[education-wg] endorse S. 1714 and ask for help with FOSS English reading and speech freemium

[James Salsman]

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the OSFA. I understand
today is the deadline for doing so.  Firstly, I want to endorse Greg
DeKoenigsberg's recommendation to support Senate bill S. 1714, the
Open College Textbook Act of 2009 below.  Supporting this important
legislation is well within the Mission, Charter, and Principles of the
OSFA for all of us in our capacity as citizens, and I hope we can
cooperate effectively to do so.  I have proposed an open assessment
content standard at http://bit.ly/assessCont which I believe also
warrants support, and I hope others will join me.

To that end, I have been developing open source speech
recognition-based English reading and speech language learning systems
at http://talknicer.com and I hope you can offer some help. The use of
speech recognition for tutoring reading and pronunciation skills can
substantially decrease the amount of time that it takes for a typical
student to achieve a given reading level. (
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen/research.html ) These systems are
responsive to the needs of beginning and intermediate English readers,
including special needs learners and the deaf.

There is an on-line demo to try at http://talknicer.com/d/index.cgi
for which I and my employees have recently completed a Flash
10/Speex-based microphone upload system which is about ready to go
into production.  You can use open source software to provide
pronunciation assessment over the web and on mobile devices to help
beginning and intermediate English learners speak and read.
Commercial products with such features sell above $500 per unit, but a
freemium service could be ad-supported on the web for everyone.
Slides for a five minute version of a talk on this subject are at
http://talknicer.com/james-salsman-5mof.pdf

Development has not been inexpensive, and I am now faced with a large
and relatively expensive hardware and colocation order to deploy the
croudsourcing content development system for a freemium, ad-supported
service.  Patents have been licensed (very difficult!) and all the
hurdles have been cleared, I just need to raise several thousand
dollars to make sure I can go live and get to 5,000 words of
instructional content at beginner through intermediate level in three
months time and release the entire system as open source for reading
tutors in languages other than English -- that is the maximum amount
of open source I can offer given the licensing terms, at least for a
few years until the patents expire.

So I ask, for those of you who can help, please consider supporting
this endeavor at http://talknicer.com -- and I welcome any questions.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
James Salsman
Emeryville, California


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Greg DeKoenigsberg greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail.com
Date: Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: [education-wg] Fwd: [sf-uk-discuss] US edu contacts
To: Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com>


On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excellent, you're one of the few people I'd trust to do this, Greg.
>
> And if I can offer one suggestion: if you have an opportunity, hammer
> on the fact that non-commercially licensed software is not and has
> never been open source.  A huge chunk of federally funded software
> (i.e., NSF) languishes in the non-commercial non-foss limbo and
> changing that harms *nobody*.

They know it, too.  Have you read the Text of S. 1714: Open College
Textbook Act of 2009?  It's delightfully brief for a bill.

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-1714

It's a proposal for competitive open textbook grants.  Right now it's
stalled in committee, and that's one of the things I'm going to be
asking about.  Read section 5, though, in particular:

* * *

(a) In General- Notwithstanding any other provision of law,
educational materials such as curricula and textbooks created through
grants distributed by Federal agencies, including the National Science
Foundation, for use in elementary, secondary, or postsecondary courses
shall be licensed under an open license.

(b) Accessibility- The full and complete digital content of each of
the materials created as described in subsection (a) shall be--

(1) posted on an easily accessible and interoperable website, which
site shall be identified to the Secretary by the grant recipient; and

(2) made available free of charge to, and may be downloaded,
redistributed, changed, revised, or otherwise altered by, any member
of the general public.

* * *

This is A BIG DEAL.  The vast majority of bills that go to committee
*die* in committee.

I think that this working group has the opportunity to engage in this
particular fight.  If we were to articulate a single useful goal for
this year, it could be "to organize a community effort to get S. 1714
to the floor and passed."

So my goal in my visit to DoE will be to discuss this and any other
efforts going on that unite "open source" and "education".  My
@redhat.com email address helped me to get the meeting, but the folks
I'll ask for help will be from this working group.

That's the update.  :)  More next week.  Exciting times ahead.

--g

(In the meantime, maybe we could get the ball rolling: what sorts of
things could we do to raise awareness of S. 1714?  We could start by
publicizing a list of all of the Senators in the committee, and start
a letter-writing campaign.  Trouble is, it's the same committee
dealing with healthcare right now, so they're kinda busy at the
moment.  More info @ http://help.senate.gov/)