If you have ever searched Wikipedia and thought, “there should be a video about this,” you’re not alone. Troy Peterson and his colleagues had the same idea and acted on it by creating Nibipedia. Nibipedia is the result of matching Wikipedia entries to YouTube videos. Here is how it works, search for a video and while you’re watching that video you will see links to related Wikipedia content as well as more related videos. So far most of the matching of Wikipedia entries to videos has been done by a small group of people but now Nibipedia is looking for more teachers to try out a special teachers only beta. If you’re interested in participating in the beta, please send me an email rbyrnetech at hotmail or send me a direct message on Twitter.
I was first introduced to Nibipedia about three weeks ago. I used the Nibipedia beta with four of my high school students in the week before Thanksgiving. Started out by having students watch videos related to the US Civil War and matching Wikipedia entries to the videos. My students really enjoyed being able to quickly find information related to the references made in each video.
The second time I had students try out Nibipedia I let the students explore whatever interested them. One student explored information about China while another explored information about the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The best part of using Nibipedia in the classroom on that day was watching my students explore the things that interested them and get lost in academic content in a way that they might not explore books on a library shelf.
Below is the official press release from Nibipedia.
The new application, currently running on a web site called Nibipedia (http://www.nibipedia.com), allows viewers to enrich a video presentation by adding links to related information in the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. The links, called “nibs,” are stored in the software’s database and presented to viewers in a timeline, or “nibstream,” tied to the video. Nibipedia’s unique approach to displaying web video was born from a desire on the part of the developers to allow web users to use new social media content to share their knowledge with other webizens interested in the same material.
“We just thought, ‘How can we get more value out of something people are already doing?'” said Troy Peterson, Nibipedia’s Chief Marketing Officer. “In the case of Nibipedia, those two things are watching videos and searching articles. There’s a ton of great content on the Web, but there isn’t an easy way to make them work together. We saw a need for a mashup of Youtube and Wikipedia. Our tool allows a person viewing a video to learn more by about the material being presented by opening a link to a Wikipedia article deemed relevant by another user. The application also recommends additional videos related to the one being viewed.”
The Nibipedia database contains metadata and links to more than 1000 educational videos and users have added more than 4000 nibs to related Wikipedia material. In an effort to keep the linking tool useful and relevant, the development team is taking a measured approach to building the content repository.
“We started small until our community develops,” said Peterson, “but there is no real limit to the number of videos we can offer. In the meantime, the more Nibipedia is used, the better it gets at making recommendations to information that will excite a specific user. Everyone learns faster when we’re given information we’re interested in, Nibipedia does this automatically.”
“Calls come in everyday from users wanting more material on Nibipedia,” said Terry Schubring, Director of Technology Development. “Content quality is key for us. Currently, only educators and other select ‘content curators’ can add You Tube videos to the available video channels. The linked Wikipedia content is constantly vetted by web users because those articles are already monitored by the Wikipedia community. We hope to use a ‘go slow’ approach to make sure the material on the site is top-shelf.”
The launch of the Nibipedia tool has focused on building a tool users could interact with intuitively. Although the video viewing interface is fairly standard and understandable to even novice users, care was taken in the design of the ‘nibbing’ functionality.
“We worked really hard to make it easy to use. If people have to learn how to do something new, they won’t do it even if it saves the world,” according to Peterson. “When the people in our Beta group said they were actually having fun and wanted to nibi more, we knew we had something here.”
The Nibipedia application is currently being used by a number of teachers in their classrooms as a way to add depth to the video content they are already using. The teacher test group is also finding that Nibipedia engages students by challenging them to add their own contribution to the presentation.
“One of my students sat down and just went nuts adding nibs” said Richard Byrne, teacher and noted educational tech blogger from Free Tech for Teachers. (http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com/) “One student went from exploring Stephen Hawking videos to the CERN collider. Another student was exploring light bulbs and then went on to explore China. The third student is exploring a talk about Ben Franklin and has nibbed a few things.”
“The technology isn’t really even the good story here,” according to Schubring. “It’s about making it easy for people to learn and help each other. That’s why it’s so sticky. There’s an abundance of free content in the Web 2.0 world just waiting for people to make the connections. Hopefully Nibipedia is just the beginning of that.”
