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

[LuYu]

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
>   


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/attachments/20080309/c095250c/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: egyptian-cup.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 4412 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/attachments/20080309/c095250c/attachment-0001.gif 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: freeculture-icon.png
Type: image/png
Size: 6024 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/attachments/20080309/c095250c/attachment-0001.png