Category: Projects
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How we can organize the news (long version)
This is the first public discussion of Infobitt. We did a soft launch recently, meaning you can sign up for an account without an invitation (but that’s the only way you can see the site, for now). We are starting a 100,000-person pledge drive (when we reach 100,000 pledges to add one fact, we’ll ask everybody…
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Please read: my challenge to kindergarten and first grade teachers
Dear Teachers(and those who support teachers, please listen in), I will buy your class $100 worth of books, and donate whatever anyone else pledges below (more on that in a bit), if you successfully execute the following. (I can do this for only one teacher. But if more people pledge money for other teachers to…
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Reading Bear improvements
Here’s our latest Reading Bear update. We’re not done working on Reading Bear–which will always remain a non-profit, free website to teach reading through phonics and vocabulary. Here’s a quick progress report. Alternative reading systems soon supported. We’re putting finishing touches on a feature allowing us to reorganize our words into the order in which they appear in…
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E.’s reading progress
(No, that’s not a picture of E. He doesn’t have glasses.) Just a short report here. I’m delighted with 25-month-old E.’s reading progress. We are not studying phonics nearly as carefully and systematically as we did with H. We have been going through (more or less randomly) the two ending blends presentations, adding s, and…
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A challenge to first grade reading teachers: read in one year! No excuses!
In the course of responding on the “readbygrade3” mailing list (I’m a subscriber), I came across this page on ReadingRockets.org. I was greatly struck by the fact that, here in 2012, professional advisers to reading teachers state that, by the end of first grade, a good student “has a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500…
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Reading Bear’s First Press Release (Please Share!)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Dr. Joe Thomas 901-484-3347 INNOVATIVE NEW WEBSITE, READING BEAR, TEACHES PHONICS AND VOCABULARY FOR FREE Wikipedia Co-Founder’s Latest Project Launches to Acclaim MEMPHIS, TENN., OCTOBER 11, 2012 – The co-founder of Wikipedia has embarked on a new web-based project aimed at teaching children to read in a new innovative, multi-sensory,…
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Let’s try out “Golden Filter Premium” on Wikipedia, shall we?
I encountered a journalist-activist on Twitter, a writer for (among others) Al Jazeera in English, who is nevertheless a free speech activist. We discussed the recent FoxNews.com article that reported, among other things, that the Wikimedia Foundation entirely failed to respond to a “more or less free” offer of filtering software. They need such software, of…
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Reading Bear: Rave Reviews
Reading Bear has enjoyed excellent preliminary reactions from a wide variety of online sources. The following is just a selection, most of this in reaction to our 2011 launch, not to the full set of 50 presentations that we completed in August 2012. Our Favorite Endorsements & Mentions Larry Ferlazzo added us to three “best…
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Reading Bear is complete! Why it works.
After many months of development, I can finally announce: Reading Bear is complete! Reading Bear now has a full set of fifty presentations, with an average viewing time of about 15 minutes each. I haven’t added up the time, but it’s around 12 hours total. It covers a huge number of phonics principles, systematically. Over 1,200…
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On the moral bankruptcy of Wikipedia’s anonymous administration
I announced, named, and launched Wikipedia way back in January of 2001. My originating role in the project was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales later on in 2001, when he wrote, “Larry had the idea to use wiki software…” Virtually all of the news articles about the project before 2005 identified me as one of the two founders of…