Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
James, Thank you very much for your work. It is very useful for my current projects. I put my notes on my blog: http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/ Here is what I wrote. Book review: “E-Book Enlightenment” by James Simmons http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/ James Simmons set out to write about One Laptop Per Child e-books, but decided to go more general. I appreciate the clear and concise categories of information by chapters and within the chapters – it’s a big service to the reader, and it takes a lot of thought and work for the writer. Moreover, each piece of data tells a story with a strong exegesis in the area of open and free – meaning, it’s interesting to read, at least for someone who cares. I thought I would skip the first chapters, on finding e-books, but I learned much I did not know – for example, the story of this touching projects: *The Rural Design Collective (@rdcHQ http://twitter.com/rdcHQ)* is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the *Internet Archive Children’s Library*. It was easy for me to skim the chapter comparing different formats, because of the clear structure, but the tone is human and personal (“Advantages: I can’t think of any.” on RTF). The Sugar activities and architecture for discovering and sharing books looks like something all children’s environments should be adopting (I am looking at you, Club Penguin). My daughter is probably older than the intended audience – she uses Shellfari for the purpose. I don’t know if there are tools like this beyond Sugar, for young kids. With one click, you can share books with a person or your neighborhood. And, it has text to speech. Remember the lovely Living Books from the 90s, with text-to-speech (and animations) done via recordings, rather than generated? That was hugely useful for literacy, but not sustainable, and only a few were made. James describes wiki-software for making books, called bookihttp://www.booki.cc/. I am looking at it for next book projects of Math Future (we are using Google Docs at the moment). I think I will wait for versions beyond alpha; meanwhile, James’ adventures with collaborating are illuminating, and echo my experiences: Starting a book from nothing is intimidating. However, once the book reaches a critical mass and there is no doubt that there *will* be a finished book you’ll find that getting help and feedback is easier, almost inevitable …If we didn’t start with the awful machine translated version we would never have gotten the good one. The first thing is that there are good reasons to collaborate and not so good. A good one is that your collaborator can bring expertise to the book that you don’t have. A bad one is that you think there will be less work for you if you have a collaborator. There are many human activities where “Many hands make light labor”. Writing a book isn’t one of them. Mokurai’s Replacing Textbook project involves several Math Future people such Don “The Mathman” Cohen, and uses bookihttp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks, which James mentions. My materials about fractions may go there, as well. An obligatory Russian proverb: “The world isn’t small, but the stratum is thin.” I would appreciate if the book compared booki with Google Docs, rather than Microsoft Word (which isn’t a wiki technology). For scanning books, I may consider building a *Simmons Home Book Scanner Mark I*. It looks quite easy and the name is fun to say. However, my new flatbed scanner is fast enough, and I have kid interns who think it’s fun to scan – at least a few pages at a time. James recommend the batch image editor Image Magic http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php, which can apply the same operation to multiple images. This will save me a lot of time when I next scan a book! And for Windows, the mass renamerhttp://www.albert.nu/programs/renamer/main.htmfor files will come in handy. And looks like Scan Tailor http://scantailor.sourceforge.net/ software is even more powerful, so I will give it a try as well. Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ is the free EPUB editor James recommends. And calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ is the software for managing and distributing collections of e-books. Overall, the Publishing section of “E-Book Enlightenment” deals with the technical side of making the book available, and not with the social aspects of “making the book public” (Doctorow). I would like to see a chapter on how to connect creators with readers, post-production. I will go back to “E-Book Enlightenment” for step-by-step guides
Re: [IAEP] Please review E-Book Enlightenment
Maria, Thanks for your kind review. One thing you suggested was comparing Google Docs and Booki as collaboration software. I think Google Docs is pretty good for collaboration, probably as good as Booki. Where Booki is better than Google Docs is when it comes to *publishing* the work. Booki has a tool called OBJAVI that produces output in a variety of pages sizes, including those used by Lulu.com for print on demand. This makes it easier to format a book for printing. It also produces Web Format PDF (with a table of contents pane) and EPUBs, and finally you can get a static website out of it. That's the real genius of it. So while Google Docs will help you collaborate on a manuscript, Booki goes that extra mile and helps you get it published at the push of a button. Think of all the work you'd go through in turning your Google Docs MS into a website, an EPUB, or a PDF ready for Lulu and imagine that your methodology required you to do that every week or so. I wrote a book on my personal Booki and wanted to have some people review it. I distributed PDFs. One reviewer said she had trouble reading a book on the computer screen but she did have a Kindle. I emailed her a Kindle version a few minutes later. Booki is still rough around the edges, but I would not hesitate to recommend it. James Simmons On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 7:41 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: James, Thank you very much for your work. It is very useful for my current projects. I put my notes on my blog: http://www.naturalmath.com/blog/ebook_enlightenment/ Here is what I wrote. Book review: “E-Book Enlightenment” by James Simmons http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/ James Simmons set out to write about One Laptop Per Child e-books, but decided to go more general. I appreciate the clear and concise categories of information by chapters and within the chapters – it’s a big service to the reader, and it takes a lot of thought and work for the writer. Moreover, each piece of data tells a story with a strong exegesis in the area of open and free – meaning, it’s interesting to read, at least for someone who cares. I thought I would skip the first chapters, on finding e-books, but I learned much I did not know – for example, the story of this touching projects: *The Rural Design Collective (@rdcHQ http://twitter.com/rdcHQ)* is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the *Internet Archive Children’s Library*. It was easy for me to skim the chapter comparing different formats, because of the clear structure, but the tone is human and personal (“Advantages: I can’t think of any.” on RTF). The Sugar activities and architecture for discovering and sharing books looks like something all children’s environments should be adopting (I am looking at you, Club Penguin). My daughter is probably older than the intended audience – she uses Shellfari for the purpose. I don’t know if there are tools like this beyond Sugar, for young kids. With one click, you can share books with a person or your neighborhood. And, it has text to speech. Remember the lovely Living Books from the 90s, with text-to-speech (and animations) done via recordings, rather than generated? That was hugely useful for literacy, but not sustainable, and only a few were made. James describes wiki-software for making books, called bookihttp://www.booki.cc/. I am looking at it for next book projects of Math Future (we are using Google Docs at the moment). I think I will wait for versions beyond alpha; meanwhile, James’ adventures with collaborating are illuminating, and echo my experiences: Starting a book from nothing is intimidating. However, once the book reaches a critical mass and there is no doubt that there *will* be a finished book you’ll find that getting help and feedback is easier, almost inevitable …If we didn’t start with the awful machine translated version we would never have gotten the good one. The first thing is that there are good reasons to collaborate and not so good. A good one is that your collaborator can bring expertise to the book that you don’t have. A bad one is that you think there will be less work for you if you have a collaborator. There are many human activities where “Many hands make light labor”. Writing a book isn’t one of them. Mokurai’s Replacing Textbook project involves several Math Future people such Don “The Mathman” Cohen, and uses bookihttp://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks, which James mentions. My materials about fractions
Re: [IAEP] Producing Radio Plays on the XO
Hi Harriet, I've added links to directly download the PDFs from my blog. http://www.flatlandfarm.de/blog/?p=326 @James, Chris I'm working on publishing the manual on FLOSS Manuals. It might take some time though, till I'm done. Thanks, Tom On Jul 1, 2011, at 2:57 PM, Outofindia wrote: Dear Tom I'd love to download the Producing Radio Play Manual for the XO...but don't have a Facebook account and don't want to get on to the social networks. Do I have any other option option? Looks exciting. Warm regards Harriet Vidyasagar On 7/1/11, tom.staub...@fhtw-berlin.de tom.staub...@fhtw-berlin.de wrote: Finally, I managed to finish the Teacher's Manual on producing Radio Plays on the XO. You can find it here: http://www.flatlandfarm.de/blog/?p=326 I still consider it work in progress, and I'd appreciate all kinds of feedback. I'm planning to translate the manual to Spanish. Unfortunately my Spanish is far from being perfect, so I'd appreciate all sorts of help here. Regards, Tom - Por último, cumplió el manual de docentes para producir Radio Novelas con la laptop XO. Se encontra aquí: http://www.flatlandfarm.de/blog/?p=326 Sigo considerando que es trabajo en curso y agradecería todo tipo de comentarios y opiniónes. Estoy pensando en traducir el manual al español. Desafortunadamente mi español está lejos de ser perfecto, agradecería todo tipo de ayuda. Saludos, Tom ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Harriet Vidyasagar www.outofindia.net www.womenofindia.net INDIA: 91-99011 66276 USA: 1-301-649-2240 Tom Staubitz -- tom.staub...@fhtw-berlin.de ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] [OT] the Pope's Toilet (Uruguayan movie)
Just finished watching The Pope's Toilet, a Uruguayan movie telling of parental sacrifice, poverty, relation with authority, dreams of the young and of the old... Great movie, highly recommended if you want to have a better idea of how real Uruguayans live or survive, especially among the urban less well-to-do. Many elements I found highly accurate: the bar where the group of friends meet every afternoon, the neighborhood, small-time smuggling as a way of life for many - protectionism and import taxes make many legal imports unaffordable, thus Brazilian products have forever been a gray-area option, indeed considered by many as the very origin of the Uruguayan nationhood. I could almost smell that house, those streets... If you watch it, do notice the need of the daughter to go to study to Montevideo, how that is interpreted by his mother, father, peers and the friendly older lady, that one with a hint of ulterior motives, by the customs officer who is quite outright on what *he* wants... How much she believes in her mom's desire, that after she graduates she will come back. Wife asked if I had ever smuggled when in Uruguay. I have. (to admit something like that sounds strange - us Uruguayans feel it's entirely normal, even the wife of President Sanguinetti shared her adventures. Moreover, my experience was during an official school trip, where everybody came back at least with many layers of T-shirts - and chocolate! I can say it was quite the bonding experience) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] A big Thumbs Up for CHUAS
The reviews are coming in for our translation of Make Your Own Sugar Activities! and one young reader has given it Thumbs Up!: http://escuelab.org/contenido/publicaci%C3%B3n-del-libro-como-hacer-una-actividad-sugar This is almost as good as being in Oprah's Book Club. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [OT] the Pope's Toilet (Uruguayan movie)
I'm sure there are concrete ways to help uruguayan cinema but probably the first is to watch it. I'm downloading from: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5665298/El_BaA_A_o_del_Papa_2007_ibarak Ahoy, Sebastian El 02/07/11 19:20, Yamandu Ploskonka escribió: Just finished watching The Pope's Toilet, a Uruguayan movie telling of parental sacrifice, poverty, relation with authority, dreams of the young and of the old... Great movie, highly recommended if you want to have a better idea of how real Uruguayans live or survive, especially among the urban less well-to-do. Many elements I found highly accurate: the bar where the group of friends meet every afternoon, the neighborhood, small-time smuggling as a way of life for many - protectionism and import taxes make many legal imports unaffordable, thus Brazilian products have forever been a gray-area option, indeed considered by many as the very origin of the Uruguayan nationhood. I could almost smell that house, those streets... If you watch it, do notice the need of the daughter to go to study to Montevideo, how that is interpreted by his mother, father, peers and the friendly older lady, that one with a hint of ulterior motives, by the customs officer who is quite outright on what *he* wants... How much she believes in her mom's desire, that after she graduates she will come back. Wife asked if I had ever smuggled when in Uruguay. I have. (to admit something like that sounds strange - us Uruguayans feel it's entirely normal, even the wife of President Sanguinetti shared her adventures. Moreover, my experience was during an official school trip, where everybody came back at least with many layers of T-shirts - and chocolate! I can say it was quite the bonding experience) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [OT] the Pope's Toilet (Uruguayan movie)
thanks yama and sebastian! downloading too! i lately discovered some other great movies that show about life in other places around latinamerica... 1) La Zona Sur from Bolivia 2) Qué tan lejosfrom Ecuador thanks, Kiko Mayorga i+d ata/escuelab.org On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Sebastian Silva sebast...@somosazucar.orgwrote: I'm sure there are concrete ways to help uruguayan cinema but probably the first is to watch it. I'm downloading from: http://thepiratebay.org/**torrent/5665298/El_BaA_A_o_** del_Papa_2007_ibarakhttp://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5665298/El_BaA_A_o_del_Papa_2007_ibarak Ahoy, Sebastian El 02/07/11 19:20, Yamandu Ploskonka escribió: Just finished watching The Pope's Toilet, a Uruguayan movie telling of parental sacrifice, poverty, relation with authority, dreams of the young and of the old... Great movie, highly recommended if you want to have a better idea of how real Uruguayans live or survive, especially among the urban less well-to-do. Many elements I found highly accurate: the bar where the group of friends meet every afternoon, the neighborhood, small-time smuggling as a way of life for many - protectionism and import taxes make many legal imports unaffordable, thus Brazilian products have forever been a gray-area option, indeed considered by many as the very origin of the Uruguayan nationhood. I could almost smell that house, those streets... If you watch it, do notice the need of the daughter to go to study to Montevideo, how that is interpreted by his mother, father, peers and the friendly older lady, that one with a hint of ulterior motives, by the customs officer who is quite outright on what *he* wants... How much she believes in her mom's desire, that after she graduates she will come back. Wife asked if I had ever smuggled when in Uruguay. I have. (to admit something like that sounds strange - us Uruguayans feel it's entirely normal, even the wife of President Sanguinetti shared her adventures. Moreover, my experience was during an official school trip, where everybody came back at least with many layers of T-shirts - and chocolate! I can say it was quite the bonding experience) __**_ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/**listinfo/iaephttp://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep __**_ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/**listinfo/iaephttp://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Licitación Ceibal
Puse unas cuantas ideas respecto a la licitación en el wiki. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LLSCeibal_2011 Por favor, métanle mano. Plazos corren! SI armamos algo o si nos ponemos como para apoyara a alguien, es hasta el 29 de julio Yamandú ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
