[OLPC library] [bytesforall_readers] Re: Many great free textbooks from India (Ketan Tanna)

Sat Apr 12 05:11:27 EDT 2008

Copying to OLPC lists, and to Stacy, the Librarian Chick. I hope we
can all get together on this.

Peter, OLPC has a number of textbook and content projects, and will at
some point start translating them into dozens of languages. Right now
our translators are rather focused on the core software for the XO. We
have training materials for teachers in Spanish and Nepali that needs
to be translated to English, also.

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Subbiah Arunachalam
<subbiah.arunachalam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Dear Ketan and Fred:
>
> I am forwarding this to Prof. Peter Suber, whose blog "Open Access News" is
> the definitive chronicle of virtually all developments in open access, and
> to Prof. Mangala Sundar of IIT Madras, who has done some outstanding work in
> producing university level open courseware in web, video and Youtube
> formats.
>
> On another topic, open access is rather slow to catch up in Asia compared to
> what is happening in Europe and the Americas. Members of this discussion
> list can play a catalytic role and proactively promote open access to
> scientific and scholarly literature,  courseware, school textbooks and
> government documents.
>
> Incidentally, the NCERT books are written by a panel of outstanding teachers
> (including some award-winning scientists from IISc and IITs).
>
> Arun
> [Subbiah Arunachalam]
>
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Frederick [FN] Noronha * फ्रेडरिक नोरोन्या
> <fredericknoronha at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Ketan Tanna <ketan.tanna at timesgroup.com>
> > Date: 7 Apr 2008 15:20
> > Subject: for education list-Many great free textbooks from India
> > To: fredericknoronha at gmail.com
> > Cc: sugandha.indulkar at timesgroup.com
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Many great free textbooks from India
> >
> > April 6th, 2008
> >
> > http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/04/06/many-great-free-textbooks-from-india/
> >
> >
> >
> > I have written about the plan to buy the copyright for textbooks in
> Indonesia and publish the books online (here, and here). Today I found out,
> through the excellent Indian book blog Scholars Without Borders that the
> Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers
> free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text books. From this page,
> you can choose which year, and which subject, and receive the title desired.
> The first thing you get is a PDF with the contents, and at first I was very
> disappointed thinking that was the only thing I'd get, about to give up.
> Then I realized that the TOC is hyperlinked to the individual PDFs for the
> different chapters. However, these hyperlinks did not work neither in
> Preview nor in Skim, which I usually use - I had to download Acrobat Reader
> to view them. I hope at some point they will make available direct links to
> the different chapters, or better yet, a zip file containing the whole book,
> for offline reading (also beneficial to those with slow internet).
> >
> > The books themselves seem great. They have text books for the subjects
> English, Hindi and Urdu, and for many subjects they also offer a Hindi or an
> English version, which often seem to be identical. There are all kinds of
> reasons to applaud this. As a student of Hindi, I love reading the readers
> made for the initial grades (with beautiful illustrations!), and as I move
> up, I can use the texts in parallel, reading the Hindi and checking with the
> English that I understood. Just like I suggested that the huge amount of
> OpenCourseWare films of classroom lectures from all around the world,
> especially China and India, might be a gigantic boon to a comparative
> curriculum researcher, these text books would also be great for someone
> studying curriculum and pedagogics in India. Something similar to Bjarne
> Skov's very interesting analysis of elementary school textbooks in Panjab,
> Pakistan (in Norwegian).
> >
> > The thing that would make these books incredibly more useful though, is if
> they were affixed with a Creative Commons license, which enabled other
> people to use the material and creative derivatives. This would enable me to
> use parts of it in my own text books, translate the text, use illustrations
> in Wikipedia articles, etc. There might even be a lot of Indian NGOs that
> wish to use part of the material, but change it in different ways to make it
> more locally appropriate. Licensing it under CC would be great, but it's not
> enough however. The final step is to make available the source files that
> were used in generating the PDFs, whether those are Photoshop Layers, or
> InDesign files. Otherwise it will be very difficult to for example translate
> the text, but keep the nice background illustrations.
> >
> > I hope someone like the great Sarai Foundation or Creative Commons India
> can talk to NCERT and see if this can be pushed through. I don't even know
> if these books were written by NCERT staff, or commissioned from outside
> writers, who owns the copyright etc. Either way, they are beautiful, and I
> recommend you have a look at them. If projects from around the world write
> NCERT and tell them they love the books, but would like them to be freely
> licensed, that might trigger some Indian pride in a positive way.
> >
> > Stian
> >
> > India
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Ketan Tanna
> >
> > Special Correspondent,
> >
> > The Times Of India,
> >
> > Mumbai.
> >
> > Phone: 91-22-22735240
> >
> > Mobile:91-9821034500
> >
> > Email:ketan.tanna at timesgroup.com
> >
> > or ketan at ketan.net
> >
> > -------------------------------------
> >
> > Websites
> >
> > Work: www.thetimesofindia.com
> >
> > Personal: www.ketan.net
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Disclaimer:
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> >
> >
> > --
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> > Frederick 'FN' Noronha   | Ym/Gmailtalk: fredericknoronha
> > http://fn.goa-india.org     | fred at bytesforall.org
> > Independent Journalist   | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9970157402

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