Dictionary goes live — come play!
Posted by karen on June 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
The Kids Open Dictionary builder is now live!
Please try it out and enter a word or two. Whatever you do doesn’t have to be perfect; others will jump in and refine as we go.
In case you missed it, this is the first completely open, public domain-licensed dictionary designed with kids in mind. We intend for the final product to be used by a variety of OER producers, web sites, book publishers, hardware manufacturers, teachers, students, and others.
In a lot of ways, this is one of the most needed components for many OER projects and is a great mass collaboration project. Please join us!
Tags: dictionary | oer
Kids dictionary goes beta!
Posted by karen on June 8, 2008 in Uncategorized
We’ve released the beta of the kids dictionary builder. Yay! The tool is a sort of combined database and wiki, with functionality to “freeze” final definitions at some point and output the actual dictionary in a variety of formats (ebook, web, PDF, etc.). It was written in a combination of mySQL, PHP, and Python.
If you would like to help beta test this or participate in the building (even writing one definition will be a helpful contribution), you can sign up here or send us an email.
There have been a few days this month when I’ve wondered if creating a free, open kids dictionary was an overly ambitious project, but mostly it’s been very rewarding, and I have high hopes that lots of people will participate, and we’ll produce a great tool for anyone who wants to use it.
The dictionary builder will launch more publicly in late June. So stay tuned for another update then.
Tags: dictionary | kids dictionary | oer | open
Dictionary on the eeePC
Posted by karen on May 15, 2008 in Uncategorized
So in exploring my eeePC, I saw that there’s an offline dictionary on it. This was immediately of interest to me, because a) it’s obvious use in the classroom and b) we’re building an open dictionary (which I imagine at some point will reside on all kinds of devices like this).
The dictionary on the eeePC is from Longman. Unfortunately, it was the same problems as WordNet from Princeton and the free Noah dictionary — adult language that renders it unusable in the classroom.
If you’re not easily offended by bad language and want a big laugh, look up the f word and read all the variations and definitions they give. The synonyms are a riot too.
(By the way, if you have an eeePC and want to remove the Chinese, an update is available through the add/remove tool.)
Tags: eeepc | ulpc | dictionary
Wikis - Building content vs. displaying and using it
Posted by karen on April 22, 2008 in Uncategorized
In education, we often run into objections to wiki-based content because of the potential for objectionable content. This kind of problem mostly stems from spam, and you don’t have to spend much time in wikis to see some pretty awful (and juvenile) examples of this.
We’ve wrestled with this problem a fair amount with our kids open dictionary project. We want this to be a mass collaboration project, but know that if there are instances of obscenities or other inappropriate content, it won’t be usable by schools.
Our solution is to separate the building — which will be done in a wiki — from the final version — which will be in a variety of “frozen” formats (ebooks, uneditable web pages, print, etc.). While the approach may sacrifice a bit in terms of ongoing updates (which still could be submitted by admins or emailed to admins by others), the upside, in terms of being able to ensure quality content while minimizing maintenance work, is high.
I think this is a good solution that many other wikis might find useful.
Tags: dictionary | wikis
Search
Licensing
Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
