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.

Literacy

[Reality Master 101]

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?

Contributions...

[Notquitecajun]

What % of your contributions go to administration as opposed to real charity work?

Copyright issues

[jandrese]

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.

Re:A Talking Book?

[mark-t]

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.

Re:How do you stop Brain Drain?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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.