Penny Hero (dot) Net

(or titled “part 2 of the “hole in the wall” India literacy experiment post!”)

Google announced yesterday that it’s launching the Google Literacy project to help spread literacy and provide resources and lots of other stuff for teachers, parents, mentors, students, and just regular people (with internet access) to help do so.

While promoting literacy worldwide via the internet is not a new thing (just do a google search. basically every self-respecting university, and a number of big organizations also are working to create a more literate world), I think google’s visibility, their philosophies, and their resources can add a lot to this.

Google’s literacy project basically acts as a portal to some of its services, like book search, google scholar, and other things, all acting as a kind funnel and pointing to things related to literacy. It draws attention to literacy, education, and pro-actively does something about it in the google-way of doing things… by organizing information and making it more accessible.

That’s way more powerful than you’d initially think, really. Honestly. Because most people in “literacy initiatives” or projects try to open schools, try to gather volunteer support, write and publish, or they manually collect links to resources and re-post them. But google uses it’s own technologies to sort and find these resources for you, so there’s no manual lists of resources to sort and maintain, and all the results are current, relevant, etc.

Plus, making this kind of portal (rather than yet another technology/news/omg-cool-stuff! portal) shows what kinds of values Google celebrates and wants to promote.

So… India. The googleblog announcement talks about India, and how it has 1/3 of the worlds “literacy problem”. And just yesterday, I blogged about the hole-in-the-wall experiment from India, which showed that there was some exciting and active research going on involving literacy, technology, and accessibility to this education.

Coincidence? maybe. Awesome? yes.

Gotta read more.

But first, must go back to work.

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before now (it’s been two whole days!) but, according to lots of news sources (news.google) google opened up Writely for general registration!

I’ve been a really big fan of writely for probably six months now… BEFORE Google acquired them! A friend of mine and I wrote a collaborative project last Winter (about online collaborative writing, no less) using Writely. (It was a very meta-meta written research project. good fun. sorta… actually, not at all. but that had nothing to do with Writely and more to do with the overwhelming nature of our project)

Anyway, I’m excited, aren’t you?!

Why I love Writely:

When my friend and I were searching for online collaborative writing software, Writely was the only one that seemed to be 100% aligned with our goals and interests in collaborative writing. At the time, Writely didn’t yet have the feature to track which writer made which change, and we thought that was a cool deviation from conventional writing tools because we were interested in truly blending two author’s voices and words (although, we’ve sinced learned that there is more to individual voice than a timestamp and a username attached).

Writely was also the only tool we saw that was apparently designed exactly for what we wanted to use it for: write an essay collaboratively. It’s marketed more generally, as an all-purpose wordprocessor instead of as something for technical writers or for corporate collaborative documents, or anything like that.

I loved writely because it was community based, open, and very easy to use. It represented a direction that I think more webbased tools should go in (and perhaps already are): target a specifically more general audience but keep the software simple and contained. Visual interfaces are GOOD when well-designed with “what people actually do” in mind. Keep the feature-set simple, intuitive and specific to the job it’s designed to do (feature-creep == bad). Use open communication forums like a web-forum or a blog to keep in touch with users and keep up with the “what people actually use/need” current.

It’s been my “mission” for a long time (well, since I met Alex Polvi, anyway… who made me realize that my perspective on technology isn’t worthless) to try and help bridge the gap between non-geek “end users” and the tools I know could help them. It started with me wanting to share OpenOffice.org with other English majors, or help them learn how to maintain their computer better so that stuff wouldn’t crash at 3am when they’re trying to write an essay. I tried sharing Ubuntu with some, but it was still too “intimidating” (read “different from windows/mac”) and “buggy” (read, when stuff does break, it really breaks, and sometimes its hard for someone like me to find a linux geek without feeling stupid, or annoying etc).

I want poor students (like I was) to know what’s out there and that they don’t have to pirate the most popular (corporate, closed source, buggy, vulnerable, EXPENSIVE) office suite in order to pass Wr121. They’re already paying enough on tuition and textbooks… their pencils, paper, and wordprocessors should be cheap, if not free!

I knew I was lucky, because I grew up geeky and knew how to search for free alternatives to what most other people used. I also had this nagging problem with pirating software after I left high-school age because I think that the need for piracy at all demonstrates that the industry isn’t meeting its userbase’s needs.

I want it to be possible to use powerful free things (like linux, OpenOffice.org) to do Whatever You Need WITHOUT the need to be a total tech-geek or experienced trouble-shooter.

Anyway, Writely seemed to be totally aligned with my views on collaborative writing, literacy, software, and openness, so I fell in love. Hard. :)

So obviously, I was thrilled when Google acquired them. And now I’m even more thrilled that they’re finally opening registration. Woo hoo!

Anyway, nothing but awesome can come of this… and I’m done blogging for now.

Oh, and btw, here’s the writely blog.