Google Reading

October 4, 2006 10:43 AM

Promoting Literacy, Promoting Google at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Google's Literacy Project aims to become an essential resource for educators, though it also seems to be a promotion for all of Google's other services. Participants include 826NYC and UNESCO's Lifelong Learning Project. Quite cool is the mapping feature to help literacy groups find each other.
posted by cal71 (3 comments total)

Yeah, it's essentially a branded portal for their services, with some canned queries to get you started. I don't see them generating ongoing content for this (maybe that's what the other participants are doing? hard to tell...), so I think this project must have taken some junior employee at Google like a day or two to throw together.

Still, kudos to them for doing something, anything. I wish more companies committed random acts of kindness like this.
posted by mkultra at 12:57 PM on October 4, 2006

Google + German + LIteracy = Googlestein?
posted by furtive at 3:43 PM on October 4, 2006

I feel like that literacy map could stand to be extended a bit to look at the wide variety of cultural programs designed to combat illiteracy as well. One instance in Peru, is Sarita Cartonera, which employs extremely poor children to construct books from discarded cardboard boxes, selling the books at a very low affordable rate in communities/neighborhoods without access to bookstores, with all proceeds beyond the cost of materials going to the children involved with the project.
posted by jrb223 at 11:58 AM on October 5, 2006