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["Bruce G. Robertson" <brobertson@mta.ca>]

I a recent missive about the Gutenberg texts, I bainstormed publicly about a
kind of learning environment that might fit well some of our goals and make
use of the resources there.

Let me put that into focus a bit with this description. I'll call the system
'Lege mihi' which means 'read to me' in Latin. 

The goal is to help children and young adults become familiar with and enjoy
literature. We will do this by supplementing texts with a
synchronized dramatic reading and with sound and images. Let met take as an
example Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, poem I:

I
Bed in Summer

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

[Along with the text, featured in large letters, we see a picture of a 
boy in bed, the sun streaming through the window. He is ill.]
[The verse is read. This part is 'pluggable', that is Daddy can
record his reading and store it as a data file to this application. Then
child can listen to daddy -- lege mihi -- when he is away 
at LinuxWorld conferences :-)]


I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

[Additions to the first image - maybe a png -- of a bird, and sound
effects added of the feet.]

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

[Add the child thinking of times she once played outside.]


Note that the goal is to make the literature comprehensible with the images
and effective reading. I think easter eggs, hot spots and other multimedia
tricks would simply detract. I call this non-interactive fiction in the
subject to this letter.  Clearly this by no means taxes our computing systems
or adds any AI, often a goal of educational software. But a good collection of
these might improve some children's lives, and it should be possible to lash
together quickly as a test of the KGB, not to mention our collective creative
talent.

Yrs,

-- 
Bruce G. Robertson, Dept. of Classics, Mount Allison University
note my new email address: brobertson@mta.ca
http://www.java.utoronto.ca/~brucerob

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