Wikiotics
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Sullivan, Ian
S., Laurent
The people who believe in free software and open education have a lot in common, but few shared projects. Wikiotics has run for three years as a one such hybrid project and in the process spent a lot of time talking about education at free software conferences and about free software at education ones. If you have ever wondered why there aren't more projects like Wikipedia out there, come hear about some of the difficulties and opportunities for Foss/Edu collaboration. Openness, sharing, collaboration, and everyone's right to use, for any purpose. With these shared values, the partnership between free software and education should be natural, yet too often these communities operate without ever interacting. At Wikiotics, a language instruction project built from our own free software, we have faced puzzled looks at every turn. As the only education project at free software conferences and the only free software project at education ones, we have talked to many people from both communities about our common values and learned a lot about the barriers to working together and the incredible potential for social change when we collaborate. Come hear a little bit about our strategies for overcoming them.
 Hello and welcome. Thank you for coming. I'm Ian. This is Laurent. We do Wikiatics, which is an interactive wiki for language students and teachers. We're an education project focused on building educational content and making it possible for teachers and students to build educational content. And you may notice that you haven't seen other projects that are interested in that at FOSDEM. Yes, human spoken languages. Thank you. Yes, well they're all native to someone. As an educational project at free software events, it's a free software system behind it. We're pretty much always the duck in the room. When we go to education conferences, we're the only free software project. When we come places like this, we're the only education one. This is a little confusing. There is a lot of commonality between the education and the free software world. There's common values of access and openness and a real belief in what happens as a transformative process when people learn how to do things and can take control of their own education. It's confusing then that there isn't more of an overlap, but it turns out that the extent of this overlap is basically tux type. If you've learned how to type using it, you know what it is. We have a couple other related projects like Sugar on a Stick and Skoll Linux, which are basically just free software environments to be used in school. But there's very little besides basically us and tux typing that's focused on directly teaching content or making it possible to directly teach content. In our time going back and forth over the past couple years, we found that there are a couple basic reasons for this. The one that is probably most obvious to everyone in the room is that teachers don't code, so they don't end up generally making software systems to help them in their teaching. The flip side of this is that coders don't care. Free software in particular is about building the things that we want to build and generally speaking we're not trying to teach anything. The tools we do build that are in the education field are generally aimed at self-study. And we have some really good spaced repetition flash card free software and tux type, which begs the question of why should we care? If the teachers it's their job to teach, it's our hobby to code, why should we bend effort in that direction if they're not gonna come over and start taking classes and hacking at the local lug. And the answer I think is pretty simple. Wikipedia. When we get together and combine these communities, we can build tools that transform the way knowledge is shared, the way we all access knowledge and what knowledge actually means in the world has been profoundly changed by this type of collaboration. And that's the kind of collaboration that we want to make possible in the field of language education, which is more than a billion formal students right now and at one point in time is everyone. So the the market as they say is quite large. We're also fortunate because everyone is an expert in one or more languages at some point in their lives. So we have a shortcut around some of the Wikipedia, well who is this native speaker thing? Because they're a native speaker is the answer. But there are some challenges with the language community as well. Collaboration is really difficult with language instruction and it's difficult not just because people involved want to go and make little proprietary educational software. It's difficult because of our collaboration tools. Language is inherently rich media. It's inherently interactive. You speak with other people. You've got audio. You've got video. But our collaboration tools don't really focus on that type of material as building blocks for more complicated content. With language you also have consensus as a problem. There is no right way to teach a language. It's personal to the student and to the environment and anyone who's had more than one language teacher knows that they all have slightly different takes on things. Which is okay. This is great. This is actually how effective education works. But unlike something like an encyclopedia, there is no drive towards consensus that you can build collaboration around. There is no best article at the end of this. There are many, many different lessons. The one that hits us closest to home as people running Wikiotics, which is a live site with interactive language lessons on it, is the vandalism one. This is particularly difficult to language because by definition the people who are coming to learn a language cannot verify any of the material that they're learning isn't some mad spam garbage. Which is a point made 40 years ago very well by Monty Python's dirty Hungarian phrase book sketch. This is John Cleese in a tobacconist office asking for some matches, which his phrase book has conveniently translated as my hover craft is full of eels. And if you're using a phrase book you have no idea how to verify what's on the right hand side of the page. A lot of community efforts at trying to get language instruction material together have stumbled over this building block and have not really gotten any further. As a student you need to be able to trust the material that you are being presented with and when that's another language there's a bootstrapping problem here. So we built a new call, a new tool to address this set of issues and we called it ductus for reasons that are too long to explain right now. Ductus is a bit of free software. It powers our wiki and is generally available for other people in other situations and Laurent is one of our two core developers so I will let him tell you more about the specifics. I'll just raise that a bit. So as you know saying Ductus is structured wiki the main difference between that and something that is more widely known as say media wiki. Media wiki stores text as long strings of slightly ugly code that you're probably quite aware of. What we do is we store information as nested data, structured data that looks like this. So this is not very friendly and this is not what you see when you're using the wiki. What you see is something completely user interface with nice widgets and drag and drop and that sort of things. This is just a back end which allows us to store rich media information just like language education content. So for instance I'll go through a few examples of what you can do. You can have quizzes like this where you'd have a question up there, a prompt that could be a bit of text, that could also be something you're listening to like an audio prompt to question, a bunch of potential answers. You pick the right one and there you go and then you could get exercise series with point systems feedback from a teacher that could be transmitted to a teacher and so on and so forth. Another example is this text matching. So you have a sentence with a gap in here. You have to fill the gap, choose the right answer, that sort of stuff. All of that can be put in the wiki in a reusable way. Another example which we are working on at the moment is storing podcast type of information. If you've tried learning a language one of the big problems is understanding like listening to it. You can always listen to say the BBC to learn English but it can be nice to have something you can take away on a bus ride and listen to a podcast. So that's what we're working on. This is an example of a Mandarin lesson for beginners. All of that content is on the site and you can just reuse and remix parts of it, translate parts of that and just teach another language with the same structure and 90% of the work is done. So all of that information in the wiki is stored in very much Git like sort of information. So the content, what I was showing you a bit earlier, is hashed, stored on a hard drive. There's a database to access that. And we have capabilities pretty much like Git. You can derive information from a previous revision of some content, so say a lesson. You can branch things. You can in the future you'll be able to merge several revisions, several different types of contents together into a new lesson. Just like Git, we're not trying to get to a consensus. We support and encourage forking, branching and creating new revisions and new versions of a similar content. And our URLs in the system are pretty much like branches would be in a Git development system. So you can create them and they can live in parallel. One point I'd like to add before finishing is like we are right now importing information into the wiki from the FSI language lessons. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a series of podcasts, not podcasts, but tapes that were created by the US Foreign Service Institute. There's language lessons in about 40 different languages. It amounts to a few hundred hours of listening material. We are splitting that and structuring it into the wiki so that very soon we'll have about 300,000 sentences of material in 40 different languages that will be available for any user to just reuse, remix and build new lessons from, as well as new audio and images and text and all of that can be, you know, scrolled and mixed and used as building bricks for like creating a ginormous base of language teaching materials. I realize we left out of the slides how we address this particular problem of trusting the material. One of the fundamental ways we organize content with different URLs where are the pages stored is user and group pages, which are right protected areas where only you as the user or only the users in a group have the ability to make changes to content. So teachers can be sure that their material is presented as a representation of them and not worry about vandalizing or other sort of student hijinks perhaps. All of this is freely available material. It's CC by SA and so anyone on the site can still get to and even edit copying to another location all of this material, but we feel that right protection is a necessary and relatively understandable step for taking care of the hovercraft full of eels problem. Other than that, thank you. Yeah, and we're happy to talk here during the last couple minutes or take other questions and we're gonna be in the birds of a feather room tomorrow between three and four, which is over in AW if anyone wants to dive into a little bit more of how this works there. Yes. Right, there are two different sets of history. There's the history of the object that lesson as it's moved through its different revisions and then there's the location history of what material is available at this URL and so the objects are forkable and movable throughout the rest of the site, but the groups have control over putting any sorts of objects or editing the objects that are located in their particular namespace. Yes. Because Wikipedia is in English if you're reading the English article and the citations are supposed to support and make obvious all of the assertions in the article so you have the ability to drill down.
 Hello and welcome. Thank you for coming. I'm Ian. This is Laurent. We do  Wikiatics, which is an interactive wiki for language students and teachers. We're  an education project focused on building educational content and making it  possible for teachers and students to build educational content. And you may  notice that you haven't seen other projects that are interested in that at  FOSDEM. Yes, human spoken languages. Thank you. Yes, well they're all native to  someone. As an educational project at free software events, it's a free  software system behind it. We're pretty much always the duck in the room. When we  go to education conferences, we're the only free software project. When we come  places like this, we're the only education one. This is a little confusing.  There is a lot of commonality between the education and the free software world.  There's common values of access and openness and a real belief in what  happens as a transformative process when people learn how to do things and can  take control of their own education. It's confusing then that there isn't more of  an overlap, but it turns out that the extent of this overlap is basically  tux type. If you've learned how to type using it, you know what it is. We have a  couple other related projects like Sugar on a Stick and Skoll Linux, which are  basically just free software environments to be used in school. But  there's very little besides basically us and tux typing that's focused on  directly teaching content or making it possible to directly teach content. In  our time going back and forth over the past couple years, we found that there  are a couple basic reasons for this. The one that is probably most obvious to  everyone in the room is that teachers don't code, so they don't end up  generally making software systems to help them in their teaching. The flip  side of this is that coders don't care. Free software in particular is about  building the things that we want to build and generally speaking we're not  trying to teach anything. The tools we do build that are in the education field  are generally aimed at self-study. And we have some really good spaced  repetition flash card free software and tux type, which begs the question of why  should we care? If the teachers it's their job to teach, it's our hobby to code,  why should we bend effort in that direction if they're not gonna come over  and start taking classes and hacking at the local lug. And the answer I think is  pretty simple. Wikipedia. When we get together and combine these communities,  we can build tools that transform the way knowledge is shared, the way we all  access knowledge and what knowledge actually means in the world has been  profoundly changed by this type of collaboration. And that's the kind of  collaboration that we want to make possible in the field of language  education, which is more than a billion formal students right now and at one  point in time is everyone. So the the market as they say is quite large. We're  also fortunate because everyone is an expert in one or more languages at some  point in their lives. So we have a shortcut around some of the Wikipedia,  well who is this native speaker thing? Because they're a native speaker is the  answer. But there are some challenges with the language community as well.  Collaboration is really difficult with language instruction and it's difficult  not just because people involved want to go and make little proprietary  educational software. It's difficult because of our collaboration tools.  Language is inherently rich media. It's inherently interactive. You speak with  other people. You've got audio. You've got video. But our collaboration tools  don't really focus on that type of material as building blocks for more  complicated content. With language you also have consensus as a problem. There  is no right way to teach a language. It's personal to the student and to the  environment and anyone who's had more than one language teacher knows that they  all have slightly different takes on things. Which is okay. This is great. This  is actually how effective education works. But unlike something like an  encyclopedia, there is no drive towards consensus that you can build  collaboration around. There is no best article at the end of this. There are  many, many different lessons. The one that hits us closest to home as people  running Wikiotics, which is a live site with interactive language lessons on it,  is the vandalism one. This is particularly difficult to language because by  definition the people who are coming to learn a language cannot verify any of  the material that they're learning isn't some mad spam garbage. Which is a point  made 40 years ago very well by Monty Python's dirty Hungarian phrase book  sketch. This is John Cleese in a tobacconist office asking for some  matches, which his phrase book has conveniently translated as my hover  craft is full of eels. And if you're using a phrase book you have no idea how  to verify what's on the right hand side of the page. A lot of community efforts  at trying to get language instruction material together have stumbled over this  building block and have not really gotten any further. As a student you need to be  able to trust the material that you are being presented with and when that's  another language there's a bootstrapping problem here. So we built a new  call, a new tool to address this set of issues and we called it ductus for reasons  that are too long to explain right now. Ductus is a bit of free software. It  powers our wiki and is generally available for other people in other  situations and Laurent is one of our two core developers so I will let him tell  you more about the specifics.  I'll just raise that a bit. So as you know saying Ductus is structured wiki the  main difference between that and something that is more widely known as  say media wiki. Media wiki stores text as long strings of slightly ugly  code that you're probably quite aware of. What we do is we store information as  nested data, structured data that looks like this. So this is not very friendly  and this is not what you see when you're using the wiki. What you see is  something completely user interface with nice widgets and drag and drop and  that sort of things. This is just a back end which allows us to store rich  media information just like language education content. So for instance I'll  go through a few examples of what you can do. You can have quizzes like this  where you'd have a question up there, a prompt that could be a bit of text, that  could also be something you're listening to like an audio prompt to question, a  bunch of potential answers. You pick the right one and there you go and then  you could get exercise series with point systems feedback from a teacher that  could be transmitted to a teacher and so on and so forth. Another example is this  text matching. So you have a sentence with a gap in here. You have to fill the  gap, choose the right answer, that sort of stuff. All of that can be put in the  wiki in a reusable way. Another example which we are working on at the moment is  storing podcast type of information. If you've tried learning a language one of  the big problems is understanding like listening to it. You can always listen to  say the BBC to learn English but it can be nice to have something you can take  away on a bus ride and listen to a podcast. So that's what we're working on.  This is an example of a Mandarin lesson for beginners. All of that content is on  the site and you can just reuse and remix parts of it, translate parts of that  and just teach another language with the same structure and 90% of the work is  done. So all of that information in the wiki is stored in very much Git like  sort of information. So the content, what I was showing you a bit earlier, is  hashed, stored on a hard drive. There's a database to access that. And we have  capabilities pretty much like Git. You can derive information from a previous  revision of some content, so say a lesson. You can branch things. You can in the  future you'll be able to merge several revisions, several different types of  contents together into a new lesson. Just like Git, we're not trying to get to a  consensus. We support and encourage forking, branching and creating new  revisions and new versions of a similar content. And our URLs in the system are  pretty much like branches would be in a Git development system. So you can create  them and they can live in parallel. One point I'd like to add before finishing is  like we are right now importing information into the wiki from the  FSI language lessons. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a series  of podcasts, not podcasts, but tapes that were created by the US Foreign Service  Institute. There's language lessons in about 40 different languages. It amounts  to a few hundred hours of listening material. We are splitting that and  structuring it into the wiki so that very soon we'll have about 300,000  sentences of material in 40 different languages that will be available for any  user to just reuse, remix and build new lessons from, as well as new audio and  images and text and all of that can be, you know, scrolled and mixed and used as  building bricks for like creating a ginormous base of language teaching  materials. I realize we left out of the slides how we address this particular  problem of trusting the material. One of the fundamental ways we organize content  with different URLs where are the pages stored is user and group pages, which are  right protected areas where only you as the user or only the users in a group  have the ability to make changes to content. So teachers can be sure that  their material is presented as a representation of them and not worry  about vandalizing or other sort of student hijinks perhaps. All of this is  freely available material. It's CC by SA and so anyone on the site can still get  to and even edit copying to another location all of this material, but we  feel that right protection is a necessary and relatively understandable step  for taking care of the hovercraft full of eels problem. Other than that, thank you.  Yeah, and we're happy to talk here during the last couple minutes or take  other questions and we're gonna be in the birds of a feather room tomorrow  between three and four, which is over in AW if anyone wants to dive into a little  bit more of how this works there. Yes.  Right, there are two different sets of history. There's the history of the  object that lesson as it's moved through its different revisions and then  there's the location history of what material is available at this URL and so  the objects are forkable and movable throughout the rest of the site, but the  groups have control over putting any sorts of objects or editing the objects  that are located in their particular namespace. Yes.  Because Wikipedia is in English if you're reading the English article and the  citations are supposed to support and make obvious all of the assertions in  the article so you have the ability to drill down.
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