creative commons attribution-sharealike 3.0 license

Summary

lingro is a truly useful site with a decidedly free and open approach to multi-lingual dictionaries and online web translation. It provides users with quick and powerful online translation dictionaries and study tools, vocabulary lists and games. The site is "committed to building the Web's largest collection of open dictionaries."

I was struck by the straight-forward, no nonsense approach to open content. The site content is empowered and protected by the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License. In short, this means the multilingual dictionaries can be copied, adapted and distributed with proper attribution. Equally, content editors must allow their additions to continue to be worked with under the same license. Thus, in an open and free way, lingro appeals to the users for help in creating "relevant translations and definitions" for the these language translation dictionaries.

lingro's website is fast-loading, taking advantage of solid web technology to allow translations to be performed and wordlists to be created without reloading multiple web pages. This can improve productivity considerably for folks with slower internet connections.

Additionally, other sites can be browsed right through the lingro website by typing in the web address in the bottom bar. (View Free Language in Lingro.) This allows any word on the page to be instantly translated when highlighted, and quickly added to a user's vocabulary lists. These lists can then be used in games that aid in memorization. Browsing other sites this way slows down the overall browsing experience, but if language-learning is the goal while reading content from anywhere on the web, lingro effectively adds learning tools to the exercise.

Currently, lingro offers tools and dictionaries for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish, with more languages on the horizon.

Bravo to the folks at lingro! :)

From Website

lingro's mission is to create an open and free on-line environment for language learners worldwide. In addition to developing exceptional study tools and games, we're committed to creating and maintaining the largest collection of open dictionaries.

The dictionaries we're creating and improving are all available under free licenses to make sure that they will remain useful to the on-line community forever. This means that you will always be able to download and use any of our complete dictionaries to your computer or PDA free of charge!

lingro's programmers have developed many tools to help ensure that our dictionaries will provide you with relevant translations and definitions. However, maintaining and improving dictionaries requires continuous effort, both from us and from our great community.

We're in the process of building detailed pages for each dictionary, allowing our users to add and improve the most imporant translations.

lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofál. As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words in their original context.

lingro's mission is to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them. Whenever we're developing new tools for lingro or planning the next big step, there are two principles we always consider:

• Knowledge and information essential to human communication and interaction should be free and accessible to everyone. This is why we created the most comprehensive set of free dictionaries available under open licenses so that anyone can contribute, download, redistribute, and modify the dictionaries for their own needs. These licenses guarantee that they will always remain free and useful to society.

• To have the best dictionaries, you need to have the best tools. Every tool we create, from games, quizzes, and study tools to in-context word lookup is designed for you, the user. To us, this means that they should be intuitive, fast, easy to use, and hopefully fun. :-)

Visit lingro.com

Related Internal Links

Resources Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

Related External Links

Wikipedia Article on Open Content
Wiktionary the Open Dictionary
FreeDict Free Bilingual Dictionaries
Beolingus Dictionary Wörterbuch dicciónario
Liquid Learning is where I found out about lingro.

Summary

The Open University, based in the United Kingdom, has several free and open courses for learning Modern Languages. Currently, there are courses for learning and exploring the English, French, German and Spanish languages.

The courses on the site range from English Grammar in Context to German: Regionen, Traditionen und Geschichte, and consist of quite a lot of useful education materials, structured to flow as a "physical" university course.

Best of all, and indeed the reason it is called The Open University, the content on the site is empowered by Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This means that you can share, copy, distribute, display and make derivative works of the courses as long as you give proper attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes and "share alike" (under the same license) any new changes or improvements.

In time, I hope to see many courses in the Modern Languages section of The Open University, as well as in the other sections of the site. Keep up the goods!

From Website

The Open University is open to people, places, methods and ideas.

It promotes educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions and fulfil their potential.

Through academic research, pedagogic innovation and collaborative partnership it seeks to be a world leader in the design, content and delivery of supported open and distance learning.

Visit The Open University.

Subscribe

Subscribe for updates to the Modern Languages section of The Open University.

Related Resources

Download Free Open University Courses from MIT OpenCourseWare Foreign Languages and Literatures Department

Summary

MIT has joined a growing list of universities worldwide in the OCW (OpenCourseWare) Consortium. An OpenCourseWare is "a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses".

Of interest to language learners is MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Department on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. While courses in this department range from "Communicating Across Cultures" and "Japanese Literature and Cinema" to "Topics in South Asian Literature and Culture" and "Expository Writing for Bilingual Students", they do also include specific language education courses. Currently at ocw.mit.edu, OpenCourseWares are available for learning the French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish languages.

What makes these truly "free and open" to the general public is the Creative Commons license under which these OpenCourseWares are licensed: The Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 3.0 License. In a nutshell, this license gives the public freedom to share, copy, distribute, display and make derivative works of the courses as long as they give proper attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes and "share alike" (under the same license) any new changes or improvements.

This is an exciting project to see! In time, free and "OpenCourseWares" should be available for learning all the world's major languages and, I hope, at least some of the minority languages as well. Bravo MIT and the OCW Consortium!

From Website

MIT OpenCourseWare is an idea—and an ideal—developed, supported, and embraced by the MIT faculty, who share the Institute's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world. In 1999 the Faculty considered how to take best advantage of the Internet to advance education, and in 2000 proposed OCW. The rest is our history...

Link

Visit the MIT OpenCourseWare Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.

Summary

A very useful and cool tool for on-the-go learners of Mandarin Chinese. Almost everyone these days has a cell phone and, with this application, learners can make good use of them for studying Mandarin Chinese when they get a spare moment or are in transit!

From Website

The basic principle is fairly simple - the program shows a word in one language (either English or Chinese), then displays the pinyin (Chinese pronunciation) of the word and finally gives the word in the other language. You can choose whether to go from English to Chinese or from Chinese to English, and also other options like whether to view words in order or in a random order, and whether or not to remove cards after a certain number of successful answers.

At the moment the program comes loaded with seven word lists at different levels, and you can also add your own lists in the CEDICT format (it's a little tricky to do this, but nothing too difficult).

To use the flashcards your phone needs to support Java (MIDP2 / CLCD 1.1), which should be no problem for most phones bought in the last couple of years, and to see the Chinese characters you need to have Chinese fonts installed as well.

Visit the Mobile Chinese Flashcards Website.

Software License

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

I've changed the program's license from "no derivative works" to "share alike", meaning that you're free to add your own word lists and share the altered program with whoever you want, as long as you let other people do the same thing with the changes you make. I plan to eventually open-source the software, but I don't want to do so until version 3 of the GPL becomes available - the current version does nothing to stop anyone from applying DRM to GPL-licensed software, and DRM unfortunately all too common in the mobile industry.