Telling, writing and reading stories

mEducation Alliance logo

On Friday I had the chance to join the fifth annual mEducation Alliance Symposium and it got me thinking again about stories. Everyone has a story, as they say, and sometimes many. Technology may facilitate the telling of those stories, and it will be interesting to examine in more depth the work of organizations that are exploring this potential.

One of the things noted in some literacy efforts is how newly literate people will express themselves in the new medium - writing (literacy is not just learning how to read, a fact that is sometimes forgotten). Other efforts even going back some years have had interesting results putting video recorders in the hands of people who never had access to it and letting them document their livelihoods.

Now with smaller and more powerful devices in the hands of more people in more places, the issue becomes how to exploit the potential not only for delivering content from the usual centers and sources (with no disrespect...), but also for facilitating creation and collaboration by more people in more languages (including heretofore less-resourced ones), linking speech, text, and images in new ways. And then, how to bring rapidly evolving machine translation technology into the process.

Focus on the stories - from the autobiographic, to fiction, to community histories, to practical experiences...

I hope to come back to this soon with reference to at least a couple of current projects.