Marc Bogonovich, a former graduate student at IU, took his studies in plant geography and transformed them into an entirely different use — developing a language-learning application for smart phones called Openwords LLC, similar to applications like Duolinguo and Rosetta Stone.
Bogonovich said he mined large amounts of open data — data around the world available to anyone — and wanted to repurpose the data for a mobile application, giving it another purpose instead of it just being in ?cyberspace.
Open data is important because if you have educational material, it is not owned by a company, but it is owned by the general public and can provide other services with that data, ?Bogonovich said.
Scott Trepper, a graduate student working with user experience design, said he was inspired to get involved with Openwords by Bogonovich’s driven personality and ambitions for the application.
He said he joined the project before he fully understood what Openwords was.
The application allows you to learn spelling and has self-review, Trepper said, comparing it to “flashcards on steroids.”
Trepper said the openness of the application would allow teachers to personalize the vocabulary for specific fields of study and the platform allows people to create lessons that can be reused.
One aspect, space repetition, is important for learning, Trepper said.
With space repetition, if the person studying gets the word wrong, it just goes a few words back instead of going to the back of the list of words.
The word will then keep showing up just a few words back continuously until the word has been correct multiple times so that studying is more effective.
“We want to give learners control over what you’re going to learn,” ?Bogonovich said.
Bogonovich said they are currently planning a Kickstarter campaign to help the application in its final stages with three reward levels.
The first reward level is early adoption, which allows input on design, Trepper said.
The second level is a party with the group, which allows the donor to hang out with everyone on the team of Openwords.
The third award level allows influence in language priority if the person has a specific language they think is more important so the team can build out those words and specific learning modules, Trepper said.
The team has currently mined data for about 1,000 languages for Openwords, and they are still working to collect more from more than 7,000 languages from around the world.
Bogonovich said mining the data and gathering the languages is a never-ending process.
“If you add up the top nine languages of the world, that doesn’t account for 50 percent of the world’s ?languages,” he said.
Bogonovich said the reason the application is struggling to be finished is because there is such a large amount of data to be read.
Bogonovich said he wants to allow people to have personalized learning and lessons for all the different languages around the world. He also wants freedom for people to learn how they want to learn.
For more information on the application, those interested can visit ?openwords.com.
