Welcome SCALE 9x attendees!

We are Wikiotics, a project focused on building freely licensed interactive language instruction and study materials that everyone can edit and share as easy as editing a wiki.

Think of it as a free software github for language materials. Rich media elements (pictures, audio, text) are combined in interactive lesson templates, making new materials easy to create and existing materials easy to break apart and remix.

The software behind this, called ductus, is built on top of Django and uses a version control model similar to git. It is GPL’d software, and all the content on the site is licensed as CC-BY-SA to encourage community sharing.

Demo

The ductus system is capable of supporting a wide array of lesson formats. Take a tour through the Introductory Picture choice lesson for English to see one of the types we have implemented so far.

Contribute

As an instructional wiki project built from multimedia materials, there are dozens of ways you can contribute to the project in addition to the normal free software cod/test/design options.

If you can speak

If you can speak, you can record audio for our picture choice lessons. Having audio from a native speaker close to your age/gender/voice type can make learning a new language many times easier so feel free to record even for lessons that already have one or more speakers.

If you have a camera

We have a flickr group that needs your freely licensed (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) photos. Every picture we collect and tag there makes it easier to build high quality, beautiful lessons about the items and situations in our lives.

Teach people what you know

If you have ever tried to troubleshoot software or go grocery shopping in a foreign language, you know how difficult it can be to find language materials that explain the right terms for these common tasks. If you know these terms, in any language, you can help people like you all over the world by making a simple lesson on the wiki. Go ahead, take a look