Tiddly-Khan?

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi All,

As part of my work with Ed Dixon's Team-Tiddly I am working on building a TW front-end to the Khan-academy resources. Our goal is to demonstrate how TW can be used to package educational materials for offline study with periodic online syncing (Danielo's recent work with couchdb is of particular interest in this regard). Eventually we want to get it talking directly to next-gen learning management systems using the xAPI.

As a start, I was able to ingest the meta-data for all of the KA videos and package it into a TW. viz;

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/KhanAcademy.html

There are ~6,500 videos in this file and the idea is that teachers will be able to select the videos they want, along with exercises etc. and package them into a deliverable for their students. Each video will then have attached tiddlers for taking notes - handwritten and/or typed, exercsises/quizzes and eventually functionality for communicating with the teacher and other students. For example, we imagine that students will be able to send questions to the teacher, time-stamped with the place in a video that the question relates to and that students will be able to send notes about the content to each other and so build a community knowledge-base around the material.

Ed works with a company called Learning Equality who currently maintain a product called KA-Lite (https://learningequality.org/ka-lite/) which creates a local server and pulls content down to it from the Khan servers (meaning overall lower bandwidth requirements for continued use of the materials) and eventually I would like to look at integrating with their solution too.

If we make something as useful as I suspect we can then I intend to show it to the folks at Khan Academy - hopefully this will be a good way to demonstrate the awesome capabilities of TiddlyWiki and get more people using it.

If you'd like to know more or want to help in any way, drop me a line.

Regards,

Richard

[Ed Dixon]

Sal Khan and Khan Academy supports our efforts at FLE and our Khan Academy Light product and they understand the importance of our mission knowing that a great number of the world's population are on low bandwidth connections or have no internet access at all. The tool Richard, I, and others here have envisioned could integrate with KA and other resources like them to provide learning and note taking resources where right now the students really have no resources at all so your efforts toward this are appreciated. The xAPI cohort for this season has ended and although we did not meet this goal we did learn a lot and met many fascinating people, groups, and industry leaders in this space and I think we are primed to come in next season with some amazing tools that highlight just how amazing you folks are here in the TiddlyWIki community and I would love to see you join this effort which in a way you all have long before I came around. :) 

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Shamelessly bumping my own thread so that Felix et al. will see it - this could be a good place to start if we want to demonstrate a powerful application of tw to 'blended learning'.

Also - this thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tiddlywiki/khan/tiddlywiki/sWPJ8jtfrR4/gMEyvObqAn4J - links to Danny Hillis' talk about a learning map, which gives some interesting thoughts about the direction we might take with OERs.

[Devin Weaver]

I love the idea of a downloadable tiddlywiki for educational uses. How can others contribute to such a project?

[Mark S.]

For an offline version, would you be allowed to pack up the videos into a local directory?

When I look at Android apps, I see multiple ones that provide indexes into KA. I don't see any actual study material nor (what I was really hoping for) KA-in-a-app.

It would be really cool if there were apps (or TW's) with KA quizzes for either offline study or (if that's not possible) study on mobile devices. I can imagine TW with hide/reveal for answers.

Mark

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Devin - the idea is to build tools to allow teachers to collaborate on content - there is a lot of OER content that already exists but no great tools for breaking it into pieces and re-using only the useful bits. Federated TW will let many teachers build overlapping resources - collaborating where appropriate and diverging where necessary. Any help at all would be very much appreciated - what would you like to do? To show that a full book can work when atomised and the re-assembled, I 'ported' a great open-source math textbook to TW - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83055414/Books/Active_Calculus_v0.1.html

Hi Mark - take a look at KA-Lite https://learningequality.org/ka-lite/ - my friend and fellow tiddlywikier Ed Dixon is part of their dev team - it installs to a local server and tracks progress across the videos and exercises from Khan Academy - one goal of tiddly-khan would be to hook into their offline repository, with a fall-back to the online videos. The use case is low-bandwidth environments - for example remote schools or correctional facilities.

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Richard,

I think your vision of using TiddlyWiki as frontend that syncs sporadically to a server to update its content is a great idea. However, this requires much effort imo because syncing and distributing content is not a trivial task. Ed's work with the xapi is equally complex. It really needs some dedicated programmers that fully use their time to accomplish this task...

My comment (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/XOQ5uUOPSh4/x6a0MEH-u-AJ) to Greg's post in contrast had a much simpler intention. I simply realized that tiddlywiki could be promoted as a replacement of e.g. PDF as format for digital content and that tiddlywiki could represent the new standard for a digital textbook: highly dynamic, multimedia friendly, cross-plattform, interactive.

Of course if it could update its content once in a while it would be awesome, but as said, I think this is a complex task.

-Felix

[RichardWilliamSmith]

I think your vision of using TiddlyWiki as frontend that syncs sporadically to a server to update its content is a great idea. However, this requires much effort imo because syncing and distributing content is not a trivial task. Ed's work with the xapi is equally complex. It really needs some dedicated programmers that fully use their time to accomplish this task...

Agreed. In it's original form, my idea doesn't rely on this functionality but, having researched the topic somewhat, it seems like this ability to 'phone home' is going to be pretty important - not so much to update content, but more for reporting student progress to a server for a teacher to see and for 2-way interaction. Non-trivial, I agree - for many, many reasons (laws around storing any data which make students identifiable, for one thing) but potentially very useful.

I'm not a programmer yet, but when I am I'll see what I can do :-) 

Regards,

Richard