In celebration of World Book Day, on April 23 2008, iCommons asked members of the community to list some of their favourite Open Literacy projects. From computers that talk back, to teaching materials, the following projects are an excellent example of the useful, tangible, and exciting projects that are making the magic of reading accessible to people all over the world. Many thanks to everyone who sent in project details.
Wolne Lektury (Poland)
Wolne Lektury is a community-driven project created and used by Polish teachers. Users are able to edit and enrich texts with annotations. Each text is prepared as rich, custom XML which enables the team to implement interesting features such as tagging literary motives from within the text. All content is public domain or CC BY for countries and the website software is AGPL.
Speak (OLPC)
Speak is a "book-reading" interface with a face and many voice options that's being built into One Laptop Per Child machines. Anything a user types on the keyboard will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. Users can also adjust the accent, rate and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth of the face that appears on the screen. Speak is free software, licensed under the GPL.
Wikijunior – (A project of Wikibooks)
Wikijunior aims to produce age-appropriate non-fiction books for children from birth to age 12. These books are richly illustrated with photographs, diagrams, sketches, and original drawings. Wikijunior books are produced by a worldwide community of writers, teachers, students and young people all working together. The books present factual information that is verifiable. Each book is available under a free content licence, allowing it to be re-used and modified.
Free-Reading.net
Free-Reading.net is an open resource centre and community for early literacy teachers. Some of the goals of Free-Reading are to help educators worldwide teach kids to read, to make quality, research-based, explicit and systematic instruction for early reading widely available and free (in two senses of the word "free": "at no charge” and “openly offered so as to be used, reused, mashed-up and shared again”) and ultimately, as Catherine Snow has said, for kids to be able to "read books with enjoyment while lying in a hammock under elm trees"
tags: johannesburg south africa education literacy open-literacy world-book-day-2008 unesco
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