About

CloudBank is a crowd-sourced information system for advanced language learning. It allows students to collect, annotate and tag interesting or intriguing language- and culture-related content found in everyday life, including text, images, audio snippets and web links.

These content items are saved to an online repository, from where they can be syndicated in various ways. RSS feeds allow the content to be included in almost any website, including blogs and profile pages. Mobile alerts notify students when new content is uploaded to the repository by their peers.

In addition to syndication, the repository offers a web interface for adding, editing and discussing content in an online community.



A typical use case

Khalil is Jordanian student in the Brighton. He is in the Student Union watching a football game with some English friends. A goal is scored and there is much hilarity over the goalkeeper being nutmegged. Khalil cannot make sense of this: there’s not much connection with the nutmegs of his experience, which are used in cooking. He asks his UK friends what it means to be nutmegged. They explain that it means the striker played the ball through the keeper's legs. Khalil thinks other non-native speakers may be interested in this new nugget of knowledge. He gets out his Android G1 phone, starts the CloudBank app and keys in “to nutmeg: in football: to play through an opponent's legs”, tagging the entry with “nutmeg” and “football”. For good measure he also records an English friend pronouncing the word, and adds the recording to the entry, before sending it to the CloudBank cloud.

This same evening, Keichi, a Japanese student, learns about the term to nutmeg through the CloudBank RSS feed on his profile page. By chance he’s just been watching a video clip of the goal from tonight’s match. He logs onto the CloudBank community portal, searches for the nutmeg entry, and adds a reference to the video clip, so that others can get a better understanding of what it means to be nutmegged.


The mobile application

• The CloudBank mobile application is developed for Android and can be installed from the download page.
   
• If you'd like to play around with the application before installing it than have a look at the CloudBank widget.
   
• A printable CloudBank Mobile User Guide is available here.