[Olpc-mg] Digital media: perspectives for Madagascar?

[Samy Boutayeb (OLPC France)]

Hi,

I stumbled upon an interesting source of digital media, LegalTorrents
(http://beta.legaltorrents.com/ ), an online digital media community.

The aim of this project is to "discover and distribute high quality
open-licensed (Creative Commons) digital media and art, and provide
support to Content Creators."

They distribute for example:
* "Physics Textbooks"
(http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/158-physics-textbooks ) covering
various subjects (1. Newtonian Physics, 2. Conservation Laws, 3.
Vibrations and Waves, 4. Electricity and Magnetism, 5. Optics, 6. The
Modern Revolution in Physics, 7. Simple Nature, 8. Conceptual Physics),
* a manual about "Wireless Networking in the Developing World",
* a series of films in mathematics, in French
(http://beta.legaltorrents.com/torrents/209-dimensions---a-walk-through-mathematics-french
), etc.

Another project is distributin free audio resources aimed at language
learning (http://www.book2.de/ )

This is only an example. As a matter of fact, there are just plenty public
domain texts and media, most in English, some in French and another major
european languages, and very few in "minor" languages, and maybe some in
malagasian.

On the side of the bookreaders, some of them are usable especially on the
XO laptop (BReader, Adobe Reader, jbook reader, etc), either as standalone
applications or as embedded readers usable from within a Web browser.

As for the formats used by those bookreaders, many of them are widely
usable, such as pdf, epub, txt, etc.

Various media may be used to store those digital media, for example, USB
sticks, SD Cards, Cd-Roms, DVD, hard disks.

Those questions are already in discussion among the olpc people, for
example here:
- The Library Archives: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/
- The Bookreader Archives : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/bookreader/

Please feel free to discuss those matters, especially about digital
contents, their creation, adaptation, digitization, diffusion, use in
schools, colleges, universities, libraries, etc.

Best regards

Samy


-- 
Samy Boutayeb
Secrétaire OLPC France
http://olpc-france.org
samy.boutayeb at olpc-france.org