Try PLOTLearner 2

Try out PLOTLearner 2 - let the Hebrew text be your tutor!

Download PLOTLearner 2 HERE and learn more HERE

EuroPLOT is developing technology for persuasive learning from a text database such as the collected works of a writer like Danish playwrigth, poet and pastor Kaj Munk or a sacred text in an ancient language like the Hebrew Bible. The major part of the work to develop language learning for the Hebrew Bible is now being completed with the release of PLOTLearner 2 on July 26.On the same day we signed a contract with the German Bible Society which gives us the license to distribute some 20 % of the Hebrew Bible database as an open educational ressource. From now on we will focus on developing course material for scaffolding of the text with pictures, videos and textbook material and the system will be piloted in educational projects in Sweden and Madagascar in 2013.

Try out our ressources

PLOTLearner for Hebrew is a free and flexible tool for task-based language learning. With the release of the second prototype we have the almost final version of a new text-driven tutor for language learning and we can develop new perusasive learning objects for this new technology. Fellow teachers and interested students are able to try out the new technology and form their own opinion on whether they would like to join EuroPLOT and be part of new world-wide learning community from the summer of 2013:

Here are the learning ressources that we would like for you consider for use for Hebrew language learning and study of the Hebrew Bible:

• INSTALLATION OF TOOL: The PLOTLearner 2.0.0 is distributed from eplot.3bmoodle.dk and all future distributions will be available from this platform. We continue our proud tradition of agile development and around August 26 we will have a new download version to be used in an online course at Gothenburg University and for testing in Madgascar. The piloting version PLOTLearner 3 will be available at the end of the year.
• ONLINE RESSOURCES: PLOTLearner is a tutor which automatically scans for scaffolded learning objects to enable persuasive and appropiately timed motivational learning. The project has developed a flexible resource database which is available online at resources.3bmoodle.dk. At the moment it only contains a small selection of pictures, but in the project we will add thousands of images as well as videos and text documents. As the learner immerses in the text and learns through the user-friendly corpus interface he or she can click on texts, pictures, videos and screencaptures. 
• OPEN SOURCE eLEARNING: As part of our strategy to promote free open educational ressources we are now constructing course material in the world's best and largest learning management system. We will be developing material in Moodle 2.3 at bh.3bmoodle.dk throughout the project period. We will support collaboration in a learning community based on Moodle, because we believe that this platoform will stay open and free, and thus be available for teaching in Majority world institutions. 

Join us for a webinar

EuroPLOT is the host of a serious of webinars whcih can be downloaded after the event. If you want to know more about how persuasive technology can improve mastery, control and purpose for learners studying Biblical Hebrew you can join us for an hour sometime in late August or September.

The date of the PLOTLearner webinar has not been settled yet. However workpackage leader Nicolai Winther-Nielsen will present the first results from class exprience in August at the Fjellahaug International University College Denmark and explain how the tool supports the learners. The programmer of PLOTLearner, Claus Tøndering will comment on technonlogical aspects of the tool and we will answer questions.

We are dedicated to our strategy to promote world-wide persuasive leaning on open and free platforms and will therefore use Big Blue Button (www.bigbluebutton.org) for the seminar. This is a very user-friendly environment, and if you want to have a say on the date for our webinar you should vote on Doodle HERE. 

More on PLOTLearner

The initial development work of PLOTLearner has used a prestigeous Dutch corpus of the Hebrew Bible which has been under construction for more than 30 years by the Werkgroep Informatica of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, or for short the WIVU database. This is the corpus for which the Stuttgart Electronic Bible Study, the SESB, was developed and marketed from 2003 and until recently, and it can be bought from Logos to work with PC, Mac and mobile devices.  

By developing persuasive learning technology for one of the best linguistic databases of the Hebrew Bible in the World, we believe we can offer learning for masses of students who can never own a Bible software program, but are dedicated to the study of the Hebrew Bible as part of the indispensable Jewish and Christian canon of the Bible. We will be collaborating with the German Bible Society in Stuttgart which is the leading world publisher of texts sources for the study of the Bible, and we are grateful to have the license to use a significant part of the Hebrew Bible source text from this prominent society, and to serve our common mission. We hope to collaborate with Bible societies around the world to offer the Hebrew Bible for free or affordable outside the West and to help students in poor countries based on GDP principles.

By July  26 2012, EuroPLOT has completed the basic prototype for this new tool to learn Hebrew from a text. The tool now offer a new kind of learning, which is completely driven by a text database, yet fully controlled by the learner and his facilitator who can define their own goals for mastery and repurpose the tool any way they like. After the second prototype is being delivered by the end of July, we will focus on testing these new principles of persuasive language learning. From August and onwards we will implement the tool in teaching in Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Madagascar. Fellow scholars and teachers are cordially invited to experiment with the tool as a resource for teaching and they can use it freely in class from the Fall of 2013. The presentation will demonstrate the software and discuss its potential for Hebrew and other languages.

PLOTLearner is developed for Hebrew and designed and tested for this case, but it can already handle the Greek New Testament and we can demonstrate learning from a German database. However, the tool can be used for any text corpus in any language, and currently the Aalborg Master student Judith Gottschalk is developing technology to prepare any text as a database for use as a corpus for the PLOTLearner. Because all development is open source we are expanding the range of technology-enhanced persuasive language learning in this project. Persuasive learning objects can be any text and texts can be repurposed and integrated into learning management systems.In this way we are expanding the emminent work by Aalborg University researcher Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen who developed the Emdros database management system  (emdros.org) for Hebrew, Greek, and Munk corpora.