Mark W.F. Condon: Blog

Yesterday we launched the Literacy Commons. Historically, a “commons” is land shared by all community citizens. The Literacy Commons will be picture books shared with the world. We hope the Literacy Commons will become an additional, powerful new direction for local, community-based publication. 

At the meeting of the Jefferson County Public Schools Cultural Consortium here in Louisville (Kentucky) we began a process yesterday that could mean hundreds or even thousands of wonderful online RealeBooks written by experts from across the spectrum of life. Our hope is that this will make a huge difference in the learning resources available to children, teachers and families.

First a little background…
The Cultural Consortium (CC) is a group of 80+ cultural organizations - Museums, historic sites, public utilities, parks, performance and arts groups, other family recreation venues and even manufacturers, institutions and individuals from our region that represent efforts to enhance and promote what is interesting, good and healthy about our community. They all come together monthly to discuss and plan for the best ways of making their content rich services available to schools and families.

The other group of interest here is The Louisville Writing Project (LWP). The Louisville Writing Project is our local affiliate to the National Writing Project, which is dedicated to helping teachers develop as writers on their own. Then they can help their kids learn to write better.

Yesterday, in an effort to combine the talents of both of these groups, I addressed the Cultural Consortium, challenging them to work with local teachers/writers to create digital picture books (RealeBooks of course!) about their collections, their services, and their crafts. 2/3 of the groups present accepted the challenge and will be meeting with me and with the current group of teachers in the LWP for one productive morning in early July.

The cultural educators will arrive at the LWP site each carrying a collection of digital images featuring some important part of their mission. They will matched with the writing teachers and each pair will create a RealeBook promoting a particular part of their institutional mission. This beginning group of 22 collaborators will generate (at least) 22 picture books. Those expertise-filled picture books will then be placed in the Kentucky RealeLibrary (http://kentucky.realelibrary.com) and thereby made available to the world’s children and their schools and families. (Click on my sample featured here for an idea of how these will look.)

Now, if these books end up as good as I KNOW they can, then, the influence of these cultural institutions on children’s learning will be greatly enhanced. Using those 22 as a clear indication of what is possible, we will then challenge cultural educators across the 50 states (and beyond?) to follow the lead of our intrepid group from the Louisville area to:

1. Select a specific focus - part of a collection / performance / site / process that children are likely to find compelling, or that naturally connect to one or more of the state’s educational standards.
2. Collect or create images that showcase that focus.
3. Download the free RealeWriter, and using the Starter Template (File menu) create a beautiful, entertaining and informative book with the look and feel of one or all of the 22 models we will have provided.
4. Add sufficient information to the book to make the institutional source of this gift clear and to emphasize how much more their institution has to offer schools, families and their children.
5. Add their logo image to the back cover of the book (of course!).
6. Contribute the book to one of the state RealeLibraries.

Can you see how this might grow into something very special?

* Thousands of picture books with rich and authoritative content, written appropriate to one or more school grade levels will be online where anyone can download to read on-screen or print them.
* Children will always be able to find something fun and informative to read. Children who read more, read better of course. With what they learn through the Literacy Commons and school and about how now picture books can be written by anyone, they will also find themselves positioned to write their own books, based upon their learning.
* Cultural institutions will build names for themselves (and an invigorated following) as they create more and more books that capture interesting and important content for children.
* Families will learn about the powerful potential of cultural institutions of their communities, for learning and fun, around which to plan outings and vacations.

It will all be free for children across the world. (We will be seeking a corporate or foundation sponsor to cover online, administrative and promotional costs). It will offer an open invitation to anyone with expertise to capture it in a picture book and share it with the world. Thus, we can create a Literacy Commons one personal contribution at a time.

Not bad for a day’s work from each of us!