Colingo
| Free language learning for all
About
Colingo aims to make it free and easy for everyone to learn languages. To make this happen, Colingo is creating a free web portal, software packages, and content. Colingo aims to promote language exchanges using digital video, games, and videoconferencing.
Along with OLPC, Colingo is a non-profit organization aiming to combat a worldwide crisis in affordable education. Colingo also takes a constructionist approach to education, in which students are encouraged to learn through exploration and discovery, rather than rote memorization.
Colingo is an OLPC developer and is actively developing material for the October release of the XO, most notably ColingoXO, a video library, and the English-learning movie series 1-2-3 ingles.
ColingoXO
- Main article: ColingoXO
ColingoXO is a package for collaborative language exchange customized for the XO. It will allow children to learn languages by constructing video dialoges out of short video clips. Akin to magnetic poetry for refrigerators, ColingoXO will permit the remixing of short video phrases.
ColingoXO is currently under active development; a stable release is due to be released in October. Python developers interested in working on this project are encouraged to write to the Colingo discussion list.
1-2-3 movies
A second Colingo initiative is producing free 1-2-3 language-learning movies. The initial focus of the movies is to highlight native speakers saying
The first beta release of these movies can be watched in a Flash-enabled web browser at colingo.org (Watch Movies)
On August 22, 2007 Colingo released 1-2-3 ingles #1, a content bundle for the XO laptop. On October 15, 2007 Colingo released 1-2-3 Spanish, 1-2-3 Portuguese, and 1-2-3 Spanish for kids. The movies are currently available as streaming flash or as raw theora. XO users should watch the theora versions, as Gnash will not yet play our videos.
Philosophy
Colingo is committed to linguistic equality and does not hold one language, culture, or individual superior to others, Colingo does, however, find some software and licensing superior to others. Content is released under an attribution Creative Commons license.
Colingo is based on open source software to the fullest extent possible; similarly, we submit most of our language-learning resources into the public domain, freeing anyone to legally share and remix them.
Ultimately, Colingo operates under a premise that better language exchange resources are necessary to facilitate understanding, tolerance, and peace in the new globalized world.
Submitting videos
Technical instructions on how to submit videos to Colingo for Debain Linux systems) (This section being actively edited 8.15.07)
- Record videos onto a DV camera
- Use dvgrab to automatically capture all the video on the tape, and break it up into separate files using the timestamp (a timestamp is created whenever you hit the record button):
sudo nice -n-20 dvgrab --autosplit --timestamp --format dv2 filename_prefix-
- Rename all clips as
language (en, es, zh ISO code)]_[level (1-10)][lesson (a-z)]_[phrase].dv
- Use ffmpeg2theora:
ffmpeg2theora -x 240 -y 160 -v 5 -a -1 en_1a_can_you_speak_louder_please.dv
You may find this tutorial helpful.
Content bundle
Colingo released its first content bundle on August 22, 2007. This first installment of 1-2-3 ingles highlighted 14 common English phrases. The library file can be downloaded from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:colingo.xol .
Community and Developers
Colingo is an open project growing at a quick pace. Check out http://dev.colingo.org/mediawiki/index.php/Who_We_Are to see the current core of Colingo.