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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.
Do you have plans to prevent this and encourage actual literacy instead of pseudo-literacy?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
pseudo literacy is better than no literacy at all.
... well, they won't learn with OR without technology. Almost any tech aided project can lead to pseudo-learning instead of real learning, so don't get your panties in such a knot.
Technology helps people who want to learn. People who don't want to learn
How do you learn to read without someone or something reading the words to you?
At the UNHCR camp in Ghana, the last I heard, tuition for a year in grades 3-8 was about $10/term.
So my question is, given the choice between a term of schooling for one child and two Talking Books (or half a term and one Talking Book), if you had only ten dollars to spend on your children's education, which would you get and why?
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
By learning phonics, and sounding the words out. You only ask somebody for help when you come to a word you can't figure out on your own.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Based on the comments here so far, I have this question: how do you overcome the perception that you're harming literacy by providing speaking machines rather than "forcing" people to learn to read?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Erm, who do they ask exactly?
The whole point of the talking book is that there are not enough teachers around to ask.
America, Home of the Brave.
One of my greatest concerns is that devices like these will be used as propaganda spewers rather than learning tools. How do you plan or protect for that circumstance? Was it a concern when you actually put these devices in their intended use? Now that they're out of your immediate reach, is there anything you can do to prevent their use for propaganda?
What % of your contributions go to administration as opposed to real charity work?
You appear to have half of the problem worked out in the form of an inexpensive ebook reader, but what are your plans for getting material to put on those readers? As I am sure you are well aware, the Public Domain is being strangled by changes to copyright law. Do you have a source of textbook material suitable for these children that can be given away for free? Presumably these poor communities can't afford the typical $20-$50/book fees for such material.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
a book that forces you to learn to read if you want to know it's contents?
I believe that's called a "book".
I suppose.... maybe if the AI was really ramped up, it might someday be possible to have a talking book that would encourage its reader to try to sound out words themselves first, only finally reading the word out to the child when the child has not been able to sound it out after a certain amount of time (this could be very subjective, and the book would probably have to learn to adapt to a particular child), and would be sure to congratulate a child whenever they had successfully sounded out a word they were having some difficulty with, to encourage the child to keep trying. It would further be able to respond to a child's queries with regards to word definitions, using spoken language no more sophisticated than the vocabulary required for understanding the particular book.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If it's something like English or French, then it will take you months (or years) to learn to read, or else you get the "Owe that eye mite bee that be" phenomenon.
French spelling might not look very phonetic, but it is actually far more so than English is. Once you learn the common vowel combinations, which might take a few days at most, you can pretty much sound out French words without any trouble. On the other hand, trying to spell words that you hear can be very difficult.
I thought I might see what Wikipedia had to say about this, and here it is:
French spelling, like English spelling, tends to preserve obsolete pronunciation rules. This is mainly due to extreme phonetic changes since the Old French period, without a corresponding change in spelling. Moreover, some conscious changes were made to restore Latin orthography... As a result, it is difficult to predict the spelling on the basis of the sound alone... On the other hand, a given spelling will almost always lead to a predictable sound... In particular, a given vowel combination or diacritic predictably leads to one phoneme.
I'll vouch for the accuracy of those statements, too, since I've studied the history of the French language.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I have reviewed your website and I believe that I understand your objectives and how you intend for this device to be used. To aid literacy, it takes the place of a literate person reading the book to the learner.
I know that cost is an issue and that affordability in the target area is a major concern, but I am curious as to why there is no display, not even a simple LED/LCD display similar to that on several toys, such as the "Speak-and-Spell"?
My concern here is that if the physical book is lost, your device essentially becomes an inexpensive music player and its purpose fails.
Although history is written by the winners - it is safe to say that literacy is probably going to kill less people than, say
Your argument that
they need to develop at their own pace without those with good-intentions paving the way.
would be valid if those struggling economies and cultures didn't want to participate in the world economy. But they do - they are attempting to compete in a world where they're not equipped to compete. If people desire the luxuries that come with modernization, then they have to pay the price of modernization. I'd love to live in an environment where I didn't have to deal with smokers, teenagers and idiots every day - but I also want to live in a large city with access to amenities.
You can pick your actions, but not your consequences. 'Developing' countries and the population that wants to be educated MUST pay the price of development - either through cash or sacrifices of the 'old' ways. You can have some of both, but you can't be completely modernized and completely true to your roots. It just doesn't happen. China, America, Europe have all gone through industrialization, pollution and overcrowding (in areas). Who are you to presume that another country should get a free ride? A helping hand? YES. But free? No. That is the problem with the janjamen.
oh, and how is a gun 'good'? Other than a very effective way of enforcing your values upon others?
At least literacy never forces anyone to do anything - it is a tool. A gun is a weapon. Big difference.
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
Buy Text Processing in Python
Literacy is not a prime mover of civilization, Freedom is.
Economic Freedom? Freedom to move around? Freedom of Ideas? Free as in beer?
Your assumption that reading and literacy will enhance the effects of tyranny is odd.
You say that freedom grows society. We agree, mostly - except you don't state what generates freedom. Literacy encourages freedom.
# When you try to add literacy and education into a developing countries, where there is no Freedom, then you don't get progress, you get a Brain Drain. [virtualave.net]
So, the people are FREE to leave, and that creates the brain drain. Since freedom is present for brain drain to occur, you can't state that a lack of freedom causes brain drain. (You need one for the other).
Literacy encourages freedom. When people gained the ability to read and learn for themselves (gutenberg, again), the foundation was set for the renaissance. When people could read, knowledge could be obtained by many more people than simply using word of mouth. Knowledge is the result of literacy. And Knowledge inevitably leads to change for the better... and freedom is better than tyranny.