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Google, UNESCO and the Literacy Project

At the Frankfurt Book Fair [1]Where Google isn’t the most popular outfit [2]. Google has announced a new service bringing together some of its services as a tool-kit to promote literacy [3].

Excellent endeavour, although I was puzzled by the linguistic bias (English and German predominate) – why not Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin? And I’m not sure what is novel here, and what is just a wrapper for other services.

According to one commentary:

Google has asked literacy groups around the world to upload video segments explaining and demonstrating their successful teaching programs. Among the first few hundred to be posted is a same-language subtitle projectFor an academic analysis of SLS, see Reading Out of the “Idiot Box”: Same-Language Subtitling on Television in India [4]. from India that uses Bollywood films to teach reading [5].

A nonprofit group in New York called 826NYC [6] is helping a group of six-to-nine-year-olds make a video tutorial for Google, while a set of older kids is filming a claymation short.