UPDATE: We are proud to announce that the Living First Language Platform has been selected as one of the Solvers in the 2019 MIT: Solve Global Challenge for Early Childhood Development. See the post below for more information on the project and on MIT Solve.

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There hasn’t been a lot of activity on The Literacy Bug in these past few months. To be honest, it has been very quiet in 2019. This has been largely due to another important project that has occupied the person behind this site, Eric Brace.

Eric’s main occupation is as the Director of Programs for The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation. As one aspect of this role, he is part of a team of people who have developed the Living First Languages Platform, which is a digital platform that allows Indigenous Speaker Groups to collect languages assets (e.g. phonemes, words, semantic categories, sentences and texts) so they can create their own language and literacy applications for teaching and learning purposes. This is quite important in the cases of minority and endangered languages where there is often limited materials available to best support the preservation and teaching of literacy in traditional languages. The main premise behind the Living First Languages Platform is best captured in the following video:

Whilst a lot has happened since the making of the video, it remains an accurate depiction of the aims and objectives of the project.

So … why are we writing this today. Well, we think the Living First Languages Platform may be of interest to those in The Literacy Bug network. And we are proud to say the project is a finalist in the MIT: Solve Global Challenge for Early Childhood Development, which will see Eric travelling to New York in late September (during UN General Assembly week) to pitch to a live audience to raise the profile of the project and to seek further support.

You can find out more detailed information about the project by visiting the detailed description at the following link: https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/early-childhood-development/solutions/9228

There are many other very worthy projects in this year’s MIT: Solve Global Challenge, so feel free to explore more about MIT: Solve and about the other finalists here:

• About MIT:Solve Challenges: https://solve.mit.edu/challenges

• About MIT:Solve Early Childhood Challenge: https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/early-childhood-development

• For a list of all the finalists in this year’s challenge: https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/early-childhood-development/solutions#challenge-subnav-offset

We appreciate your time, and hope you don’t mind this less-than-usual update from The Literacy Bug, but we decided that it is something that many be of interest to sizeable portion of our audience. If this is of interest, then - as usual - please explore and enjoy!