Hi Barry, this looks like an excellent candidate to merge with Vikidia. Have you worked with them or their community of children and teachers?
https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Main_Page Warmly, SJ On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Barry Desborough < barry.desboro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, I’m Barry Desborough, a retired teacher who taught in English > primary and secondary schools. > > I have been trying, on and off, to get an idea off the ground. It is for a > free, online, child-oriented encyclopedia. I have tried approaching > Wikipedia itself, the Khan Academy and the California CK-12 initiative, and > I have paid for and started to develop a Wikispaces site "Wikidia dot net" > to show how the idea works. Unfortunately, I was not able to rustle up > enough contributors to be able to justify continuing to pay for the site, > and for various reasons, the other sites are not a good match for the > project idea. > > What’s a child-oriented encyclopedia? It’s an encyclopedia that a child, > on their own, may go to and navigate for themselves, to find > age-appropriate educational content of interest to them. Pages should be > brief, and as simple as possible for conveying the information. The pages > should also be suitable for directed learners, and usable as teaching > material by educators. Wikipedia content, as is used by the OLPC Digital > Library, is not generated with the needs of children in mind. I have an old > prototype of the idea still on the net at > https://wikids.wikispaces.com/Index+1 which should give the general idea. > > I am looking for a new home for this project, and it occurred to me that > the OLPC might be able to host it, and encourage other contributions of > suitable content, either from educators, or from children themselves, > wiki-style. Generating content for it should provide a great motivational > incentive for classes of pupils! There’s constructivism for you! All it > would need would be a separate searchable wiki on the OLPC website. I would > be happy to spend the rest of my retirement generating, curating and > moderating content for such a wiki, and I would be willing to contribute a > substantial (for me) sum in order to help get the thing started and keep it > going. > > With the cost and producing and distributing textbooks is so high, and in > a world where teachers are unavailable or too expensive but cheap internet > technology is becoming ever more accessible, I believe far more attention > should be paid to providing accessible, high quality, appropriately pitched > educational content. > > Is there anyone on the list with the authority to pick this up, or has > contacts with such people? > > What are your thoughts on the idea? > > Regards > > Barry > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Olpc-open mailing list > Olpc-open@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open > > -- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
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