[Air-L] Sambad Seminar 2008

[Ganesh Ghimire]

Apologies for cross posting.***
 *

*Can the importance of literacy be compensated for by technology?***

*Bhashaka Kura (7th March 2008)*

*4:30pm-6:00pm*

*Yalamaya Kendra, PatanDhoka, Lalitpur, Nepal.*


Presenters:

Prof. Pat Hall, Ganesh Ghimire, Abhishek Shrestha, Prabin Gautam

Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Nepal.

Summary:


Literacy is frequently seen as a prerequisite in helping very poor people
enhance their quality of life through improved livelihoods, leading to the
achievement of the millennium development goals. Often literacy is taught
independently as a life skill, outside of any context of its use, but
increasingly the practice is to teach other practical subjects like
agriculture or health care and in that context teach sufficient literacy for
that particular purpose. An important part of this use of literacy would be
to access communal knowledge, but equally important would be the
contribution of traditional knowledge to the shared pool of knowledge. But
just how critical is literacy to all this?

We can view writing as a means of recording speech, and when writing was
invented many thousands of years ago, making marks on stone or clay or bark
was the only technology available. However today we can directly record
speech using electronic devices, and with computers can manipulate and edit
that speech. We can also generate speech from written materials, so that
previously written materials can be read to the person who cannot read.
Writing may no longer be as important as it was previously.

In this seminar we will discuss these issues and demonstrate speech based
technologies that could enable illiterate people to immediately gain
benefits previously denied them due to the barrier of literacy.


Interested people are kindly welcome.

http://sambad.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1&Itemid=2


Further information:

Phone: 977 1 5521393

Email: info at sambad.org




regards,

Ganesh