Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

Those of you familiar with early English language education may be familiar with the concept of a leveled reader. The basic idea is that of a book that very carefully and slowly increases vocabulary. They are very important, if dull, to create and read. There are few (if any) such resources on the XO. Most Leveled Reader resources online are proprietary and costly. What resources that do exist at places such as Free-Reading lack illustration or presentation suitable for children, although their page on Connected Text Activities is excellent.

I wasn’t aware of this lack, or even the concept of Leveled Readers three weeks ago. But then the wonderful fellow volunteer Carol Leche started me onto them while preparing materials for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. This happened to be right after I had discovered a wonderful cache of images at WikiMedia, the storehouse for Wikipedia image, audio and video files.

The cache of images were illustrations of Dinosaurs by Ladyofhats very thoughtfully released into the Public Domain for use anywhere. How can I resist? I saw illustrations of dinosaurs, and I thought: Picture Book.

So the subject is set, does a similar project exist that I can improve instead? Well there does exist a WikiJr Dinosaur’s project over at en.Wikibooks.org. But it’s reading level, I would estimate, is about 12th grade, and fairly wordy. While texts for 12 yr-olds is important, I was looking for something that can really show off the illustrations.

A picture book with one or two lines of text is also pretty ideal for translation. Translation of software in OLPC is done on ‘strings’ of text in Pootle, where all of the ‘strings’ from various software projects are listed. A simple project like the Dinosaur Book, if handled properly, could be done in html & css and uploaded into Pootle for translation. This is really a prerequisite for any content on the OLPC, if it’s only in English, and has no ability to be translated, it has limited utility.

If you would like to help contribute to translation, please go this post about OLPC translation at OLPCnews. Work is really just starting on this project. If you have any suggestions, or want to get involved we’re looking for a CSS guru and any early language instructors for languages other than English. If you would like to get involved, comment or drop me a line at the OLPC wiki.