The second best reason to own a smartphone - reading eBooks!

Recently I've been using Kobo.com to read eBooks on my tablet and smartphone. It brought back the reading habit in me! It sure is fun browsing an online bookstore with thousands of titles. I love the feeling of being able to get books online which are impossible to find in the local bookstores.

How to store the entire Wikipedia (well almost) inside your Smartphone or Tablet

How would you like to have the entire Wikipedia text inside your android smartphone? What do you say to that? I'd say "Information is POWER!".

Never mind that it's fully text-only with not a single image in sight. Imagine reading two million articles on famous persons, history, technology, etc. on Wikipedia, but totally, get this, OFFLINE. Access the articles, anytime, anywhere, without WiFi.

Welcome to BitMagic Technologies LLP's Wiki Encyclopedia Offline-Free app!

We're talking here about a whopping 3.58 Gigabytes of download data for your cherished smartphone or tablet. Zounds! A long wait indeed, depending on your Internet speed, but it's well worth the wait.

In fact, I can't wait for the day when a smartphone or tablet has the storage capacity exceeding 250 Gigabytes - which is how much storage space a full version of an offline Wikipedia, containing text and images, will take up.

Einstein would have been proud of you!

2 million articles at your fingertips.

My one gripe is that the app doesn't allow text-to-speech capability. So my Ivona Amy or Nicole TTS Engine can't read the text while I'm driving or ironing my shirt. Maybe in the next update then.

A smartphone is too smart and expensive a device to use it just to play games. Life is too precious to while the time away with all kinds of distractions on your smartphone. Want to be a winner at Jeopardy? Why not enlargen your world and knowledge by browsing 20 Wikipedia offline articles a day? It'll only take you 273 years to finish the two million articles of 2013 Wikipedia! So why not Wikipedia-fy your smartphone and tablet today? You won't regret it.

Happy Wikipedia-ing
Frankie Kam

P.S.,
Incidentally, my first blog post on Moodurian.blogspot.com was entitled "How to fit the entire Wikipedia inside your laptop" was in May 2010. How times have changed. Amazing.

Gamification and the Moodle Wonderwall.

I figured out the how to include sentence statistics and have added in a gamification element/dimension to the Wall. It's getting more interesting.

I. Giving feedback with word statistics for a Wall post. 
I thought that it might be useful if the number of words, sentences per post and the average words per sentences might be useful information to be shown after each Wall post.

Try this out:

http://www.moodurian.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=4274

Username: studentscm

Password: studentscm

My iframe embed code is:

<iframe width="90%" scrolling="auto" height="700px" frameborder="0" align="middle" name="Embedded Frame" src="http://www.moodurian.com/wall/index.php?Order=0&CourseId=28&Id=1&Likes=1&Datestamp=0&WordStats=1&WordLimit=200&AdminOnly=0&Email=2&Desc=Announcements&MinWords=10&MinSentences=3" marginheight="4px" marginwidth="4px"></iframe>

The interpretation is this: the teacher has told the class that his/her expectation is that every post to the wall must meet a minimum number of 10 words, and must have a minimum number of 3 sentences. Those posts to the Wall that meet these two criteria will be rewarded with an icon each (gamification element here).

 The student is awarded this stamp  If he or she
meets the minimum words per sentence average.

The student is awarded this stamp  If he or she 

meets the minimum number of sentences in the post.

Check it out. I've done it. That's a whole new element to the Wall. Lots of possibilities to create visual cues to the teacher as to who did what and who didn't achieve what. And lots of possibilities for students to be rewarded with stamps and icons and stuff for meeting the teacher's requirements/expectations.

II. Adding a Readability Score to a Wall post.
Every heard of the Flesch-Kincard Readbility score?

I also surfed over to these sites:

http://www.readability-score.com/  (nice site!)

http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php

and implemented the Flesch-Kincaid Readability score test on the Wall.

(The website www.readability-score.com uses the PHP code available from https://github.com/DaveChild/Text-Statistics specifically from this download link: https://github.com/DaveChild/Text-Statistics/archive/master.zip)

So anyway, the readability scores translate as follows:

Flesch Reading Ease Score	Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level	Typical age	Style description
Elementary School *
	1	6-7
	2	7-8
	3	8-9
	4	9-10
Middle school *
90 to 100	5	10-11	very easy
80 to 90	6	11-12	easy
70 to 80	7	12-13	fairly easy
60 to 70	8	13-14	standard
High school *
60 to 70	9	14-15	standard
50 to 60	10	15-16	fairly difficult
50 to 60	11	16-17	fairly difficult
50 to 60	12	17-18	fairly difficult
Post-secondary education (College or University) *
30 to 40	13	18-19	difficult
30 to 40	14	19-20	difficult
30 to 40	15	20-21	difficult
30 to 40	16	21-22	difficult
Graduate education *
0 to 30		22+	very difficult

*) Education in the United States. 

Source:

http://www.mobilefish.com/services/readability_tester/readability_tester.php

Here's a simplified scale of the scores.

   if($n >= 90) return "Very easy";

   else if($n >= 80) return "Easy";

   else if($n >= 70) return "Fairly easy";

   else if($n >= 60) return "Standard";

   else if($n >= 50) return "Fairly difficult";

   else if($n >= 30) return "Difficult";

   else return "Very confusing";

I dumbed it down a bit, since I only have five icons (see attached gifs!), to this

slightly simplified structure:

   80-100 : Very Easy 

   70-89 : Easy  

   50-69 : Standard 

   20-49 : Difficult 

   0-19  : Very Difficult 

I programmed the PHP function from the github link into message_ajax.php of the Wall and you can take a look at the screenshot after a typical post. Mouseover your mouse cursor onto the icons and you have a nice popup text description.

So now, you have not only a numeric Readability score, you also have a set of visual colourful icons to indicate the level of readability of the student's wall post.

BTW, I tried the following speeches on the Wall, and here are the results:

Obama's speech at the memorial wake in Newtown, Connecticut = high 90s

Queen Elisabeth I's speech = low 40s

So the Flesch-Kincaid readability algorithm does seem to work fine.

The php code from the github link also allows me to program these readability scores functionality into the Wall:

          * Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease

          * Flesch Kincaid Grade Level

          * Gunning Fog Score

          * Coleman Liau Index

          * SMOG Index

          * Automated Reability Index

        The same code also can give:

          * String length

          * Letter count

          * Syllable count

          * Sentence count

          * Average words per sentence

          * Average syllables per word

Summary: I've added in visual cues to a student's post so that both the teacher and student will know if the post meets the teacher's expectations. In addition, a readability score is added to the post.

I'm sure that the Gamified Wall can be useful in language classes where feedback is important.

Regards

Frankie Kam