[This a transcript of a video (available on youtube) recorded by Ian Sullivan. The Wikiotics Drumbeat project page is available on the Drumbeat site.]
Teaching people about the open web, like teaching them about free software or free culture, is about empowering them to be creators and collaborators rather than passive users of pre-made materials and technologies.
The best way to teach people is to get them involved. Nothing opens your eyes to the possibilities of the open web like that first productive contribution you make to a project that could only exist there. We want that feeling, the one you get with your first permanent Wikipedia edit: the realization that you are part of a community and have something more to offer than your eyeballs passively staring at a screen.
If I were given a year to teach people about the open web, I would spend it building that kind of community around an activity with the potential to include an entire generation of web users: language instruction.
My idea is a site that helps teachers and students build simple interactive language materials out of web parts and provides a structure for the community to re-use, re-mix, and collaboratively improve those materials. We call it Wikiotics.
The technologies involved are not complex. Existing popular language tools, like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur, use small quantities of language material in simple structures that repeat over the course of instruction. Rosetta Stone uses a grid of four pictures with a foreign sentence above them and an audio recording of that sentence. All you do is click on the picture that matches the sentence and it tells you if you are right. Pimsleur takes a more audio-focused path, playing listeners a foreign dialog and then repeating the individual sentences with native translations interspersed.
You can build all of this and much more with simple html5 pages, a little javascript, and some css. We should give the language learning community easy tools to create these sorts of lessons, a place to share their work, and support in experimenting with the creation of new lesson types using the same open web technologies.
Since our tools will always be built out of web parts, every contribution is like an open web essay and rewards the contributor with skills that will work anywhere. If we are successful, we can train a generation to be native tinkerers on the open web from very early in their lives rather than growing up to see it as nothing more than a broadcast medium.
Even if most people never want to tinker with the technologies behind their language materials, they can make a huge contribution simply by making the materials work more effectively for themselves. If you want to learn the words for complex concepts like “beautiful” or hard to see ones like “welcoming”, the best way to do that is by adding pictures that trigger those concepts for you personally. With the spread of camera phones it is becoming increasingly trivial for language learners to improve the content of their lessons with those sorts of meaningful pictures taken from their lives.
This customization makes language easier to learn for the student and produces a wealth of information that can be shared back with the community. We should have hundreds of thousands of pictures easily available for the community to build from. Those pictures in turn make it easy for teachers to create thousands of lessons covering all kinds of specialized vocabulary and situation-specific material.
Most importantly, when it comes to language, we are all teachers. If you can understand this sentence, you know enough to help someone learn. Our system should be built to encourage the sharing of this knowledge.
Do you like a foreign language lesson you just took? Take a moment to translate it into your native language. Is it already translated? Record audio for it or improve the pictures by replacing them with ones that are more beautiful or culturally appropriate.
Do you want the audio of your foreign language lessons to be from someone of your age and gender from a particular country? The open Internet is large enough to connect you with an appropriate person, someone who also wants to speak your language the way you do.
Record some audio for each other to go with your lessons. You’ll both end up with the accent you want and maybe the connection of helping each other in a shared activity will keep you involved in your lessons longer, or even gain you a friend.
The community is vast and the materials being generated are larger than any private organization could possibly afford to develop. If we give the community the tools they need, they will build a project so large that everyone can see the only place for it and the only way to create it is the open web.
Thank you