Talk:Wikicite/grant/WikiCite for Librarians: Interactive Learning Pathways for Information Professionals

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@Clifford Anderson: thank you to you and your team for this proposal. I have a couple of questions about the proposal.

  • Can you point to an existing example of Twine being used in a learning context, especially for teaching software? The examples I can see on https://twinery.org/ are "interactive fiction" - that doesn't preclude it being a viable teaching tool, but I'm just checking if there's any examples you can point to of this system being used to teach people how to use a website?
Thank you for the question! Twine is often used for interactive fiction, but it is also highly customizable and frequently used for game-based inquiry. Here at Vanderbilt, a group of faculty and PhD students developed a "digital storytelling" working group to explore the use of twine for both learning and communication. Derek Bruff, the director of the VU Center for Teaching reports on a learning at play symposium held on campus last year, featuring Twine in learning environments. Perhaps more concretely, twine has been used to teach people with no computer science education about modelling machine learning algorithms. In addition to communicating complex ideas, such as these, twine has been used in instructional tutorials, as well. This blog post by Jillian Sandy, instruction librarian at St. Mary's college, offers a good example of using twine in this way. (Awesolek2 (talk) 13:44, 2 October 2020 (UTC))[reply]
  • Are you familiar with The Wikipedia Adventure, built by User:Ocaasi as an interactive trainer for Wikipedia's Visual Editor. Is your proposal similar in 'feel'? That system lives 'inside' Wikipedia. How would people interact with yours?
The Wikipedia Adventure is nice because it allows the user to interact directly with the "real" Wikimedia interface. However, the level of technical expertise required to have a tutorial integrate with an actual Wikimedia page is beyond the capabilites of our group and we don't want to over-promise something that we cannot deliver. The level of choice and interactivity that Twine provides would allow for a "path" and choices similar to the Wikipedia Adventure. But by keeping it in a separate window from the actual Wikidata web editing interface will allow the user to practice working with the interface without the problems of "getting lost" that happens when a user of the Wikipedia Adventure X's out a popup. It also will allow users to organize their screens as they wish -- a problem with Wikipedia Adventure where the popups are "stuck" in a particular location that covers up part of the interface and cannot be moved. Users will interact through their choices of paths through the tutorial and also through questioning with video feedback that depends on their response to the questions.Baskaufs (talk) 20:14, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, The Wikipedia Adventure was prototyped in Twine when it was a text-only demo.Ocaasi (talk) 19:36, 20 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Budget:
    • The largest component of your budget is 5 x 1year licenses to Adobe Creative cloud - for $1.2k. Can you give a more detailed description of that budget item based on Adobe's license plan options? Especially: which pieces of software are required for whom and for how long - given there are 6 people in the team, the duration of the project is 6 months, and you intend to outsource graphic design and captioning?
Great question! We added another team member at last minute so I actually should have requested six licenses. But we can make do with five, I believe. The team members will use Adobe Creative Cloud for audio (Adobe Audition), video editing (Adobe Rush, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder), and production (Adobe After Effects). The Creative Cloud suite will enable us seamlessly to share assets between team members as we produce our audiovisual elements, eliminating potential tooling incompatibilities. While we are indeed planning to outsource graphic design and closed captioning, we ourselves will produce the audiovisual components incorporating those elements. From my reading of the documentation on the website, the education rate for Adobe Creative Cloud is US$19.99 per month based on an annual plan. I don't see a month-to-month plan for educational users, but the regular month-to-month plan is US$79.49 per month. So the month-to-month plan would cost $476.94 per person for six months without the educational discount, compared with the proposed plan to acquire an annual subscription at US$19.99 per month = US$239.88 for the year. If you read the cancellation terms for the Creative Cloud suite, we'd be responsible for "a lump sum amount of 50% of your remaining contract obligation" if we cancelled after 6 months. Clifford Anderson (talk) 20:54, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • You have chosen to include professional translation into two languages - es and zh - for $500 each. Why these two specifically? Would volunteers be able to create their own translations afterwards for their communities too? What is the workflow for that?
We chose Mandarin Chinese and Spanish since they have the second and third largest number of internet users, respectively (en: World_language#Spanish). Our team has members with enough skills in these two languages to verify that the translations of Wikidata-specific terms are the terms in actual use by Wikimedians.
Our team believes that it is feasible and practical to enable the Wiki community to contribute translations into other languages. The first two languages that we add will provide a pilot for the addition of more languages. Talinum (talk) 21:26, 1 October 2020 (UTC)(Charlotte Y. Lew (talk) 15:04, 5 October 2020 (UTC))[reply]
    • What is the portable recorder for? Who will own it after the end of the project?
We will share the portable recorder as we are producing audiovisual clips for this project. After the conclusion of the project, we will make the digital recorder available to library staff members at Vanderbilt University for related audiovisual projects. Clifford Anderson (talk) 21:13, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • On a related but separate note - since this is about providing training resources for librarians for Wikidata - are you aware of the call for proposals to make video tutorials about key WikiCite tools, which is currently open for proposals? See: WikiCite/Video tutorials.
Yes, we did see it and we believe this audiovisual tutorial project would form a great complement to our present proposal. Thanks for making these opportunities available to the WikiCite community! Clifford Anderson (talk) 21:17, 1 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 30 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]