Hello List,
I got here via Erik at the WM Foundation.
I'm working with Pratham Books [1] and we're a non-profit children's
book publishing house that seeks to put a book in every child's hand.
To further this goal, we are in the process of developing a reading
portal for India, on the lines of the water portal [2] that we hope
will ultimately be the de facto repository of information related to
children's books in India.
An integral part of this portal is a wiki-like platform where we hope
to upload all of our books, close to 1000 of them, and allow them to
be translated and edited and downloaded in high and lo res PDF's by
users. The goal of this project is to untie distribution of the books
from the physical medium to further our mission, as mentioned
previously.
However, given that it's children's books, maintaining and preserving
the layout of the books, the pictures with respect to the text, is
crucially important. We also contemplate uploading blank templates, of
only the layout and pictures, for people to use to write their own
stories.
A few areas we're looking for assistance are:
User Interface
Given the nature of the content we're seeking to create and enable use
and re-use of , the ease of use and the intuitiveness of the UI will
be crucial in building support from a user base.
Platform Design
Ideally, we'd like the platform to conform to the same standards that
the project does of being open, free and modifiable. However, the
deeper technical issues are, at this point, a little beyond our scope
of abilities.
Community Building
In particular, building an active and engaged community around the
idea and the content will define whether this platform works. Also,
issues and processes for moderation and administration from within the
community.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you.
Best,
[1] http://prathambooks.org/
[2] http://www.arghyam.org/
--
Please read our new blog at:
http://blog.prathambooks.org/
Join our Facebook Page too:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pratham-Books/9307274926
If someone could forward this to the wikiversity mailing list too (I
assume there is one?), that would be cool.
thanks,
Brianna
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jessica Coates <j2.coates(a)qut.edu.au>
Date: 2008/5/19
Subject: [cc-au] FW: [unesco-oer] The Open High School of Utah
To: "cc-au(a)lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-au(a)lists.ibiblio.org>,
"cc-nz(a)lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-nz(a)lists.ibiblio.org>
Hi
Pretty cool announcement below - might be of interest to the educators
on these lists.
Jessica Coates
Project Manager
Creative Commons Clinic
Queensland University of Technology
ph: 07 3138 8301
fax: 07 3138 9598
email: j2.coates(a)qut.edu.au
________________________________________
From: David Wiley [david.wiley(a)gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, 16 May 2008 4:51 AM
To: iiep-oer-opencontent(a)communities.unesco.org
Subject: [unesco-oer] The Open High School of Utah
Everyone,
I'm very pleased to announce the formal establishment of the Open High
School of Utah. OHSU is a publicly funded high school in Utah, USA,
whose charter commits it to using ONLY open educational resources. The
school will be 100% online and 100% OER, opening to Utah 9th grade
students next fall in 2009.
As you can imagine, there is a large amount of material that needs to
be located, aggregated, and even developed in order to support a high
school running exclusively on OERs. I'm very hopeful that we can find
ways to collaborate to put together this curriculum for the OHSU, and
I am even more hopeful that we can find ways to repurpose this
curriculum in your own local contexts for the benefit of you and your
neighbors.
Preliminary information is available online at http://openhighschool.org/
David
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--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
Hi All,
I'm pleased to announce a new web service.
MediaWiki2PDF - is a free online service, that allows you to generate
nice looking PDF documents from books found on wikibooks.org. It looks
through child pages and collects chapters and subchapters into a single,
well-formatted PDF document. All you have to do, is just enter url of
the book and press "Enter".
From recent time service can also generates PDF-s from wikipedia articles.
Visit us at http://blogpaper.com/mediawiki2pdf
We hope it will be useful to you.
Best Regards
Blogpaper Development Team.
With less than three months to go until the fourth annual Wikimania
conference, registration has finally opened and will remain so until
the 15th of June. This year Wikimania starts with the a promise to
"Change the Shape of Wisdom" as it is hosted by Bibliotheca
Alexandrina, the reincarnation of the ancient Library of Alexandria,
one of pillars of this Earth when Philosophy and Wisdom are bought
into question. In Alexandria, from the 17th to the 19th of July, ideas
will be shared and discussed between people from all over the globe,
once again igniting the golden cosmopolitan age of the city.
As always, the conference will take place over 4 different tracks,
with a variety of speakers: Keynote, invited, and other. The
conference tracks this year are:
* Wikimedia Communities - Interesting projects and particularities
within the communities; policy creation within individual projects;
conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity;
multilingualism, languages and cultures; social studies.
* Free Knowledge - Open access to information; ways to gather and
distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in
education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and
usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with
Wikimedia projects. Free Content in Middle-East/Africa countries.
* Technical infrastructure - Issues related to MediaWiki development
and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development
(including usable case studies from other wikis or similar projects).
* Scientific track - Papers submitted to the scientific track were
peer reviewed by scientific standards and accepted or rejected based
on these reviews. The papers will be published in proceedings
afterwards. Based on the number and the quality of the submission, a
journal special issue may be pursued
This year the conference is taking an interesting direction that hopes
to enlighten third world and Middle Eastern countries about the new
digital realm that is continuously expanding and evolving; as such,
along with many well reputed figures, an emphasis has been put on
bringing in Arab speakers. Speakers include Ahmed N. Tantawy, the
Technical Director of IBM in the Middle East; Eliane Metni, the
founding director of the International Education Association; Tim
Spalding, the founder and lead developer of LibraryThing; Eric M.
Johnson, the team leader for the Knowledge Management Action Team at
the U.S. Department of State; and Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!'s executive
vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions.
Take part on one of the most important IT events of the year. Check
the registration prices online.
<http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration>
While these prices do not include accommodation, the local team has
taken the effort to make all sorts of housing opportunities available,
starting from dorms up to luxury hotel rooms. Check these when your
registering. You will also be pleased to know that transportation is
available to and from Cairo International Airport in the 2 days before
and after the conference.
And what is a gathering without fun? Tours and parties are being
planned out for the participants of the event. After all Alexandria is
cultural city that brims with hospitality and the main idea of the
event is to provide a gathering place.
Hope to see you there!
The Wikimania Local Team
----
Please forward this message along to whomever you think will be
interested! (Sorry if you've already this e-mail more than once!)
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.