User:Joe Gittings

I'm the project administrator for Occleve - The Open Content Learning Environment.

This is a mobile phone computer based learning system which stores its test data in XML on a mediawiki backend.

Occleve lets anyone create and edit tests on the wiki, then load them into the mobile phone testing software. It's a totally open system: the mobile phone software is GPL-licensed, and the content is GFDL-licensed. As far as I'm aware this is the first time mediawiki has been used like this: as an XML backend serving a mobile phone application.

I live in Shanghai, China so at the moment nearly all the tests are for English-Chinese vocabulary. This explains the system's other name, PocketChinese. But there's nothing stopping you creating tests for other language pairs, such as English-French, English-Arabic, etc, etc... In fact the system already contains a few tests on English-Hindi, English-Korean, and English-Shanghainese.

In the longer term, my ambitions for the system extend beyond language learning. For example, I'd like to add MathML rendering support to the client, so it can be used for learning maths equations.

Mediawiki extensions I'd like to write
The following extensions would be very useful on the server side:
 * Mask the underlying XML from the user, to make editing the tests friendlier. This will move the wiki significantly away from being a standard mediawiki installation.
 * Validation against the DTD when edits to a test are saved. If the XML is bad, rejection of the edits.
 * On-demand simplified Hanzi -> traditional Hanzi conversion, so users testing themselves on Chinese have the choice of either.
 * Allow designated experts (based on academic qualifications) to mark a recent version of a test as "accurate". The user will have the choice of either downloading from the "live" ListOfTests, or a list of the most recent "accurate" versions. (Presented to the user as "Do you want to download from the most recent tests, or from the checked tests?")

Relevant links for the project

 * Occleve homepage
 * Occleve demo - try the software in a simulated mobile phone in your browser
 * Occleve wiki - the tests are stored here. Anyone can edit existing tests, or create new ones. These are then available in the mobile phone front end.
 * Development website - on berlios.
 * To-do list and road map. If you have any fresh ideas, please add them to this page.

Other wikimedia userpages

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Joe_Gittings
 * http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Joe_Gittings