How to get teaching materials translated and converted?
Günther Osswald
the University of Munich (LMU), department for the didactics of
physics, plans to get their materials for primary education on-line on
WE. According to their own estimations, the size is about 1000 pages.
The project is called SUPRA, and contains lesson plans and handouts
(immediately usable material for print or download) as well as
didactic background information and the results of research surveys.
Prof. Wiesner, the head of the department, calls it “unique in the
world”.
http://www.edu.uni-muenchen.de/supra/
My personal opinion is, to get this content on WE could be of help to
millions of schools, as even in German teacher education, primary
physics is often weak.
The “only” problem for them is the translation into English and the
conversion to wiki syntax.
The department itself does not have any resources available for this
purpose, cost are estimated to about 25.000 Euro.
I guess this case is not the only one of this type. Good teaching
materials, ready for use, the authors willing to release it under CC-
license, but need for translation and conversion, and no funds :-( .
BTW: I myself do not yet know how I should get my Mechanics11
translated properly :-( :-( .
Any proposals?
Greetings from hot&sunny Bavaria
Günther
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:White_Eagle
Wong Leo
Facebook ( FB ) is doing a interesting work on localization , to make FB useble for Chinese people , and it is intersting ,
http://pro.yeeyan.com is a website focus on translation , one of my high school classmates he work for them , I think the most difficult or challeng is German is a difficult langauge I see , and not many people who can speak German , so it is much more feasible to translate English stuff instead of Other things
So suppose you translate it into English , and as myself many of people here in China don't speak English , and WE is not even supporting Chinese now , so let alone using it , so bascially I think it is almost like waste of time to do the translation , but I strongly will encourage everyone who would like to do translation job shift the focus on asking questions like
1 translating what ? learning course or blogs ,
2 why do we do this ?
Another topic jump to my mind is encouage WE to support Chinese and all langauges , so we can keep updating with our own resources , in this way , it can really change the education , there is a old saying in Chinese , if you give someone a fish ,he can eat for once , but if you teach him how to fish for himself , he can use it for his whole life .
so I think the best way to help people is not to give people the fish but teach how to fish especially for teachers ,
any comments ?
Leo from China
--
HELP 项目论坛
https://groups.google.com/group/helpelephantsliveproject
Wong Leo
Anyway , thank you for your post
Sgurell
I would recommend uploading the material in whatever file(s) you have.
Then solicit volunteers to each take a part of the source material and
convert it to wiki markup. The key at this point is to have structure
on the wiki make sense and easy to navigate. Once the German source
material is on the wiki, use machine translation to convert the
paragraphs from German to English. Once in English, volunteers will
still need to polish, but it will be a lot easier for them. The
machine translation may still leave some paragraphs unintelligible, so
someone with a good grasp of both German and English would need to
look over the material.
Just a thought.
Sincerely,
Seth
On Jul 2, 1:58 am, Günther Osswald <Guenther-Ossw...@t-online.de>
wrote:
Günther Osswald
hi Leo, Seth
Thanks for your feedbacks! The problem with volunteers is, that they
don't have them. My proposal to engage their own students for
wikifying was rejected, because working in a wiki is not what they
teach at this department. It is even new to the teachers themselves.
I think what is needed is good software, that does the job, as all
material is already on-line in HTML. As the MediaWiki wikis can read
HTML, the question for us is, if we would we be ready to accept 1000
HTML-pages in WE. ( I remember I once put in one HTML-page, and Wayne
finally wikified it for me, because he argued we should use wiki
syntax, so that everyone would be able to deal with the source code
and modify the text.)
For translation, Prof. Wiesner would never be satisfied with a machine
translation. The material is of high quality and should stay of high
quality.
Leo, the saying with the fish is absolutely right, but I think the LMU-
people will only release their material, if they can convert it into a
form that is ready for use, so to speak into a fish-can.
Best regards,
Günther
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:White_Eagle
Leigh Blackall
Lingro
By Cameron Parkins on Weblog
Lingro is a project that aims to create an online environment that will allow anyone, in reading a foreign language website, a quick and easy means to translate words they don't understand. Simple in concept, yet profound in implication, Lingro (which we have blogged about twice before) uses open dictionaries and user-submitted, CC BY-SA licensed, definitions to expand its ever-growing database. We recentlly caught up with co-founder Paul Kastner and were able to discuss in-depth the philosophies behind Lingro, how it accomplishes what it does, how it uses CC licenses, and what its future holds.
What is Lingro's history? How did it get started? Who is involved?
The
idea to create a new kind of on-line dictionary which would help people
learn languages was conceived by my co-founder, Artur Janc. A few years
ago, Artur was practicing his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofál.
He had taken all the advanced Spanish courses at the university where
he was studying, and like most students, had a good grasp on the
grammar and core vocabulary of the language. When he started reading,
he found that while he could understand the structure of the writing,
there were so many words he hadn't come across before that he was
spending more time looking up words in a dictionary than actually
reading!
Artur thought there must be a better way, and built a prototype of what
would become Lingro, allowing him to look up words in a document he was
reading just by clicking on the word. This was a huge improvement in
terms of speed and reducing distraction compared to the usual method of
looking up words in a dictionary. He also built a flashcard game, which
let him review the words he looked up while reading after he was done.
We realized that this tool could be useful for other people as well, so
we set out to build a version that anybody could use, with many more
languages than the original English dictionary. We got a lot of help
along the way from Holmes Wilson, one of the people behind Miro, the free open-source video player as well as downhillbattle.org, promoting a fairer music industry.
That's only half the story - since we launched in November 2007, there's been a really great community developing around the site. Lots of people have been contributing translations and expanding the dictionaries. We've also gotten a ton of feedback on the tools, which has been invaluable as we build and expand them. All the support we've gotten has been really flattering, and the project definitely wouldn't be anything close to what it is now without all of the dedicated people who have contributed.
Lingro takes aim at a problem that has plagued those in web development for some time - making their sites readable by people who don't speak the site's native language. You have already developed functional dictionaries for a bevy of different languages. What kind of tools does Lingro employ to tackle this problem, both in pooling definitions and making these definitions usable by both web-developers and site-visitors alike?
There's a big gap in language learning between what's taught in a classroom and what you need to know to use a language in day-to-day activities. Some people will travel to a country where the language they're learning is spoken in order to reach a sufficient level of fluency. Short of that, there are surprisingly few ways for people to get support after they're done with their coursework.
Lingro aims to fill this gap by giving everyone quick access to translations while they're reading foreign-language web pages and documents, right at the moment they need to know what a new word means. When you're using Lingro to read a web page, you can click on any word in the text to bring up a translation on the same page. This eliminates the need to move away from what you're reading and go to a separate dictionary site, or thumb through a paper dictionary.
When we started searching for content for Lingro, it was really important to us from an ethical standpoint to use open dictionaries. Language is one of the basic, common, and deeply necessary aspects of humanity, and to have the core information about it controlled by a few large publishers seems wrong on many levels. Especially in this age, where the growth of society is driven by global interaction and cross-cultural communication, the means of communicating across language barriers need to be as accessible as possible.
We set out to start assembling open dictionaries to include in Lingro, but we found they were, well, a mess. A lot of people have done some really great work building open dictionaries, but their efforts are scattered across many different sites and projects. What's more, most of these dictionaries aren't machine-readable. A big contributor to the success of Creative Commons licenses has been making it easy to include machine-readable data along with the work being licensed. This allows works to be easily found through search engines by someone looking to reuse it. Flickr is a great example of this - when you're searching for a particular photo, you can specify your requirements for license terms, and the results will show only those photos that fit your needs.
Imagine how hard it would be to do this kind of search if every flickr user had a different way of specifying the licenses of their works. This is pretty much the way it is with the open dictionaries out there. The way a dictionary for one language pair, say German to English, encodes information such as translation text, part of speech, noun gender, etc. is usually completely different from the way another language pair does it. This makes it nearly impossible for a project like Lingro (which would eventually like to support translating from every language to every other language) to incorporate dictionaries from multiple sources.
To overcome this, we've been writing software that takes in this mish-mosh of different dictionary formats and puts out dictionaries in a clear, simple, machine-readable format. We then load them into Lingro's back-end so that people can access all the dictionaries through a common interface.
The process doesn't stop there. Once the dictionaries are loaded into Lingro, we encourage users to contribute translations to continue expanding the dictionaries. We've put a lot of effort into creating the Lingro dictionary builder which helps people easily add translations and definitions. Once someone has chosen a language pair they're fluent in, the builder shows them a list of words missing from that particular dictionary, ordered by how common they are in the language (the word "the" would be near the top, while "onomatopoeia" is further down). They can also see sentences showing the words used in context to help recall the meanings. These are the same kinds of tools used by the big publishers to create their dictionaries - we're not just opening up the dictionaries themselves, we're opening the entire process of creating them.
We've also created tools for webmasters of other sites that allow them to directly access Lingro's dictionaries. Anyone can add Lingro's translation pop-up translations to their pages, which is a really great way for sites with a big international audience to make it easier on their readers. We've also built a tiny search-as-you-type dictionary that webmasters can include on their pages. These tools further Lingro's mission of making translations as accessible as possible for as many people as we can.
Part of Lingro's core is user submitted, CC BY-SA licensed, word definitions. Why did you choose to go with CC licensing (and specifically CC BY-SA)? Have you found CC licensing to be a good fit for what Lingro is attempting to accomplish? How do CC-licensed definitions compare to those pooled from other resources? Has there been any unique instances or anecdotes you can think of that were enabled by CC-licensing?
Just as the the formatting of all the open dictionaries is a mess, the licensing landscape is just as convoluted. Most of the dictionaries out there were started before the creation of Creative Commons licenses. Some dictionaries, like Wiktionary, use the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), while others, such as the XDXF project, use the GNU General Public License (GPL). Even worse, some have no formal license at all, and we've had to get in touch with some of the authors to ask permission to include their dictionaries in Lingro.
When we were starting out, we were fortunate enough to get in touch with Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons and generally recognized as the foremost expert on cyberlaw) about the problem. He recommended that we dual-license all the new user contributions under the CC BY-SA license and the GNU FDL. This allows us to contribute our user translations back to existing projects like Wiktionary, while also making them available under the much easier to understand terms of a Creative Commons license.
We especially like the CC BY-SA because it ensures that the content created on Lingro will be free forever. Anyone building on the work our contributors have done will be able to freely share it with the community in the same way. This freedom is central to the creation of a commons of knowledge and allowing people to collaborate across cultures.
Since we made the decision to use the CC BY-SA, there have been some really exciting developments in the world of content licenses. Back in December, Wikimedia (the parent organization of Wikipedia and Wiktionary) announced that the board had passed a resolution to work with the Free Software Foundation on updating the GNU FDL (used by Wikimedia) to allow for migration of their content to the Creative Commons BY-SA. This is an important step because the FDL was never designed for projects like Wiktionary; it was written with the intent of licensing software manuals. The CC BY-SA, in contrast, was designed for projects just like Wikipedia (and Lingro as well), which have a strong emphasis on collaboration. The move to the CC BY-SA license means that people will have a much easier time knowing their rights and restrictions when reusing Wikipedia content.
That said, I've been somewhat disappointed with the lack of progress since then. There was a good deal of fanfare surrounding the original announcement, but it's been more than half a year since then and we've barely heard another word about it from the organizations involved. Great things can happen when organizations which share such similar philosophies come together for a common goal, so I hope Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation, and Creative Commons all continue their collaboration to make this a reality!
Lingro always seems to be adding new features and functions to its already long list of amenities. What is next for Lingro? Is there anything else you'd like our readers to know?
We're working on some really cool study tools which will help people review the words they've translated. On the educational side of things, one of the unique aspects of Lingro is the ability to provide a personalized learning experience, which is really necessary at the more advanced levels of language learning. Lingro keeps track of the words you look up while reading so that after you've done with the web page or document, you can use study tools, such as the flashcard game and sentence history page, to help you review these words. We've got some big improvements and additions to this part of the site planned for the coming months!
Another part of the project we're developing very actively are the tools for webmasters and language learning sites. We're creating easy ways to include Lingro's translations both as full-featured pop-ups as well as dictionary widgets. We're also making a flexible dictionary API so that people can come up with new ways of reusing the content. What we're shooting for is reaching a point where anyone looking to include translation capabilities on their site can decide to use open dictionaries not just because of ethical considerations, but because of the high quality and ease of use of the dictionaries.
We're also working with volunteers to add more dictionaries to Lingro, especially the widely-spoken languages such as Chinese. There's a lot of political tension between the West and China right now, and as with all international disputes, one of the keys to resolution is communication. By bringing together tools and dictionaries to help people communicate across language and cultural boundaries, we think Lingro is able to make the world a better place for all of its inhabitants.
If you would like to get involved with the project, please feel free to e-mail me at paul AT lingro DOT com. We're always looking for more volunteers to help expand the range and depth of the dictionaries available through Lingro.
--
Leigh Blackall
+64(0)21736539
skype - leigh_blackall
SL - Leroy Goalpost
http://learnonline.wordpress.com
valerie
wrote:
> don't have them.
translations and/or wikifications could be really good projects if
they are promoted and managed!
Some instructors are having students participate in Project Gutenberg,
which as a good setup for volunteer work.
I have a lot of students in my online classes who will need
educational volunteer projects. I have been looking for English-
Chinese or English-Vietnamese translation opportunities as many of
these students are multilingual. I'd like to see them contributing to
WE to fulfill that requirement.
As this is a new project, the student guidelines are being drafted,
but here is the work in progress.
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Community_Service_Learning/Community_service_learning_student_guidelines
Randy Fisher
This is a wonderful project ~ is it listed in the WikiEd List of Projects?
Increasingly, we're getting feedback from our community, about the importance in involving students in their actual learning process....whether it's hosting a class on the wiki, or integrating a component of actual development relating to course content. I am glad we are open to this, as it allows for innovative thinking and practice, and in this complex self-organizing ecosystem, who knows where it will take us.
I am doing some work in the Community Media node (www.wikieducator.org/Community_Media) and I wonder if there would be openness from say journalism / media schools for students to partner / intern with say, a Community Radio station across the miles, or do some other component of community service..
Your thoughts?
Randy
________________
Randy Fisher - Facilitating Change, Connections and Collaboration to Improve Performance.
* Engaging People in Teams, Communities and Organizations....and WikiEducator!
+ 1 604.684.2275
wiki...@gmail.com
http://www.wikieducator.org
http://www.wikieductator.org/Community_Media
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Randyfisher
Skype: wikirandy
Wayne
On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 07:09 -0700, valerie wrote:
As this is a new project, the student guidelines are being drafted,
but here is the work in progress.
http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/Community_Service_Learning/Community_service_learning_student_guidelines
Don't forget that our WikiEducator community would also benefit tremendously from these initiatives <smile>. WE already has a few examples worth exploring.
Steve Foerster has started called XXI Texts -- the idea being to update text books which are in the public domain. (http://wikieducator.org/XXI_Texts ) and as started work on the Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshal over here: http://wikieducator.org/Economics_Marshall . Still lots of work to be done and it would be great if we could get a little help.
Biology for Elementary Schools, run by Declan McCabe is another brilliant concept where student teachers develop lessons and license these under a free content license (http://wikieducator.org/Biology_in_elementary_schools ).
We need help in translating our Wiki Newbie Tutorials for the Spanish, French and Portuguese WikiEducator installations and hopefully Chinese sometime in the future.
WikiEducator could easily provide free training for students in basic wiki editing under the Learning4Content project and feel free to invite students to register for any of the upcoming workshops: http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Registration
Perhaps we should think about refining our community portal page listing community service projects? We could list a number of projects which would be suitable for community service projects. What do folk think?
Cheers
Wayne
Wayne
Wow -- that's good news.
Apology for my delay in response -- we've been busy with our quarterly programme update meetings.
That's an amazing donation! Please encourage Prof Wieser to develop a node page in WikiEducator for the University of Munich. Once you have more details of the project -- I would like to prepare a front page news item about this project. (See for example the University of Education, Winneba page node in WE - http://wikieducator.org/UEW ) In this way the University can profile their work in the open education arena.
Regarding conversion of HTML into mediawiki syntax -- there is an online webservice that we could try. See:
http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/
I've not used this myself yet -- but perhaps you could try converting one or two pages as a test case?
Cheers
Wayne
Barbara Dieu
http://www.timeproject.org/old/french/default.html
http://www.timeproject.org/old/french/activites/videoconferences.htm
http://www.timeproject.org/old/french/activites/jumelagedeclasses02.htm
http://www.timeproject.org/old/french/activites/frisechronologique.htm
Unfortunately, the team which took over the project in the Netherlands changed their site and did not update the different pages so what there is a lot of link rot, especially in the Portuguese site, which we totally lost.
If you manage to advertise and sell this idea well in different classes both at high school, language schools and language colleges, you may benefit from a snowball effect :-)
Warm regards from Brazil (where we know nothing about snowballs...hehehe)
Bee
--
Barbara Dieu
http://dekita.org
http://beewebhead.net
Steve Foerster
<< Don't forget that our WikiEducator community would also benefit
tremendously from these initiatives <smile>. WE already has a few
examples worth exploring. Steve Foerster has started called XXI
Texts -- the idea being to update text books which are in the public
the Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshal over here:http://
wikieducator.org/Economics_Marshall. Still lots of work to be done and
have a number of candidates for XXI Texts of old textbooks that would
be worth revising for today's students.
In our case, though, part of the delay is that I believe that
something that comes out of the public domain should stay there, even
as it's revised, so having a complete WE policy on exactly how we use
alternative licenses within WE will be helpful. I suppose that will
have to wait for the new Council....
<< We need help in translating our Wiki Newbie Tutorials for the
Spanish, French and Portuguese WikiEducator installations and
hopefully Chinese sometime in the future. >>
Spanish WikiEducator:
http://es.wikieducator.org/
French WikiEducator:
http://fr.wikieducator.org/
Portuguese WikiEducator:
http://pt.wikieducator.org/
Perhaps those German language materials could start life as the core
of an instance at de.wikieducator.org?
-=Steve=-
Wayne
In our case, though, part of the delay is that I believe that
something that comes out of the public domain should stay there, even
as it's revised, so having a complete WE policy on exactly how we use
alternative licenses within WE will be helpful.
To speed up processes for when the Council is established, we can already start work in building on the draft policy on licensing. WE has already confirmed the use of CC-BY materials in good faith with the understanding that we will be drafting a policy to support this implementation. The pragmatic requirements re CC-BY materials in WE that we will need to think about are:
* The need to state upfront that a new project is CC-BY and not start with CC-BY-SA and then decide to shift to CC-BY at a later stage;
* For CC-BY projects to monitor their watch pages to ensure that CC-BY-SA content is not copied into CC-BY projects without a distinct identifier that a given paragraph or section is licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Other than these issues, I think that it shouldn't be too hard to develop a workable licensing policy.
Cheers
Wayne
Jim Tittsler
> Regarding conversion of HTML into mediawiki syntax -- there is an online
> webservice that we could try. See:
>
> http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/html2wiki/
Or use the HTML::WikiConverter module from CPAN. Since there are a
large number of pages with the same source format, it would make sense
to build knowledge of the conventions they use into the utility to
best fit the WikiEducator conventions and templates.
Randy Fisher
www.wikieducator.org/Converters OR www.wikieducator.org/Conversion
with links to the Conversion options
Randy
valerie
For community radio and beyond, check out
http://radioproject.org/
There are guidelines for submitting programming ideas and content.
For lists of hundreds of "local" stations that carry their
programming and might be interested in student projects.
http://radioproject.org/listen/usaschedule.html (US)
http://radioproject.org/listen/intschedule.html (international)
On Jul 4, 9:48 am, "Randy Fisher" <wikira...@gmail.com> wrote:
... I wonder if there would be
Randy Fisher
This is really helpful ~ thanks.
Would you mind posting this on the Community Media list ~ we have a small, growing community....and you're welcome to join!
http://groups.google.com/group/community-media
- Randy
valerie
On Jul 4, 9:50 am, "Wayne" <wmackint...@col.org> wrote:
> WikiEducator could easily provide free training for students in basic
> wiki editing under the Learning4Content project and feel free to invite
> students to register for any of the upcoming workshops:http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Registration
>
> Perhaps we should think about refining our community portal page listing
> community service projects? We could list a number of projects which
> would be suitable for community service projects. What do folk think?
>
much better (and less work for me <smile>) to direct students to a
list of current projects. Great use of a wiki for connecting needers
and do-ers.
I'll volunteer my students as early-adopters. The first batch will be
coming through in about 3 weeks. Oh, and BTW, summer session is only 6
weeks long so everything is pretty intense.
Günther Osswald
The diberri.dyndns converter does not work for those pages, and I'm
not technical enough to make is work. (Maybe somebody who's more into
HTML could try again?)
But simply putting the source code into the wiki editor does not work
either => Great idea, Randy, to collect community knowledge about
automatic wikification. I think if we had a working software/online
service for this task, people would much easier donate material for
use in a wiki.
Translation by students is nice, I've tried it several times and they
really liked it a lot. But the quality is not really sufficient. It
needs a lot of volunteer work by the language teacher himself to get
things round. I think, in this case professional translation is
needed.
Thanks, Leigh, for the Lingro tool. I've already used it for the texts
in our forum!
To tell the truth, I'm not yet satisfied with the advices I got now.
I've to show them a realistic way, otherwise they won't donate!
Would it be of help, if they, as a first step, simply change the
license of SUPRA to CC-BY-SA and put a link on a “node page” in WE,
that people can find it? Like we have it for the “Traveling School of
Life”, that is listed on the project list, but is represented in WE
with only one sentence and an extern link?
Please give me some more good ideas!
Günther