I heard this story this morning, and it was very inspiring to me. <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100677646">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100677646</a> It was especially meaningful because I have been working on a related project that pertains to literacy learning. I would like to invite your attention to SynPhony, Multilingual Synthetic Phonics Literacy, a new project I have started with Norbert Rennert, a researcher at the Canada Institute of Linguistics.  It is intended to be a literacy resource for XO activities that use words (perhaps paired with images) as their underpinning, as well as a resource in other educational contexts.  Any feedback would be welcome.  Right now you will find the project scope and background described and 14 use cases documented.  By the end of this week we should have a first release with the database  and some initial web-based interfaces packaged for download. <a href="http://synphony.wiki.sourceforge.net/">http://synphony.wiki.sourceforge.net/</a> The wiki is set up to allow discussion to be open to everyone but the pages to be updateable by project members.  If the project interests anyone, we'd love some help.  I'll be posting a "help wanted" later this week, but it will certainly include a need for educators to help define mappings to common reading curricula, any volunteers interested in helping bind images to the words in the database, and programmers to help make various activities draw their vocabulary from the word bank.  We also need language experts to extend the database to other languages, as we only have English and Spanish so far, and the Spanish database is smaller (10,000 words) than the English database (44,000 words). Regards, Carol Lerche