Image by OEGlobal CC-BY
OEG and CCCOER are excited to join OpenStax, a leading publisher of free, open textbooks, to support the Free the Textbook, a campaign to shake off the fine print on automatic textbook billing programs. Fine print like hidden fees, limited opt-out periods, and higher costs for print textbooks. Let’s take a closer look at current textbook contracts and choose free textbooks first.
You can learn more and join the movement at wefreethetextbook.org.
#FreetheTextbook
Welcome to the home of podcasts produced by Open Education Global. These shows bring you insight and connection to the application of open education practices from around the world. Listen at podcast.oeglobal.org
In this episode we take you to Bangalore, India to hear about a remarkable publisher, Pratham Books and its Open Education for Excellence Award winning platform Storyweaver, core to Pratham’s mission of a book in the hands of every child in the country, published in that child’s mother tongue.
We welcomed in the studio Purvi Shah, Senior Director of StoryWeaver & Strategy to tell use the story of Storyweaver, which was recognized with a 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Repository category. At this time, StoryWeaver offers now over 64,000 stories in more than 370 languages spoken around the world, and offers a place for anyone to contribute images, new translations, and also age and subject specific teaching resources. All of this came about from a bold commitment in 2004 from Pratham Books to embrace open licensing for their published storybooks.
Enjoy the enthusiasm in Purvi’a voice as she shares the missions and global reach of StoryWeaver, as well as sharing examples of her favorite titles. And we appreciate the serendipty, than when Purvi offered to read a selection of a favorite story, from among the 60,000 titles in StoryWeaver, the one she chose was What Will Today Bring? authored by someone we know well here at OEGlobal, University of Leeds open educator Chrissi Nerantzi.
We also want to thank Sreemoyee Mukherjee from Pratham Books who joined us in the studio and was instrumental in coordinating this conversation.
at Descript.com
FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.
In this episode of OEGlobal Voices, host Alan Levine engages in an inspiring conversation with Purvi Shah, a key member of the StoryWeaver initiative by Pratham Books in India. StoryWeaver, a community-driven digital platform, earned the 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Curation Repository category.
Alan and Purvi’s conversation encapsulates the essence of open education and the incredible work being done by the StoryWeaver team to foster literacy and inclusivity. The episode concludes with a recommendation to explore StoryWeaver and an acknowledgment of the upcoming Open Education Awards.
Tune in to OEGlobal Voices to dive deeper into the world of StoryWeaver and the transformative power of open education.
(end of AI generated show notes)
How can we work with the communities to increase the depth of languages? So that could be a potential future milestone. We were just discussing this in office the other day that it’s so interesting that while the platform has 370 languages and that’s a milestone in itself, but the real milestone is that for that one child reading the first book in their mother tongue is really the milestone.
We hit that milestone almost every day because every day a child is discovering a book in their mother tongue for the first time. That milestone will never get old, I think. And some of the other sort of milestones [has] been just not being a platform where we allow for stories, but say, when we created this whole different platform, the white label StoryWeaver for Room to Read in Indonesia and that helped kickstart their own platform called Literacy Cloud.
That was a pretty important milestone because whatever we have learned, we could empower other organizations. to build off our investments, our learning, in countries that they work with.
Purvi Shah on StoryWeaver’s milestones
Our open licensed music for this episode is a track called Fairytale Story by Serge Quadrado licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).
The image of the reading octopus in this episode’s artwork was part of a previous version of the StoryWeaver web site, an illustration credited to Measa Sovonnarea.
This was another episode we are recording on the web in Squadcast. This is part of the Descript platform for AI enabled transcribing and editing audio in text– this has greatly enhanced our ability to produce our shows. We have been exploring some of the other AI features in Descript, but our posts remain human authored except where indicated otherwise.