Recently we featured a post on this blog entitled ‘Ten takeaways from the African Storybook Project Colloquium in
Stellenbosch recently’ The groundbreaking African Storybook Project (ASP) which is
being administered by Saide uses the web to revolutionize literacy education
for African children, and draws on research to strengthen the project. Viewers
are invited to use and contribute to open-access stories in multiple languages.
The project is an initiative of the South African Institute for Distance
Education (http://www.saide.org.za/african-story…). The project is planning to unveil the
long-awaited www.africanstorybook.org website in early 2014. This will
contain stories from the four pilot countries of South Africa, Uganda, Kenya
and Lesotho.
Bonny Norton, Professor of Dr. Bonny Norton,
Professor in the Dept Language & Literacy Education at
the University of British Columbia from Canada wrote an email recently with some updates on the
research side of the African Storybook project.
1. The Peter Wall website has been updated with the report on the
colloquium, the final list of participants, and the final program. Please do
check this out at: http://www.africanstorybookproject.pwias.ubc.ca/
2. There is now a 10 minute video of the ASP and research
colloquium. Take a look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc-qjmdetp8&feature=youtu.be
3. You can read more about the project at http://www.saide.org.za/african-storybook-project
It was very exciting for SchoolNet to run a free, online digital
storytelling course for teachers around South Africa earlier this year.
Teachers were encouraged to write a story themselves and also get their classes
writing for the project. All the stories written have been collected on a wiki
while the website is in progress, and then the project plans to select 20 of
the stories for the actual website. If you would like to read some of the
stories on the wiki please visit http://africanstorybookproject.wikispaces.com.
We are hoping to run a further course next year for the project… we’ll keep you
posted!
