lessons. Many people stopped by, and many people were excited about the project.

DML2011

Ian attended the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Long Beach, California, March 3-5. Among other things, Wikiotics was a last-minute entry into the “Drumbeat science fair.” I am told that Ian met many additional people who are excited about the project.

Adelphi University

Shortly after the last monthly update, Matthew Curinga posted a message to the list about the research study he is leading at Adelphi University regarding Wikiotics:
http://groups.google.com/group/wikiotics/msg/20f2c6abfb5a6161 He recently hired a student programmer, and we should be hearing more soon.

Wikiotics Monthly Update

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Hi everyone,

This is the first of what I plan to be a monthly update on progress and happenings in the Wikiotics project. Hopefully it will help keep everyone involved aware of the work that others are doing. If you have anything to add, just reply-to-all on this email. Or, in the future, send me an email by the end of any given month and I will include it in the next update.

Audio in lessons

January marked the arrival of audio in picture-choice lessons. Ian has added audio phrases to half the frames in the introductory English lesson. You will only hear audio if you are using a browser that supports HTML5.

Lesson building

We still need more lessons, both in English and in other languages. (I particularly advocate the building of English lessons, as this allows people to translate to other languages easily, since most people building lessons on Wikiotics at this point will know at least some English. Indeed, I was very happy to wake up one day late in December to realize that a user named ‘rouklia’ had translated all of the existing English lessons to Greek :) .) My plan lately has been to start with one goal the picture-choice lesson format is specifically good at: helping to build vocabulary of nouns that are easily visualized. Inspired by the page at, I have been working on building a lesson that incorporates many ‘picturable’ English nouns. My work (in progress) is available at. Feel free to fork and improve this lesson if you wish.

SCALE

Ian and I will be exhibiting at SCALE 9x in Los Angeles, which takes place on February 26 and 27 this year. We will have a machine or two set up to demo the language lessons we have built so far, and we hope to try to raise awareness about the project. If you are around, please stop by. More information is available at the SCALE site.

Development

The main goal for development in the near future is to improve the experience of editing lessons. Hopefully some of this work will be ready by the time we exhibit at SCALE.

Building community

Our of our major challenges is to build a community of volunteers who will help us build lessons and the software that supports the site. With this in mind, I pass on an excellent article recently discussed on the FLOSS-Foundations mailing list, which includes much good advice. Although it focuses on software contributors, I think the points mentioned hold true for any contributors to a project: http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/open-source-community-simplified/

$2 billion available for CC-licensed education resources

Creative Commons recently announced that the U.S. government will grant $2 billion toward the development of career training programs in community colleges. The government is also requiring all new learning materials made under the grants to be available under CC-BY. There’s probably no /direct/ way we can get involved in this action, but it is a good thing to be aware of, particularly if we can get involved with language teachers at eligible institutions. I have not had much time to look into the details of the program myself, but more information is available in a blog post from CC at the Creative Commons project blog.