by Samuel Sennott
The Tar Heel Reader just reached the one thousand books mark this past week. This is so exciting for students and teachers alike. So much thanks for the work of the UNC Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and for the Computer Science work of Gary Bishop and now his class. I think that the Tar Heel Reader offers some initial proof of concept that we can create solutions to questions and challenges that we have by working together. In this case, everyone submitting a book or two truly makes a difference. See how it becomes even more powerful when you get a teaming of literacy specialists with computer scientists. The internet and low cost computing really does offer an unprecedented platform for collaboration. I look forward to seeing this idea grow and blosom. Also, it is exciting to consider the next steps and the refining of initial goals.
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One to One Thousand and Tar Heel Reader’s success is an example of “Crowdsourcing”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Traditional production has producers and consumers. When consumers ARE the producers, there are many benefits: the product is more likely to be relevant to the consumer’s needs, you gain from others’ work (with the only expense being sharing work the that you have already done), and best of all, your work becomes a social experience rather than an individual chore.
Not many companies have leveraged this idea into a profitable business. Threadless and YouTube are couple. Most companies aren’t willing to let their fortunes be controlled by outsiders.
But for non-profits like Wikipedia and TarHeelReader, crowdsourcing is all upside.
The Tar Heel Reader has enabled Latin teachers to do something that we have been discussing for some time – it has given us a platform to write beginning readers in Latin – in two weeks, over 40 of these have now been written, and they are already being used by students across the globe.
This is a revolution, as the Latin books are available on an open bookshelf in the Tar Heel library, and so anyone using the reader has access to very basic books in Latin, so even a young child can read Latin, even a parent at home can start to read basic Latin readers with their children. This increases access to the language, and can only be a good thing.
There has been a dearth of such books for Latin – almost nothing of this type exists at all, so the Tar Heel reader is helping us do something that really needed to be done.
As there is a strong connection between knowledge of Latin, and English Literacy, this is an added benefit.