Converging cultures of open in language resources development

Alannah Fitzgeraldhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfgangfoto/4705194692

MINING & LINKING OPEN CONTENT FOR DATA DRIVEN LEARNING

FLAX Language Digital Library Project, University of Waikato, NZ

Data-Driven Learning

The metaphor that Johns evoked was one where language is treated as empirical data and “every student is a Sherlock Holmes”, investigating the uses of linguistic data directly to assist with language acquisition (Johns, 2002, p. 108).

FLAX Academic English Collections

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=library

MANAGED OPEN ACCESS FOR REDISTRIBUTION IN EAP

FLAX Language Digital Library Project, University of Waikato, NZ

Repurposed as Open EAP Corpora• Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS), managed by

the British Library– Abstract metadata of 400,000 PhD theses via the EThOS toolkit– “reuse by third parties for not-for-profit purposes” (British Library,

n.d.).

• British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, managed by the Oxford Text Archive (OTA)– 2500 pieces of learner writing (3 UK universities)– A formal request must be registered with the OTA to develop the

BAWE corpus for non-commercial “research use or educational purposes” (IT Services, University of Oxford, OTA, 2015)

FLAX ETHOS PHD ABSTRACTS COLLECTIONS FOR ACADEMIC ENGLISH

EThOS PhD Abstracts Collections

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=PASS&if=flax

Using Dewey Decimal Classification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#Class_300_.E2.80.93_Social_sciences

Browse by Discipline

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=b&rt=r&s=ClassifierBrowse&cl=CL1&c=PASS&if=flax

Wikification of Specialised Terminology

http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=d&c=PASS&d=HASH29c3a6e8f235b56f62a551&dt=simple&p.a=b&p.s=ClassifierBrowse

RESEARCH INTO MOOC LINGUISTIC SUPPORT

MOOC participants

“MOOC participants register for educational courses; they do not sign up as language learners.” (Wu, Fitzgerald & Witten, 2014)

• English Common Law MOOC (Coursera and University of London)

• CopyrightX (Harvard Law School, HarvardX and the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society)

• ContractsX (Harvard Law School and edX)

English Language Resources

You’ve got some gall

This behaviour is referred to as GALL, Google-Assisted Language Learning (Chinnery, 2008), and this activity mimics the majority of online search behaviour for information retrieval.

Main reasons for using FLAX

Searchability rates highly

http://tinyurl.com/h7sddkr

MOOC learner feedback"thanks, Alannah, for this FLAX site for the Contract Law course. i discovered your work a bit late (one month after you posted your announcement of the FLAX site). at the beginning, i was jumping ahead, skipping lectures, and found myself not knowing certain terms (e.g., dead weight loss). i had to go back to the beginning, searching for where Prof. Fried defined this term. if i had known about your FLAX site, it would be of great help. in general, your FLAX site would be great for a review, or for someone searching for certain case. surely, in the future, in case i need to review some concepts of Contract Law, i would hit your FLAX site first. again, great work. thanks."

...as does the linking in of Wikipedia for glossing and expanding knowledge

http://tinyurl.com/h8f9uex

...and the saveability of useful language patterns (collocations, lexical bundles)

http://tinyurl.com/zkx4wjx

References• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at . . .: lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks.

Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405. Biber, D. (2006). University Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

• Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purpose, 26, 263–286.

• Chinnery, G. (2008). You’ve got some GALL: Google-assisted language learning. Language Learning & Technology, 12(1), 3-11.

• Fitzgerald, A. & Wu. S. (In press). Practices and Resources at the Interface of Openness for Academic English. In Zourou, K. (Ed.) Special Issue on the Social Dynamics of Open Educational Practice, Journal of Learning, Culture and Social Interaction.

• Fitzgerald, A., Marín, M.J., Wu. S., & Witten, I. H. (In press). Evaluating the efficacy of the digital commons for scaling data-driven learning. In M. Carrier, R. Damerow, K. Bailey (Eds.), Digital language learning and teaching: Research, theory and practice. Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

• Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222-239.• Johns, T. (2002). Data-driven learning: the perpetual challenge. In B. Kettemann & G. Marko (Eds.), Teaching and

Learning by Doing Corpus Analysis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora, Graz 19-24 July, 2000, (pp. 107-117). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

• Wu, S., Fitzgerald, A. & Witten, I.H. (2014). Second Language Learning in the Context of MOOCs. In S. Zvacek, M. T. Restivo, J. Uhomoibhi & M. Helfert (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (pp. 354-359), Barcelona, Spain: SCITEPRESS.

• Wu, S., Franken, M., & Witten, I. H. (2009). Refining the use of the web (and web search) as a language teaching and learning resource. Computer Assisted Language Learning 22(3), 249-268.

Thank You

FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/ The How-to eBook of FLAX:

http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdfFLAX Game-based Apps for Android via Google Play Store (free):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en

Ian Witten (FLAX Project Lead): ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nzShaoqun Wu (FLAX Research and Development): shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz

Alannah Fitzgerald (FLAX Open Language Research): a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca

TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/

Twitter: @AlannahFitz