While the piece does a good job explaining industry fighting to us mere mortals it still gets captured by the industry’s own view of competition. As a result it never asks the the two really interesting questions about the wireless industry, which are:

1) If spectrum is a finite resource you absolutely need to run a wireless network, then why don’t we treat wireless phones like a utility by building one network and requiring that everyone get fair access to it? We have done this with the wired telephone network for more than a generation.

2) How sure are we that selling exclusive access to wireless spectrum, which is a practice designed in the era of vacuum tube radios, is still the best way to use our wireless resources now that our “radios” are smart phones? WiFi devices use completely unregulated spectrum and are simply smart enough to route around each other when there is interference.

The White Spaces Coalition is a group of tech companies testing devices that use the buffer, or white space, between broadcast TV channels to create a super high speed wireless network. If using smart devices on scraps of spectrum gets us long distance WiFi, what could we build with the spectrum we currently lease to cell phone companies? Or to radio and TV broadcasters for that matter.

The people who make decisions about whether wireless networks should be open to access by competing companies and who choose what rules should govern our use of spectrum in this country all work in one place, the FCC. Something to keep in mind whenever people talk about wireless competition.

As the name indicates, the course is part of our Last Language Textbook campaign and will focus on building materials from the curriculum guide for that project. The course starts today and will run for ten weeks, covering how to develop a basic language lesson, how to use the Wikiotics system to build each of the four lesson types we support (picture choice, podcast, multiple choice, and storybook), and how to get additional help from the community.

Enrollment is open and you are all welcome to check out the course materials and sing up here: https://p2pu.org/en/groups/build-the-last-language-textbook/

Crossposted with the Wikiotics blog.

Since language education is a vast social enterprise, any attempt to come up with a total number of students is necessarily a general approximation. Using information from a British Council 2009 report that lists the number of English language students in India as over 320 million and the same group in China as over 300 million, it is easy to estimate the population of global language students at over a billion, a number that has been making the rounds recently.

The trouble comes when you try and calculate how many students there might be if language education were free and universally available. How many new people would start learning?

I spent some time trying to get a picture of this number and the estimate I came up with is an entire second billion, conservatively speaking. That number comes mostly from the 2008 UN world illiteracy report which lists 775 million adults–1 in 5 globally–who lack the basic literacy skills to participate effectively in society and found another 75 million school-age children who were not enrolled in any school.

While accessibility and cost of education are not the only reasons for the persistence of illiteracy, they are certainly strong contributing factors. Since many other social factors, like potential embarrassment or difficulty of finding purely non-text teaching materials would also be solved by using computer resources, I count those 850 million safely in the pool of potential language students.

With that as the pool of potential first language students, rounding up to a billion seem almost excessively conservative when estimating the size of the total population of second and third and fourth language students. But there it is, my first draft estimate for potential new students, presented in traditional BRN (Big Round Number) format.

Considering that everything we are already doing around the world is stretched to the limits by the first billion students, imagining doubling that pool is a daunting prospect. Realizing that we have the potential to actually do it with technology is more than a little exhilarating.

Truly free educational technology like we have at Wikiotics is challenging to put together and it can be difficult to explain to people sometimes why we even bother when there is such an active startup scene in the field. If you want to understand a little bit of what motivates us, think of this the next time someone mentions a new educational initiative, textbook rental scheme, or one-size-fits-all educational product: is that built to teach the next billion students?

Crossposted with the Wikiotics blog.

Which brings us to the conversation. My father asked “How realistic is this context stuff?”, to which I replied:

I actually audited one of Nissenbaum’s graduate seminars on privacy and technology two years ago when my boss was thinking of writing a book on the subject. Philosophically, I have great respect for the idea; it is powerful and elegant, and seems to neatly summarize what people really care about with these issues. For instance, it explains why Google’s change in data handling this month raised so many hackles: when you start using a particular google service, there are clear expectations about how your data is used and generally you can see it happen, as your searches turn up targeted ads or your email text does the same in gmail, but Google’s decision to pool that /exact same information/ system wide feels like a betrayal of the terms under which you gave the information to them originally.

Part of what has stymied the discussion for a decade is that it makes little sense to talk about this kind of profound shift in how data is processed and used as an “invasion” of privacy. People have, after all, already volunteered the data to Google, or to Facebook, whose many changes designed to push more of your social data into the public represent a string of this kind of context changing. Once you stop talking about “Invasions” your description of the problem becomes both easier for people to understand, and more accurate. You gave Google your email as a postman, it is inappropriate for them to now decide to filter what news you receive based on those messages, just as it would be inappropriate for your postman to cut articles out of your newspaper.

In that sense, I think the context framework will be very helpful to the discussion of privacy related issues and to those people having to decide what actions of regulated organizations are appropriate or inappropriate. Whether the regulations based on this will work, I am not expert enough to venture a guess. This framing of suffers the same weakness as the Supreme Court’s “reasonable expectation” view of privacy in that it relies on ill-defined social norms. This unfortunately comes with the territory since “privacy” is such a norm itself. In the world of technology, where the limits of what is possible and the ways in which those possible ends are achieved shift every year, defining social norms and relating them to individual actions by people in the industry seems a difficult task to say the least. Given how thoroughly the banking and telecoms industries have captures their relevant regulators, I don’t expect any piece of regulation to transform the data-mining industry right now.

That is why I continue to help push technological tools like FreedomBox that are designed to keep as much information as possible decentralized and why I continue to use discrete services, for which I pay, for web hosting, mail, and search. On the plus side, having more people talking about the context sensitive nature of personal information makes advocacy and education much easier, which I am quite pleased about.

Many of you may already be getting lessons like this from language podcast sites and know the value of the format. Podcast are a widely used source of explanation and new practice audio for students looking to grow beyond language fundamentals. Adding this existing format to the Wikiotics toolkit would, by itself, have been a useful addition but we’ve gone one large step further by making it as easy to create or re-create these lessons as any other wiki page. This capability opens up interesting possibilities for collaborative creation, editing, and remixing.

For example, what if you like a lesson but want the practice audio in a different dialect, or perhaps from a speaker of a different age or gender? With static files you are simply stuck and have to look for other sources entirely or try and make do with materials that are of marginal use in your studies. If those lessons are in Wikiotics, you can replace just the small bits of audio you want to change and save a new version of the lesson, all while leaving the rest of the instruction and explanation material intact. Similarly, if you want to take a lesson designed for French speakers and give it to students who only speak Hindi, you can replace the instruction and explanation audio while preserving the practice audio and the way that material is gradually introduced and repeated over the course of the lesson, making it possible to directly collaborate and share materials across national and linguistic lines.

You can see three examples of this new lesson type on the site already. Two (1 and 2) are part of the introductory Mandarin Chinese unit and cover greetings and polite forms of address. Both of these are actually portions of the static audio lesson from this public domain FSI lesson that I converted into our more flexible format. The third lesson comes from a kindred project wiki-babel and covers polite forms of address in French. Take a look and don’t forget to hit the ‘edit’ button to see how simple it is to create and re-create these lessons.

This makes four basic lesson types and the first to build on top of our new flashcard interface which will be the basic system for creating and editing lessons going forward. As always, please feel free to send any ideas and other feedback straight to me or start up a new conversation about them with the group, and thanks for being part of Wikiotics.

Crossposted with the Wikiotics blog.

Two moments in particular jump out at me from the conference. The first happened on Thursday when Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki and the man who coined the term, stopped by our booth to find out about the project. Finding out that he likes what we’re doing and now has us on his mental list of wikis felt like winning a nerd merit badge. I actually yelled “Lexical validation!” after he walked away, which might qualify for some sort of nerd award all by itself.

The second moment actually happened regularly throughout the conference as people walked past our booth. It was the moment as they walked past, read our sign, and you could all but see the curiosity grow until it forced them to swing around and walk back to the booth to find out more. That felt amazing every time.

We’ve got a lot of work ahead if we’re going to keep that kind of interest building. Thankfully the rest of the summer pilot promises new lessons, new lesson types, a new interface, and a new method for creating and saving lessons. Those should all start turning up one by one over the rest of the summer weeks.

Before I head back to that I want to extend a warm welcome to all the new friends and potential collaborators we talked to last week. Also, a great thank you to O’Rielly for the non-profit booth, to Jamela for helping out, and again to Kenny for the monitor loan that let us demo the site to so many people.

Crossposted with the Wikiotics Project blog.

New blog

First of all, welcome to the new blog! After the drumbeat project’s spring re-design removed blog functionality from all the project pages, we’ve been a bit too isolated, and too busy to build new communication infrastructure. That all changed at the Community Leadership Summit where I found enough time during coffee and lunch breaks to migrate all the old content onto this, more permanent blog.

Community Leadership Summit

The stolen moments I took for blog work were surprisingly in keeping with the general theme of the Leadership Summit, which is an unconference specifically focused on the issues of community building and management in the Free Software context, where blogs are a commonplace tool.

We met a lot of great people and will hopefully see many of the over the coming week at OSCon.

OSCon

Since we were lucky enough to get one of the non-profit/community booths at OSCon this year, what we manage to see of the event is going to depend a lot on who comes by our little corner of the exhibit hall. We will be over in booth 224, if that ends up meaning anything for navigation purposes during the actual conference. More importantly, we’re right near the restrooms and across from the Wii lounge so we expect both foot and virtual tennis ball traffic to be high. If you’re at the conference, we’d love to meet you.

New interface

Anyone who does stop by the booth will get a sneak peek at the new interface design Jim has been working on for the past few months. The existing design was built with the picture choice lesson type in mind and does little to make use of the flexible backend that really makes Wikiotics a different kind of wiki project. Jim and I are both very excited about the new interface and would love to show you some of the new potentials, either at the booth, or in August when we push the final changes to the site.

You flattrd’d my paypal!

Finally, we’ve opened up a couple of new convenient donation options: payal and flattr. While you are no doubt all familiar with paypal, many of you may have not seen flattr before, which is a social payment system that has been growing in popularity within the free software and free culture communities. As always, contributions are warmly appreciated, whether those are financial or otherwise

Crossposted with the Wikiotics Project blog.

The particular concert was Joanna Newsom playing at Carnegie Hall. It was the end of her tour and a packed crowd that loved the show.

Carnegie hall, like all of the performance venues I have been to recently, felt the need to send someone out before the show two make two important announcements. First, everyone should turn off their cell phones so that there would be no distracting ringing during the performance. People either complied or we were lucky, because the audience was quiet throughout the show. Second, we were told that all photography, and audio or video recording was prohibited.

This prohibition on recording is always interesting to me because, again like all of the performance venues I have been to recently, Carnegie Hall was not prohibiting any recording of the show, just any recording done by members of the audience. The hall itself is lined with microphones strategically placed to best capture the performance, even when the acoustics of the room requires hanging microphones floating out in the air at very what look like very awkward and precarious angles. Naturally, recording happened anyway.

Beyond the announcement at the beginning, and the ushers who showed us all to our seats, the only other communication from the venue was through the Playbill, printed on paper and used mainly to advertise other programs at the Hall, commercial products, and to list the donors to the Hall for that year. The bit about the actual performance that night was a single sheet inserted into the exact middle of the booklet, where it could be most easily assembled and stapled together. The text of that insert was clearly written by Joanna’s record label, badly. It is attached for your reference. In particular, notice the discussion of how surprising it is that internet distribution didn’t cut into the actual sales of her recent album. they write:

“The briskness of sales was even more surprising given that a prominent music website had unwittingly leaked the album in advance of the date.”

This was particularly amusing to me given that Joanna is currently dating Andy Samberg, one of viral video’s biggest stars. Presumably she has had a first hand look at the positive career impact of the internet.

The final bit I’ll talk about came at the very end of the show. The set was finished, Joanna and the band received a standing ovation, and left the stage. And came back. Of course they came back. Encores are a fixed part of performances today, as are, almost, the standing ovations that precede them. There’s no reason for that. The crowd was enthusiastic but equally mild mannered and not likely to start a riot for want of that last song. It is just how things are done.

These once exceptional events have become part of our everyday expectations. In the future, as all these expectations change, we can look back on the records that we make now and remember how things were different.

Happy holidays everyone.

I had a lot of fun at the Drumbeat festival. I met a lot of interesting people, showed my work to many interested people, and the “festival” structure of the event (part-conference, part-un-conference, and part-makerfaire) encouraged a lot of mixing and interaction I would not have experienced at a traditional conference where I would have been sitting with other wiki people getting past the narcissism of small differences all too common to such highly-focused gatherings.

There has been some talk over the past week about all the things the conference was not. It was not a pure un-conference open to all, it was not multilingual, it was not a revolution. I understand the disappointment that gives rise to these criticisms. The intersection between education and technology can be both an exciting and a depressing place to work.

Technology is rapidly changing how we communicate and store information but institutions in general, and educational ones in particular are slow to change and even slower to re-engineer their basic principles of operation to incorporate outside changes. No conference was going to resolve this systematic tension, nor would it have been wise to pretend to solve it by excluding everyone with money or everyone with business-friendly leanings.

What Mozilla did instead was facilitate a discussion between parts of the community that don’t often come into contact with each other. While the Open Education conference held earlier in the week had a number of interesting talks, I did not meet the wide spectrum of people there that I did during the Drumbeat festival. This was a hugely useful to me in my work. I got lots of different perspectives on what I’m doing, learned a lot about what else is going on in the field, and made some great connections for future collaboration.

Would I have liked more of a multilingual focus? Sure! I run a language instruction non-profit, and spent the opening night of the conference showing everyone how easy it is to make Catalan lessons. I’d love for people to focus on language all the time. But I respect how hard it was just to get everyone into the same space and get everyone excited about working together.

More than anything, that is what I see Mozilla Drumbeat doing. They pull us together, they get us moving, they beat the drum. It is even in the name! It is great work and work that Mozilla is uniquely positioned to do.

Everyone seems to agree that lots of great people went to the festival and everyone had some great interactions there. To me those are signs Mozilla is doing their job well and making these productive meetings of cultures more commonplace. Getting us together is what drummers are for and you can’t blame them for the structural tensions that cause us to have different viewpoints and priorities when we get there.

This week we are shifting the focus from consensus to individuality and asking everyone to build personal lessons based on some shared vocabulary. We want to see your take on some common concepts, your viewpoint. Don’t worry about making lessons for someone else, build a lesson as practice material for your self and at the end of the week we will take a look at the different versions people have built for themselves and see how useful moving away from consensus can be.

How To Participate:
1) Log in.
2) Go to the lesson: http://alpha.wikiotics.org/en/Adjectives and click on "Copy" at the top.
3) Enter "user:YourUserName/Adjectives" into the copy box and hit enter
4) Click on "Edit" at the top and change the images using the "find new image" link next to each page. That will let you search on flickr for a better picture. If you are getting too many results, try clicking the "Restrict to project's Flickr group" box when you are searching.
5) Save your new lesson and add a link on the Adjectives talk page.

As always, thanks for being part of the community!

A note on user pages

If you want to know more about User Pages and how to use them, our User Page Instructions has what you are looking for.

Crosposted with the Wikiotics Foundation blog.