Ask Literacy Bridge Founder About Charity, Education, and the "Talking Book"

Literacy Bridge is a public charity working towards the goal of creating tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning. More specifically, they have been working on producing a $5 "talking book" device that can both help improve literacy and provide a steady flow of important information while the education is taking place. Unlike many in the "wouldn't-it-be-nice" category, Literacy Bridge already has working silicon, shaped plastic, and actual presence in their target country, Ghana. Literacy Bridge has no paid employees, but several who volunteer their time to make this idea a reality. Cliff Schmidt, founder and executive director of Literacy Bridge, would like to answer any questions you have about the charity, the mission, or the technology. Prior to Literacy Bridge, 'Cliff ran a successful open source software consulting business for clients throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North America, specializing in intellectual property issues, nonprofit governance, privacy policies, and community development. He also served many nonprofit organizations, such as The Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenSEA Alliance, and the Free Software Foundation' in addition to working as a industry standards rep for Microsoft. Click through to see the Google TechTalk given by Cliff earlier this year. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply — so ask all the questions you'd like, but please confine yourself to one per post.

Comments

The $5 iPod

[Nymz]

FTV - "Imagine a $5 iPod, used to play locally created podcasts."

One of the advertised features is Device-to-Device copy (which my multihundred dollar iPod can't do) is sure to run into legal problems, thus raising the target price even higher. To be fair, he did admit they cost more than $5 during his presentation.

More background

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

There's lots of good material on Literacy Bridge's own site, and elsewhere. But a little plug: I had a change to speak with Cliff for about an hour and a half when I was reporting from OSCon. He was an interesting guy with a really good project. I wrote up my impressions of the conversation at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/davidmertz?entry=project_leaders

Re:Still dependent on technology.

[squidinkcalligraphy]

I have taught students (at the upper end of the schooling system) who couldn't read. Yes, we were making efforts to teach them to read, but at the same time, they were interested in a lot of things, and _wanted to know and learn_ stuff. They just couldn't access it. If something like this acts as a bridge for these sorts of kids to stay engaged at school, then that's just brilliant.