Gozim and Offline Educational Resources

I recently came across an interesting project called Gozim, which provides offline access to the entire Wikipedia library. You all might recall the Raspberry Pi I brought in last month (fashioned as a PirateBox); these are the perfect devices for something like this. The idea here isn’t so you have your own, personal copy of Wikipedia (there’s another project more conducive to something like that called Kiwix). A Raspberry Pi can be set up as a server in this case, hosting a complete, offline Wikipedia for anyone within reach of its wifi card to connect and browse just as they would if they were online. We’d obviously be slightly remiss to give blanketed praise to Wikipedia as the perfect resource for information, but it’s a great starting point, and it continues to get more robust and thorough with users regularly maintaining it and providing (and checking) citations and source material on which the entries rely.

The Gozim website asks us to “think about accessing any Wikipedia article you might need during a power outage, a remote expedition, a natural disaster, or during a visit to an internet-restricted country!” Moreover, these can be purposed in classroom settings in certain parts of the world where internet access is either not possible or heavily restricted (or monitored!). This article from a couple years ago details how a school in Tanzania – one without electricity – has been using something like this for education, which is especially useful since it has very limited resources and textbooks available for students. A donated Raspberry Pi and 32gig SD card gave them access to Wikipedia for Schools (an offline version of Wikipedia specifically geared towards education and curriculum-based navigation) and several other interactive media. Smartphones, tablets, and personal computers can all connect via wifi. Solar chargers and batteries are all that’s needed to connect environments like this to a growing commons of knowledge and information.

It’s interesting to consider some of the broader possibilities for tools like this, too – especially after thinking about things like Isaac Wilder’s Freedom Tower and the wireless meshing we saw in the Vice film a couple weeks ago (and the whole notion of decentralized internets!). This offline Wikipedia project also reminds me a little bit of other projects with a similar goal: the LibraryBox is one, in particular (this is similar to a PirateBox, but is meant to serve data and resources related to education, healthcare, government happenings, and so on, to areas without, with limited, or with heavily restricted access to the internet). Here’s a good, one minute video about it. Kiwix (mentioned above) has another project they’re working on called Wikimed that serves thousands of free medical articles to doctors, students, and those working in areas with issues related to internet access. I just find it fascinating that such simple technology can be purposed in so many useful (and subversive!) ways.