CC-India Discussion List

[Anivar Aravind <anivar.aravind AT gmail.com>]

Sorry for the typos** earlier

Dear all ,

Some happy news for all of us .


The School curriculum steering commitee of  Kerala Govt's SCERT(State Council Educational Research and Training)  decided  3 major points in our interest yesterday

1. SCERT is improving text book printing infrastructure by shifting from Adobe 's softwares to FOSS based XeTeX and free licensed fonts.

2. They will shift from ASCII to Unicode . This will also help in universal access for differentially abled via technologies like Text to Speech even in Malayalam Language .

3. The books will be licensed under  CC-BY-SA . 

Official Order is still pending. But I am posting this since it is already in media reports.

Read a report in TOI http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Now-free-software-to-set-school-textbooks-in-Kerala/articleshow/25781341.cms

The Change will be applicable to all newly publishing books from now Starting from Malayalam Text books in 5, 7, and 11th standards

Myself, Hrishikesh K.B and a team from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (http://smc.org) are working closely with SCERT from last few months to help  them in initiating this change process.  

Thanks to Dr. P.K Thilak, Research Officer  SCERT , Director SCERT, and  Biju Prabhakar IAS (Director of Public Instruction, Govt of Kerala )  for initiating this Change.

~ regards

Anivar Aravind

Secretary

Swathanthra Malaalam Computing

http://smc.org.in

Ph. 09448063780