This past Saturday was the first Wikiotics workshop, an event we have been discussing for many weeks. We had some great participants representing a whole range of New York’s educational organizations, from universities like Adelphi and Columbia, to the Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY), and the informal MeetUp.com group Friends of the United Nations English club group organized to support the UN language school.

During a few short hours we designed and created 4 new lessons, brainstormed topics for 11 more, and, while we were at it, recorded audio for all of our Spanish lessons. You can see the results of our work on the workshop’s wiki page.

End of the day at the Wikiotics Workshop

There was so much enthusiasm during the workshop that we have decided to expand it into a series.

I am excited to announce that we already have the next workshop lined up for later this month. Our next workshop will be in New Deli, India where I will be working with teachers from the Yuva Jyoti educaiton centers and the Hole in the wall computer project.

Thanks to the support of our sponsors at the Linux Fund and Gandi.net, we are able to start planning the third workshop in this series, back in New York during winter recess. If you want to participate or your school may want to host that workshop, just write to contact@wikiotics.org.

Many thanks to our great participants, to our hosts at Adelphi university, to our sponsors who made this workshop possible, and to the rest of the community for your great ideas and support. See you this winter!

What is a Podcast?

Last week we looked at the Picture Choice lesson format, which combines text, audio, and pictures into a type of interactive flash card format. This week the focus is all audio with our Podcast lesson format. A Podcast lesson is what we call any lesson made up entirely of audio.

These can be short dialogues, traditional "repeat after me" courses, or any combination of purely audio elements you can imagine. It is a simple, flexible format that students can easily download to listen to offline on any kind of mp3 player or phone that plays music. Because these lessons are all built on Wikiotics, they have ease of customization and collaboration, and re-use built in. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples and you can see how this built in flexibility makes the Podcast lesson.

FSI

Back in the 1970′s and 80′s the US State Department wrote a series of audio language courses for their staff about to leave the country to work at an embassy. Because these are works of the US Federal government, they are part of the public domain and a number of different people have worked to pull those materials together and make them available. We processed some of these for Wikiotics from the Mandarin Chinese and the French language series.

Because these were uploaded in bulk most of the individual elements have not yet been transcribed but this lesson is a great example of the finished product. If you need some examples of how to build a professional series of Podcast lessons, listening to a few of these will give you a feel for the format.

The introductory Mandarin lesson, like most of the FSI materials, focuses on a short dialogue, breaking it up into small pieces for the listening student and explaining each one as it appears. Any time a new phrase is introduced, it is repeated twice before being defined or explained, and as the lesson progresses previous elements of the dialogue are repeated until every part has been covered and then repeated in context. The format is relatively standardized and straightforward. Thanks to the internet, the way you build these lessons doesn’t have to be.

Flexible authoring

FSI lessons were built in a professional recording studio by a group of professional teachers and native speaker voice actors working closely together. On Wikiotics, you can accomplish the same task much more easily. Take a look at this introductory English lesson designed for French speakers. The format is very similar to the FSI but this lesson was built by two people working independently on separate continents. I wrote the original version (available here) but I don’t speak any French so I left the parts of the lesson designed to translate and explain the English for French speakers in English. You can see an example of what this looks like with this lesson. Then another user came along and translated the relevant parts into French and later this week we will get two different users to record the audio bits necessary to complete the lesson.

The ability to work in groups separated by time, distance, and that may not even know each other makes it much easier to produce professional podcasts by sharing the work and resources required. It also makes lessons much more flexible. Because Wikiotics lessons are broken down into individual sentences or other small bits of audio rather than as one large audio file, it is easy to customize and re-use whatever bits you want.

If you want to make that introductory English lesson for Spanish rather than French speakers, you can simply make a new copy of the version that is all in English and translate the explanation bits into Spanish. If you want to learn Mandarin only hearing tenor voices or voices of one particular gender, you can copy the FSI lesson and replace just the few bits of native audio. At the October workshop we will be preparing lessons with multiple different voice options so the Kids on Computers children can choose what voices they want to model when learning English.

To read more about the potential of this flexible authoring, take a look at this piece from last year when we debuted the Podcast format.

Next week

Next week we will take a look at the third of four lesson types supported on Wikiotics: the Phrase Choice lesson.

July is all about growing the community here at Wikiotics; last week with my trip to Washington DC for Wikimania and today with the launch of our P2PU course: “Build the LLT“. If you are interested in using Wikiotics or helping to Write the Last Language Textbook but want some help learning the tools, this course is for you. Whether this is your first time helping someone learn language or you teach professionally, our course will walk you through the steps.

As the name indicates, the course is part of our Last Language Textbook campaign and will focus on building materials from the curriculum guide for that project. The course starts today and will run for ten weeks, covering how to develop a basic language lesson, how to use the Wikiotics system to build each of the four lesson types we support (picture choice, podcast, multiple choice, and storybook), and how to get additional help from the community.

Enrollment is open and you are all welcome to check out the course materials and sing up here: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/build-the-last-language-textbook/

Part of what makes working in educational technology exciting are the occasional moments you have that are exhilarating and daunting at the same time. I had one such moment recently while putting together a funding proposal, specifically when trying to answer the question “How big is the problem you are trying to solve?”

Since language education is a vast social enterprise, any attempt to come up with a total number of students is necessarily a general approximation. Using information from a British Council 2009 report that lists the number of English language students in India as over 320 million and the same group in China as over 300 million, it is easy to estimate the population of global language students at over a billion, a number that has been making the rounds recently.

The trouble comes when you try and calculate how many students there might be if language education were free and universally available. How many new people would start learning?

I spent some time trying to get a picture of this number and the estimate I came up with is an entire second billion, conservatively speaking. That number comes mostly from the 2008 UN world illiteracy report which lists 775 million adults–1 in 5 globally–who lack the basic literacy skills to participate effectively in society and found another 75 million school-age children who were not enrolled in any school.

While accessibility and cost of education are not the only reasons for the persistence of illiteracy, they are certainly strong contributing factors. Since many other social factors, like potential embarrassment or difficulty of finding purely non-text teaching materials would also be solved by using computer resources, I count those 850 million safely in the pool of potential language students.

With that as the pool of potential first language students, rounding up to a billion seem almost excessively conservative when estimating the size of the total population of second and third and fourth language students. But there it is, my first draft estimate for potential new students, presented in traditional BRN (Big Round Number) format.

Considering that everything we are already doing around the world is stretched to the limits by the first billion students, imagining doubling that pool is a daunting prospect. Realizing that we have the potential to actually do it with technology is more than a little exhilarating.

Truly free educational technology like we have at Wikiotics is challenging to put together and it can be difficult to explain to people sometimes why we even bother when there is such an active startup scene in the field. If you want to understand a little bit of what motivates us, think of this the next time someone mentions a new educational initiative, textbook rental scheme, or one-size-fits-all educational product: is that built to teach the next billion students?

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

We are holding a contest to design of a logo for Wikiotics. More details at

http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/create-next-logo-wikiotics-74307

Feel free to leave feedback if you have thoughts on the entries so far. The contest will be open for another 72 hours.