Andy Carvin wrote: > Hmm... Surprised at how limited it is, both in terms > of usefulness and in its definition of literacy.... > -andy > > --- Phil Shapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>(...) http://www.google.com/literacy/ >>
I think this spartan simplicity is brilliant, Andy: this is just the Google part of a project in which the other participants are the Literacy Campaign of the Frankfurt Book Fair <http://www.litcam.org/litcam/en/index.php> and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning <http://www.unesco.org/education/uie/index_uie.shtml>, which will probably produce more elaborate materials. But as a demonstration of how search tools work, the Google page is great. Think of a Luddite teacher, put off by the fact that the internet is made of 99% of rubbish. Showing such teachers that you can safely and easily get to the immense quantity of great resources comprised in the remaining 1% without having to wade through the rubbish is vital. Each of the 6 subpages of results prompt users to use the tool themselves. I was such a Luddite teacher not that long ago. I walked out of a conference where erudite and prolix zealots enthused about the magnificent future of the connected world, muttering "The expanse of bullsh*t in a waste of sham", when the organizer threatened to repeat the videoconference with Edgar Morin from Paris, after the Swisscom folks had fixed the bad connexion during the coffee break. It took me 2 years after that frustrating experience before I tried the internet . My initiation: I clicked on Netscape in the school lab, stared at it blankly for a while, turned to a student and asked "And now how can I find pages on a given subject?" He typed altavista.it in the URL window,hit return and showed me there were other search engines in the bookmarks. That's what the Google part of the Literacy project does, and that's what is needed if you want to get tech-reluctant educators to use tech tools for furthering literacy. Best Claude Claude Almansi Castione, Switzerland www.adisi.ch PS I blogged in Italian about the google literacy site: http://adisi.livejournal.com/62384.html - thanks, Phil. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
