[OLPC library] Report about Peru Deployment of the XOs/OLPC project

Sun Mar 9 10:06:31 EDT 2008

Lu Yu,

Some ideas for the issue of the dictionaries...

I am thinking on the kids in Arahuay... and the 9,000 places (from the 
top of my head....  I am half awake.. I can be wrong)... places... were 
the 40,000 computers will be installed in Peru.

a) Dictionaries, on line: In Spanish we MUST use the _*www.rae.es*_ 
<http://www.rae.es> (it is the official dictionary from the Royal 
Academy of the Spanish language.  Every KID & TEACHER should know very 
well that IF he or she is ONLINE... that is the source to consult.  I 
hope that the peruvian teachers in the Huampani meeting last week have 
got time to share between them a minimum amount of BASE LINE knowledge 
about some useful stuff that exist on the Internet.

English?.  Let's go to webster.com (7 seconds to load... and here you 
are: it has a "spanish-english" translator, plain english meanings, and 
thesaurus)

b) Dictionaries, offline:  Interesting issue... I will collect some 
offline dictionaries and translators.  There must be some based on 
Javacripts... so just downloading and including with the Firefox browser 
would put them available to the kids... Thinking: a relatioship of words 
with a form to search the needed word and his matched translated word... 
if that doesn't exist it cab be build in Javascript.

We peruvians, specially in the high andes, are very eager to become 
americans (!!!)... that's the reason why most of the andean kids get 
names as "Jhon", Charles, Dylan, Robert, James, etc.   We have made a 
movie about a girl in an Andes town.. the name of the girl was 
"MadeInUSA"... it got many awards at international level.

c) We can install a small webserver on every XO... in this way the use 
of some internal webpages (like the dictonary) wouldn't need to develop 
a Sugar interface.  "hey kid... good news.. just open your browser 
(navigator?) and open this file that IS installed on your computer: 
mydictionary.html..."... webserver would be with PHP capabilities 
installed so that would be a total new programming enviroment for the 
kids (sorry maybe that has been done and I am speaking about something 
that is on the XOs in this moment... I will go to sleep better!)

Regards,

Javier Rodriguez
Lima, Peru

LuYu wrote:
> Ivan,
>
> I just read your post about your visit to Arahuay.  I suppose anybody 
> would be astounded at such a report.  Thank you for such an 
> interesting read.
>
> I recently joined the mailing list because I want to help with the 
> dictionaries on the OLPC.  Interestingly enough, this is the first 
> thing the teachers in Arahuay complained about.  I quote:
>
>     “The kids really want an activity to learn English, but there
>     isn’t one on the laptops” responds Mr. Navarro. “The 1st and 2nd
>     graders all use an online dictionary, but the Internet connection
>     gets slow with that many users. *It’d be nice if a dictionary was
>     on the XO directly.*”
>
> It seems to me that such a dictionary could be rather quickly 
> created.  Software exists for dictionaries (although it is in need of 
> quite a bit of improvement).  As for the information itself, I will 
> reproduce my argument here:
>
>     ... no current copyright law could govern a work created before
>     1900, and there is little or no doubt that nearly every language
>     in existence had dictionaries before then. The first Chinese
>     dictionaries were created around 100AD. European dictionaries
>     started appearing some 3 to 5 hundred years ago. During the 1800's
>     missionaries compiled dictionaries of many, many languages.
>     Copyright was not automagic back then, either.
>
>     The only reasonable conclusion is that there are Public Domain
>     dictionaries in nearly every conceivable language, and that these
>     dictionaries merely need to be digitized in order to be used. Many
>     of these dictionaries use the Latin alphabet which is well
>     supported by many Free and Non-Free OCR programs. Why are we,
>     then, limited to a few dictionaries in English and wordlists of
>     similar terms in a handful of languages?
>
> I would like to hear your and the library lists opinions on this 
> subject as it seems the first book any library should have is a 
> dictionary.  Further, it should be relatively easy for the OLPC and 
> Free Software worlds to have a comprehensive (perhaps even 
> exhaustive), multilingual, offline dictionary.
>
> I can already imagine a ton of interesting things we could add to 
> that, but a nice bug free dictionary should be a priority.
>
> Thank you for your time.  Please tell me what you think.  I will look 
> forward to hearing from you.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> -- 
>
>
> LuYu 	
>
> "How a society produces its information environment goes to the very 
> core of freedom."
>
>
> 	-- Yochai Benkler
>
>
>
> Ivan Krstić wrote:
>> On Mar 7, 2008, at 3:28 AM, info at olpc-peru.info wrote:
>>   
>>> Report about Peru Deployment of the XOs/OLPC project
>>>     
>>
>> I also posted some of my notes from Peru, and particularly from a  
>> visit to Arahuay:
>>
>> <http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay>
>>
>> --
>> Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Library mailing list
>> Library at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library
>>   
>
>
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