Re: [OLPC library] Report about Peru Deployment of the XOs/OLPC project

[LuYu]

Ivan, I just read your post about your visit to Arahuay.  I suppose anybody would be astounded at such a report.  Thank you for such an interesting read. I recently joined the mailing list because I want to help with the dictionaries on the OLPC.  Interestingly enough, this is the first thing the teachers in Arahuay complained about.  I quote: “The kids really want an activity to learn English, but there isn’t one on the laptops” responds Mr. Navarro. “The 1st and 2nd graders all use an online dictionary, but the Internet connection gets slow with that many users. It’d be nice if a dictionary was on the XO directly.” It seems to me that such a dictionary could be rather quickly created.  Software exists for dictionaries (although it is in need of quite a bit of improvement).  As for the information itself, I will reproduce my argument here: ... no current copyright law could govern a work created before 1900, and there is little or no doubt that nearly every language in existence had dictionaries before then. The first Chinese dictionaries were created around 100AD. European dictionaries started appearing some 3 to 5 hundred years ago. During the 1800's missionaries compiled dictionaries of many, many languages. Copyright was not automagic back then, either. The only reasonable conclusion is that there are Public Domain dictionaries in nearly every conceivable language, and that these dictionaries merely need to be digitized in order to be used. Many of these dictionaries use the Latin alphabet which is well supported by many Free and Non-Free OCR programs. Why are we, then, limited to a few dictionaries in English and wordlists of similar terms in a handful of languages? I would like to hear your and the library lists opinions on this subject as it seems the first book any library should have is a dictionary.  Further, it should be relatively easy for the OLPC and Free Software worlds to have a comprehensive (perhaps even exhaustive), multilingual, offline dictionary. I can already imagine a ton of interesting things we could add to that, but a nice bug free dictionary should be a priority. Thank you for your time.  Please tell me what you think.  I will look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, -- LuYu "How a society produces its information environment goes to the very core of freedom." -- Yochai Benkler Ivan Krstić wrote: On Mar 7, 2008, at 3:28 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Report about Peru Deployment of the XOs/OLPC project I also posted some of my notes from Peru, and particularly from a visit to Arahuay: <http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay> -- Ivan Krstić <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://radian.org _______________________________________________ Library mailing list Library@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library

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