[Marketing] Marketing Digest, Vol 9, Issue 9

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Jim Simmons<nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
> Edward,
>
> I guess we have a Bible reading Activity (Sword?) and a Qur'an reading
> Activity somewhere,

Yes. I want them, for my own use, and to make the point that this is
not a Christian or Western enterprise of cultural domination. That
opinion is still out there.

Also, as activities, these are much more than just texts in a reader.
Sword provides dictionaries, a concordance, side-by-side viewing of
different versions, and more.

> and while it would make sense to get these on ASLO
> I don't see that they belong as one of the pre-installed Activities on
> SoaS.  As for a selection of literature, I see two problems:
>
> 1).  How to make the selection?

Have a discussion. What do people in-country find they want? What do
we want to show the world we have? What do children ask for?

By creating a collection, we are not saying that this is it, and You
Must Read It, the way I had to read Silas Marner and Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar in high school. (Both excellent, but not necessarily for
that age group.) We are saying that this is a tip-of-the-tongue taste,
and here are some things that you might not have known existed, in
addition to as much as we could pack in of what we know you want.

> 2).  How to communicate that this selection is just a drop in the
> ocean of what is available for free?

Links in Browse or a Library activity to places such as Project
Gutenberg, PG-EU, Librarianchick.com, The Perseus Project, and the
like, offering Free and Freeware materials in a profusion of
languages. I have a substantial folder of such bookmarks. I should
make a Wiki page.

> Now if you install _Get Internet Archive Books_ you can type in the
> word "Bible", "Qur'an", and even "Koran" and get a list of hundreds of
> books including and about the Bible and the Qur'an, in several
> languages, including Arabic.  For the Bible you can get several
> versions of the book itself in several languages, plus tracts
> condemning slavery that quote from the Bible, tracts condemning
> Abolitionists quoting from the Bible, etc.

Fine as far as it goes, but just texts. We want the rest of the
apparatus for studying the texts, and we want the correlations between
the texts.

> Add _Read Etexts_ to Sugar
> and download another 28,000 or so books, including the Bible and the
> Qur'an, an English translation of the Mahabharata, etc.

We need a link to the Sanskrit, too, in both Devanagari and
Romanization. Oh, yes, the Wikipedia article lists numerous resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

> At one time I did favor getting some books added to the Journal, maybe
> something non-controversial like an Oz book, etc.

Some Christian groups consider Oz books to promote evil witchcraft and
wizardry, as they do Harry Potter. Oz has been alleged to be
Communist, and the books Communist propaganda, since there is no
money. Ozma, the ruler, is a girl who lived as a boy from infancy to
just before puberty. You need to be aware that there are controversies
in countries and cultures other than your own.

http://thewizardofoz.info/faq02.html
2.20. Have the Oz books ever been banned, edited, or censored?

Sadly, yes. There have been several recent attempts to remove The
Wizard of Oz from school libraries or reading lists. None have been
successful, so far as I've been able to discover, although some school
students in Tennessee and Louisiana have been excused from reading the
book on religious grounds. Some reasons critics have given, for
example, is that the book depicts good witches, which they claim is
theologically impossible, and that animals are elevated to the same
level as humans.

And as stated in the previous question, some public libraries used to
not carry the Oz books for various reasons. While The Wizard of Oz
couldn't be found on the shelves of the Chicago library system as
early as 1928, two of the most notorious incidents took place in the
1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American
Activities Committee were active and saw Communism in all aspects of
life. Many libraries removed a number of books, including the Oz
books, for being too "radical." Fantasy was also felt to be harmful to
children at the time, and many believed that children's books should
be more educational.

In Detroit in 1957, Director Ralph Ulveling admitted that The Wizard
of Oz had not been available in the main library's children's room or
any branch for thirty years, as it was not well-written, "the story
relies on fantastic rather than fanciful happenings," the story didn't
build to any sort of climax, "there is too much exaggeration in
carrying out each detail, [and is] old-fashioned and out-dated...It
does not meet present day standards of book selection for children."
On a catalog card for the book in 1939, a Detroit library employee
wrote, "[T]he reader's mind is not fired by this type of
imagination...no need to reinstate this book." After this revelation,
the Detroit Times newspaper serialized The Wizard of Oz so children
could read it.

In Florida in 1959, State Librarian Dorothy Dodd sent out to libraries
a list of books that were not to be purchased, not to be accepted as
gifts, not to be processed and not to be circulated. The list included
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books, F. W. Dixon's Hardy Boys series,
H. R. Garis' Uncle Wiggily books, Laura Lee Hope's Bobbsey Twins
books, Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew mysteries, all of Horatio Alger's
titles, and Victor Appleton's Tom Swift books. But at the very top of
the list were L. Frank Baum's Oz books. Dodd said on the list: "The
presence of books of this type on the library shelves indicate [sic]
waste of time and money on the part of the librarian and lack of
interest in the welfare of the children of the community." Other
communities that also didn't have the Oz books in their libraries at
the time include Oklahoma, Washington, D. C., and Toronto.
Fortunately, complaints, shifting attitudes, and the more open-minded
1960s caused many libraries to rethink their policies, and they are
now generally available. The Detroit Library even hosted a major Oz
exhibit in 1982.

> Now I think we have
> to make teachers and learners understand just how easy it is to get
> their own books in the Journal.

When it is so, +1.

> I'm blowing my own horn here, but I do think what I have created gives
> us something good to sell.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
>> Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 09:03:24 -0700
>> From: Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Marketing] [Sugar-devel] [SoaS] The next Step: v2
>>        Roadmap
>> To: Sebastian Dziallas <sdz at sugarlabs.org>
>> Cc: Sugar Labs Marketing <marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org>,       Sugar Devel
>>        <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>> Message-ID:
>>        <e574f6eb0907060903w49d3d67bp867aabef1cc5c720 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Sebastian Dziallas<sebastian at when.com> wrote:
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> so here it is, the Sugar on a Stick v2 Roadmap:
>>>
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap#Roadmap
>>>
>>> Feedback is appreciated, and as we've just entered brainstorming phase,
>>> please go ahead and shoot your ideas! :)
>>
>> I would like to see the Bible (Tanakh and New Testament) and Qur'an
>> included, and a selection of world literature.
>>
>>> More to come...
>>>
>>> --Sebastian
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Silent Thunder (??/???????????????/????????????? ?) is my name
>> And Children are my nation.
>> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
>> http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)
>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)