[OLPC library] Request for comments on a literacy project

[Samuel Klein]

Carol -

Zdenek Broz has some interesting image collections and will be
interested in the database.  Gerard Meijssen will be particularly
interested in the compilation history, and has his own databases that
could be collated alongside.

You would certainly want to include 'listen and spell' (still in
development) and 'speak' (in many languages) among the activities tied
to this API.

SJ

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche <cafl at msbit.com> wrote:
> Brief Description
> SynPhony is the nickname for the Multilingual Synthetic Phonics Literacy
> Project. The project has been formed to make available a database of over
> 44,000 words analyzed into their Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs) for
> the creation of computer-based literacy activities as well as teacher
> materials for language learners. The database was compiled by Norbert
> Rennert, a researcher at the Canada Institute of Linguistics. An excellent
> description of the background that underpins the development of this project
> and its database is available on Mr. Rennert's website, "The Sounds of
> English".
>
> The initial database consists of English words linked to their parts of
> speech, morphology, semantic categories, age of acquisition, frequecy of
> use, definitions and sentence examples, the techniques used suit many
> languages other than English even better, since their orthography is more
> transparent than English.  There is a 10,000 word Spanish database and a
> 50,000 word German database that will follow the release of the English
> database.  Mr. Rennert invites collaboration to produce databases in support
> of other languages.
>
> What We Want to Do with It
> 1. Merge images with the database, both automatically and manually with a
> provided web interface. (We will start with an automatic inclusion of images
> in wikimedia commons that are already linked in entries within wiktionary or
> simple.wiktionary, as well as images from the gcompris activities.)
> 2. Supply an API for use by new and preexisting XO activities that are
> literacy related, such as several of the gcompris activities, memory, etc.
> Provide a transparent modification to these existing activities so their
> vocabulary is broadened.
> 3. Provide a way to define a sequence of phonemes (and other restrictions,
> such as word frequency, syllable count, age of acquisition) matching a
> reading curriculum.  Link this curriculum definition into the API so that
> activities select the words in teacher-specified way.
> 4.  Provide a feedback mechanism to record individual student progress.
> 5.  Provide a way to feed back database enhancements made by users of
> SynPhony in a reviewable way so they can be shared.
>
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