Talk:Literacy Programs

I think that the OLPC solution is meant to work for children in refuge situations. The sugar UI is about as simple as you can get. Please create an account and help us all figure out how to keep things simple but effective for these children. -Jeff 17:05, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Thinking about this, I think you've identified a real need for an activity which reads text to a child, highlighting words as they are spoken, and then lets the child pick stories to be told. -Jeff 17:08, 7 March 2007 (EST)

I am the original author. I feel your last point somewhat missed the point of what my article was attempting to address. I think there is a fundamental area of the OLPC software spectrum that is being missed, based on how I imagine OLPC distribution will occur.

I recently taught my kids to read, and there are definitely proven techniques. In English, these include practicing letters, sounds of letters, sounds of letter combinations, rules of pronunciation, learning unfamilar words from context, re-reading clauses that don't make sense, etc, as you know.

Nowhere within laptop.org, or this wiki is there any mention for the need of moving children autonomously through the very earliest stages of reading their local language without literate people nearby. Software should be created that orchestrates audio, microphone, visual, tactile and keyboard to explain sentence construction, pronunciation rules, exceptions, reviews texts, uses speech and character recognition to recursively practise and feedback reading of simple texts.

In developed societies, we are great at offering the latest cool gadget to the less fortunate. Should we really be talking about 3D rendering software, GPS, and e-books when most of the target users can't even read? More to the point, I hope that OLPC will saturate needy areas i.e. areas where most kids are orphans since AIDS killed off their parents, or refugee camps where kids will never find or connect with any literate adult who gives a darn. I also assume that nether educational network hubs or even other OLPC's are ever nearby (either by theft, local investment, etc)

Because of these stark realities, I really believe that OLPC must be self-contained self-learning literacy environment, where an abandoned 6 year old in a distressed area without any educational facilities or literate adults nearby can effectively teach himself how to read and write his own language, to a functional level.

'Typing Tutor', and many of the other ideas for promoting literacy within laptop.org seem to be based on western experience. There is a whole trove of pre-school educational software avaiable, but it all is based on the assumption that its users could depend on literate care-givers to initially get them literate. These typical programs also focus on keyboard entry, not handwriting. I expect that with a lack of any PC's in the child's area over his lifetime that handwriting will always be fundamentally more important to him than typing.

I belive this is the fatal flaw of the current laptop.org literacy approach. We must also create activities that can 'stand-in' for those absent literate care-givers, and provide self-sufficient cradle-to-grave literacy services. Otherwise the appeal, target community, and mission of OLPC is substantially reduced.