Last week we explored how to use collaboration inside the Wikiotics community to build better lessons for each other and we saw how this can produce great results for material like weather vocabulary. But what about the parts of language that are more complicated? What about concepts like “beautiful”, “fun”, “boring”, and “interesting”? We each have different ideas about what these concepts look like and we are unlikely to be able to come to a consensus opinion.

This week we are shifting the focus from consensus to individuality and asking everyone to build personal lessons based on some shared vocabulary. We want to see your take on some common concepts, your viewpoint. Don’t worry about making lessons for someone else, build a lesson as practice material for your self and at the end of the week we will take a look at the different versions people have built for themselves and see how useful moving away from consensus can be.

How To Participate:
1) Log in.
2) Go to the lesson: http://alpha.wikiotics.org/en/Adjectives and click on "Copy" at the top.
3) Enter "user:YourUserName/Adjectives" into the copy box and hit enter
4) Click on "Edit" at the top and change the images using the "find new image" link next to each page. That will let you search on flickr for a better picture. If you are getting too many results, try clicking the "Restrict to project's Flickr group" box when you are searching.
5) Save your new lesson and add a link on the Adjectives talk page.

As always, thanks for being part of the community!

A note on user pages

If you want to know more about User Pages and how to use them, our User Page Instructions has what you are looking for.

Crosposted with churchkey.org

One week later I am proud to announce that our weather lesson is both more attractive and much more effective thanks to some great collaboration by our users.

← Before

             After →

You can see that the new pictures are much easier to tell apart, especially the raining and snowing ones. In addition, the sun is now clearly visible in the “sunny” picture and there is no Eiffel tower in the “cloudy” picture to cause confusion about subject.

Lessons of the collaboration

It was great to collaborate with some other users on this lesson, try out our tools for working together on a single lesson, and all the other things this push was designed to accomplish, but the best part for me was seeing how the structure of the lesson helped to keep us honest and keep our work useful.

The original weather lesson contained three types of vocabulary: words to talk about light (cloudy/sunny), words to talk about precipitation (raining/snowing), and words to talk about temperatures (hot/cold/cool/warm). As we all tried to find better pictures for the lesson, it became clear that this last group, the temperature words, was giving everyone trouble.

The problem was simple, we fell into the native speaker trap of trying to combine too many concepts in a single lesson. Temperature is much more easily illustrated as a property of things, like foods or beverages, rather than by pointing a camera outside and trying to capture the essence of “cold”. When we tried that, we all came up with different representations, some were animals in the sun, some were people outside surrounded by fall foliage.

Instead of depending on these personal cues, we broke temperature out into a separate “Temperature lesson” and combined all of the best weather pictures into a Best of Weather lesson. The result is much more grounded and easy to incorporate into other lessons through shared vocabulary.

Teaching what they need to know

It is all too easy when trying to teach someone material that you know very well, like your native language, to gloss over the complexity underneath and forget just how much information there is to share. Breaking that material apart and illustrating it are great ways to keep your lessons useful to those who are coming at them with fresh eyes. If you are interested in trying such a system, give wikiotics a try.

Special thanks to jchan, Qalthos, stevensne, colannino, and trose, for building their own versions of the lesson and making the collaboration possible.

Crossposted with churchkey.org

After a productive summer of software building, we would like to
introduce the first version of the Wikiotics community site. In order to
test everything out and introduce the site’s new capabilities, we’re
asking everyone to help out and translate our Introductory lesson into as many languages as possible.

If you know how to write “This is a boy” in one or more languages, we need your help.

This will be the first of four week-long pushes that will culminate with a lesson building session at the Drumbeat festival in Barcelona. Each push will focus on a simple task that should only take a few minutes of your time and we’ll be blogging about the whole effort each week. As always, your participation is what makes this project work, so come over to the site and take a look.

How to Translate

Translating a lesson is done with three easy steps.

First, load the lesson you want to translate.

Second, copy the lesson into the right area of the wiki for its new language. To do this, hit the “copy” botton at the top of the page and enter in a new name for the lesson, starting with the language code for the new language and a “:”. So, if you are translating the Introduction lesson into Hungarian, you would enter “hu:Bevezetése” for the new name, which is the Hungarian for “Introduction”. If you are translating it into Portuguese, you would enter “pt:Introdução”.

Third, hit the “edit” button on your new lesson and replace the English sentences with versions appropriate for your language.

Now you have a brand new language lesson that you can share with anyone! Congratulations and thanks for helping improve Wikiotics. When you are done, please add a link to your lesson here so we can all appreciate it: http://wikiotics.org/en/Take_a_lesson

The Languages

Currently the system has areas for 25 languages and we have the introduction lesson translated into five of them:

(ar) Arabic http://wikiotics.org/ar/مقدمة
(af) Afrikaans http://wikiotics.org/af/Intruction
(bs) Bosnian http://wikiotics.org/bs/introdukcija
(ca) Catalan http://wikiotics.org/ca/Introducció
(cs) Czech
(da) Danish
(de) German http://wikiotics.org/de/Einführung
(en) English http://wikiotics.org/en/Introduction
(eo) Esperanto
(es) Spanish http://wikiotics.org/es/Introductoria
(fi) Finnish http://wikiotics.org/fi/esittely
(fr) French http://wikiotics.org/fr/Introduction
(he) Hebrew http://wikiotics.org/he/הקדמה
(hi) Hindi
(hu) Hungarian
(id) Indonesian
(is) Icelandic
(it) Italian http://wikiotics.org/it/Introduzione
(ja) Japanese http://wikiotics.org/ja/緒論
(ko) Korean http://wikiotics.org/ko/소개
(nl) Dutch http://wikiotics.org/nl/introductie
(no) Norwegian
(pl) Polish
(pt) Portuguese http://wikiotics.org/pt/Introdução
(ro) Romanian
(ru) Russian http://wikiotics.org/ru/Введение
(sk) Slovak http://wikiotics.org/sk/Úvod
(sv) Swedish http://wikiotics.org/sv/Inledning
(tr) Turkish
(uk) Ukrainian
(zh) Chinese http://wikiotics.org/zh/简介

If someone has already done the translation you were planning to do, you
can skip right over to the final step and edit the existing page to
improve the lesson quality.

Let’s see how many more of these we can create by the end of the
week. Just let us know if you would like to translate into any
additional languages and we will add them to the system.

Sincerely,

The Wikiotics Team

Update #1 (12:01 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

We’ve got Portuguese and half of the Japanese translation done
already. This is great work everyone! I’m going to keep updating here
and adding links to new lessons as we get them so check back. And don’t
forget to add a link to your new lesson to http://alpha.wikiotics.org/en/Take_a_lesson when you’re done translating!

Update #2 (14:23 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

Thanks to Soassae from #learnanylanguage on freenode, we now have an
Italian version of the lesson. We have also added Hindi as a possible
language on the site so we’re up to 8/26 now. For anyone who is curious
about how we selected the initial languages to support, we based it on Wikipedia size, but just ask if you want any other languages.

Update #3 (16:18 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

#learnanylanguage on freenode comes through agaimember psychicist doing a Dutch translation. That brings us up to 9/26, possibly with more languages supported tomorrow.

Update #4 (17:27 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

And by “tomorrow” I mean right now. We’ve added support for both
Slovak and Bosnian since anonymous users made the translations without needing a place to put them. Those are both now in comfortable homes and while we were in there we added support for Hebrew so Arabic wouldn’t need to be the only right to left script in the collection. So that brings us to a total of 12 translations out of 29 languages that we have support for. Clearly we need to add more languages! Keep up the great work everyone.

Update #5 (18:00 Eastern Oct 12, 2010)

Ask and you shall receive. Thanks to yosko from #learnanylanguage we now have a Hebrew translation. Much appreciated yosko. We’re now at 13 of 29 languages.

Update #5 (10:43 Eastern Oct 13, 2010)

The multi-talented yosko starts us off strong today with a new French
translation as well as a native speaker’s take on the Spanish version.
We have also added support for Icelandic to the system and will be
adding Afrikaans later today.

Updte #7 (13:54 Eastern Oct 13, 2010)

Thanks to Manel from #learnanylanguage, we now have a Catalan
translation of the introduction lesson, as well as the correct spelling
of “Catalan” in this blog post! Thanks Manel. That brings us up to 15/30
languages.

Update #8 (15:40 Oct 13, 2010)

…And then there was Arabic! I also forgot to mention in the last
update that we’ve added Afrkcaans as a supported language, which is how we got to 30 possible languages. With the Arabic translation, we’re now back up past the half-way point with 16/30.

Update #9 (10:46 Eastern Oct 14, 2010)

Thanks to an annonymous user we now have an Afrikaans translation, bringing our total up to 17/30. Great work there. It is also worth noting that a couple of users have been going through and improving some of our existing translations, particularly the Chinese and Japanese ones. So if you looked at those earlier, take another look and try out the “history” tab at the top to view different versions.

Update #10 (11:34 Eastern Oct 16 2010)

Thanks to one Martin Falk Johansson, we now have a Swedish
translation up. Thanks Martin! That brings us up to 18 of 30 languages
here in the final days of the translation push.

Update #11 (13:10 Eastern Oct 17, 2010)

As we wrap up our first activity drive, it looks like a rough Korean
translation is going to bring us up to 19 of 30 languages. That means
that we’ve had 14 new translations done over this week, while expanding the Wikiotics language support to five more languages. We’ve also had a couple existing translations, notably Spanish and Chinese, updated and corrected by native speakers. All told, a great week. Thanks to everyone who has helped out!

I’m proud to announce that we now have a simple interface for editing and translating lessons on wikiotics.org! This is some great work by Jim that lets us get on with the fun part, making and playing with lessons.

If you have a minute, take a look at our example lesson (in English) and play around. The “edit” button at the top will let you change the text and pictures that are there, add new text and picture pairs, or rearrange the existing materials however you want.

That intro lesson already exists in Spanish and Chinese. If you know another language, just use the “copy” button at the top to move the English version to a new location, say “Portuguese_-_Introduction” and edit those English sentences away!

As always, have fun and please feel free to correct the existing translations, find more appropriate pictures for the sentences, add new material, or any other kind of tinkering you enjoy.

More information is available at our Contribute page and all our existing lessons are recorded in this handy list

Crossposted with churchkey.org

One of the biggest difficulties in open web education is building your project in such a way that it engages everyone rather than only the group of technologically savvy people who already understand the value and values of the open web. That is why we built Wikiotics from the ground up around materials and contributions that anyone can make. If we can empower people to help each other, we will teach them about the power and importance of the open web as a natural part of their work, just as Wikipedia has done for millions of people around the world.

The basic materials of language instruction are things that anyone can make. If you think our Introductory English lesson would be more effective with pictures from London, or if you think it would work better for you if it used pictures of the people and activities in your personal surroundings, you can change them. That is true whether you are a professional web designer and photographer or a kid with a camera phone. Point. Shoot. Teach. It is that simple and it is the only way our lessons get built.

If you want to turn our Chinese lesson into a Mandarin or Cantonese one, you don’t need any special training or programming expertise, all you need are a dozen sentences of recorded audio. If you don’t speak either of those dialects, there are more than a billion people who could record them for you. Our goal is to make that kind of sharing as simple as possible so that not only can some of the Mandarin speakers in the community record audio for you, but you can easily record some English sentences for them in thanks.

The raw material of language instruction is easy to make, but before the open web, there was no easy way to gather enough of it together in one place to create a universal language resource, just as there was no way to build a universal encyclopedia. The open web is the only way to make communication and collaborative creation easy enough to build either of these projects. That is the lesson that millions have learned from Wikipedia and it is why using Wikipedia as an example will let you start a conversation about the open web with almost anyone, regardless of their level of technological expertise. If we succeed in empowering people to teach each other language, there will be millions more who understand this lesson and how see the “open web”, not as an abstract concept about free technological infrastructures but rather as a vital structure supporting the activities of their daily lives.

Crossposted with churchkey.org.