OEGlobal Voices Episode 76: Purvi Shah on StoryWeaver === Intro Music and Opening Quote --- [00:00:00] Purvi Shah: And I think that's when we said that, while it was painstakingly difficult to let go of control, because the minute you decide to open license, you are letting go of a lot of control. We did decide as an organization that this is mission centric for us and we need to embrace openness. This really demanded a mindset shift from a few of us telling and sharing our stories to enabling everyone to tell their stories. That's really, how the idea of say having a platform that can house all these stories. Having a platform that can have the tools to, enable a community, empower a community to translate and create their own stories, really was the seed of StoryWeaver. Welcome to OE Global Voices Podcast --- [00:00:52] Alan Levine: Here we are, OE Global Voices. This is a podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global. Each one of the episodes we share with you conversation style, people, practices, and ideas from open educators around the world. And we hear it in their own voices. I am your most fortunate host, Alan Levine coming to you from central Canada. Fortunate because I get to be part of all the conversations that we have on this podcast. 2023 Open Education Awards and StoryWeaver --- [00:01:19] Alan Levine: Almost a year ago, we announced the winners of our 2023 Open Education Awards for Excellence. And I'm still catching up on conversations with our award winners. I hope we can convince you that this actually makes it a little bit more interesting because we can talk about what's happened since that time. It's very timely because next week we're announcing the 2024 award winners. It's a most exciting time when this happens. We like to think these conversations might motivate you listeners, thinking about how to honor, recognize people and projects not just award winners, but also keeping in the back of your mind for next year who are what in the world of open education, and that's a broad world, motivates you and is worth nominating. Meet Purvi Shah from StoryWeaver --- [00:02:01] Alan Levine: So I'm very excited to welcome to the studio today, Purvi Shah and Sreemoyee from StoryWeaver. It's a project shared and supported by Pratham Books in India that won a 2023 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Curation Repository category. As it turns out the award email notification, took a while for us to get in touch with each other, but we managed to do. Purvi and Sreemoyee were so kind to arrange to be part of this podcast conversation. Talking a little bit too much on my intro, but just delighted to share with you about a significant project that I hope you see as I have seen it actually for quite a few years. It's an open repository. But it's much more. StoryWeaver really delivers on a promise to support children learning to read in their own languages with a vast collection of stories and other education resources that you'll hear about it. But enough of me, let's welcome our guest Purvi Shah from I guess technically you work for Pratham Books. Is that right? [00:03:04] Purvi Shah: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes. StoryWeaver is an initiative within Pratham Books. [00:03:08] Alan Levine: We ask people where in the world they are and it's like a map location, but also because we're on audio only, can you describe what your physical surroundings are? Where are you right now? [00:03:17] Purvi Shah: Okay. So I want to go a little further back, Alan. And hello, Alan. So I was born and brought up in one of the busiest cities of the world, Mumbai. But for the last two decades I've made Bangalore my home. It's the garden city of India. So of course, when I look outside, I can see nothing but green all around me. So we are very lucky to have so much greenery here around us. And I wake up to the chirping sound of birds in my home. So that's really great. And Bangalore, as you may know, Alan is situated in the southern part of India. The official language of the state is Kannada, but India is a multicultural, multilingual country. So we actually have 22 constitutional languages and over 152 languages that are spoken by groups of 10,000 and over people. [00:04:08] Alan Levine: Wow. That's a lot to take in and makes sense for the project that we're going to talk about. Now we know this comes from a publisher, Pratham Books. You think traditional publisher, they've been publishing books for quite some time, right? And they're still at it. And that's the business. So can you say more about the company? [00:04:26] Purvi Shah: The Mission and Impact of Pratham Books --- [00:04:26] Purvi Shah: Pratham Books, we're actually in our 20th year. So it's been two decades of publishing children's storybooks. We are a nonprofit children's book publisher based out of India. We were set up in 2004 because there was a huge dearth for high quality children's literature that was accessible for children in their mother tongue languages. So our mission is to see a book in every child's hand. Our philosophy was really clear that if children have access to joyful storybooks in a language that they can read and understand. They will be fluent readers in no time. So we publish really high quality storybooks at very affordable costs, about less than 50 US cents actually. To date we have published over 6,000 storybooks across 24 languages and shipped over 30 million books across the country. [00:05:17] Alan Levine: That's astounding on its own. And so wonderful to hear that this is the dedication. I don't think anybody can argue with that mission. The Birth and Growth of StoryWeaver --- [00:05:24] Alan Levine: Given that was the the mission for Pratham Books, can you tell the story of how StoryWeaver came to be? [00:05:31] Purvi Shah: Yeah. As everybody acknowledges all the time, that the numbers that I just rattled off are really big, but here's another number for you-- 240 million children in India and hundreds of languages. So that really has been the number that, every one of us at Pratham Books always looks at. So we often ask ourselves that if we have to reach every child, in every language of the country, what is it that we need to do differently? How do we scale exponentially without necessarily scaling human and financial resources? What is it that we need to do to achieve our mission? And so that's really when we started internally discussing, thinking about, what is it that can be done? And I must say that, Pratham Books has been quiet, and a brand that has always innovated. The idea of Pratham Books itself is an innovation. Imagine a nonprofit publisher creating high quality children's storybooks, right? So we established Pratham Books in 2004, but as early as 2007 is when we started thinking about, yes, we are doing this and we've understood how to publish storybooks, how to get authors and illustrators into our mission. But if we have to solve a societal problem of this scale, then what can we do differently? And we found an answer in open licenses. And trust me, nobody at that point in time, especially in the publishing industry in 2007, was talking about open licenses. We ourselves knew very little about it, but we were fortunate to have somebody in our team bring to light that this could be a potential way to move forward. And we're like what do we have to lose? Let's take these five books and put them up on Scribd under a open license. Quite honestly, for a bit, we forgot about it until we went back to Scribd and we found versions of our storybooks in German and French and Sanskrit. We said something is happening here. We need to understand what has happened, and what happened because we open licensed our books. And I think that's when we said that, while it was painstakingly difficult to let go of control, because the minute you decide to open license, you are letting go of a lot of control. We did decide as an organization that this is mission centric for us and we need to embrace openness. This really demanded a mindset shift from a few of us telling and sharing our stories to enabling everyone to tell their stories. That's really, how the idea of say having a platform that can house all these stories. Having a platform that can have the tools to, enable a community, empower a community to translate and create their own stories really was the seed of StoryWeaver. And we actually launched it this month, nine years back on 8th September, International Literacy Day 2015. So it's been nine years of, doing this work as part of StoryWeaver. We launched with 800 stories in 24 languages. And today we are at 60, 000 stories in 370 languages of the world. [00:08:39] Alan Levine: That's astounding and impressive again for the innovation to recognize the value because like you said, openly giving away the books almost runs counter to the way publishers traditionally think, right? Did anybody tell you, you're a little bit crazy for doing this or did people question what you're doing? [00:09:00] Purvi Shah: Me included, because again, I was leading brand at the time. So I've been with Pratham Books since 2006, so it's 18 years now of being with Pratham Books. I was part of the brand team. So it was a new concept for me as well, that, we are going to be letting go of of things that we have created, the brand value,. Everything is embedded in the quality that we put out. So it was difficult, but I think that, when a team is unified by a mission as large as a book in every child's hand, I think some of these responses become easier. Some of these actions become easier to take because why you're doing what you're doing. [00:09:36] Alan Levine: So for our listeners they're just hearing about this. They'll go to the StoryWeaver site. We'll obviously share the link. What will they find there? What will they discover when they first enter the site? What will draw them in? [00:09:48] Purvi Shah: As soon as you enter the world of story viewer, I think the thing that catches your eye is the beautiful illustrations. There is no way you cannot get lost in them. So those little illustrated story cards, according to me, is what will catch your eye. Those story cards then become a gateway to thousands of stories in hundreds of languages. And the beauty of StoryWeaver is that because we're a multi publisher platform, we have storybooks from many countries that represent diverse cultures. We also have different themes that are represented on the platform. So if you're looking for books on social emotional learning, biographies or STEM stories or books on adventure, you'll find all of that on this platform. [00:10:32] Alan Levine: Yeah. Innovative Features of StoryWeaver --- [00:10:32] Alan Levine: And what are these things called "read alongs"? How does that work? [00:10:36] Purvi Shah: Yeah. So readalongs was an interesting addition to our platform. Several years ago we said that if children had to learn a new language and sometimes it's not their first language or the mother tongue, it's very important for children to have access to audio/video books that allow them to hear the right diction at the right pace. It becomes a tool for language acquisition. Read alongs are really audio/video books, so you have the same storybook with an audio input. But additionally, what we've done is that we've also done the same language subtitling. So as the voice moves, the highlight on the words also move, and that's a well established tool for language acquisitions. There's this really sweet story from one of our partners here down south, who didn't know English, the teacher himself didn't know English, but was doing an English class with his students. He starts using the read along videos in English and he actually sends us a really nice video by saying that my English is improved by using your read alongs with my students. So that was really nice. [00:11:41] Alan Levine: For teachers, there's structured almost, I wouldn't say curriculum, but things to support math and science and also at multi grade levels. What's the range of coverage for teachers out there? [00:11:53] Purvi Shah: So we have storybooks that teachers can use with children from grades one to eight, technically. We also have reading levels because we do believe that a child could be reading, at a different level, irrespective of the age that the child is at. So we have reading levels as well on the platform. But you are very right in observing these curated resources, because that's not how StoryWeaver started. StoryWeaver started with just having storybooks. And then when we reached 10, 000, 20,000 storybooks, we started hearing back from teachers saying, you have so many storybooks, which one should I be choosing, which is the right one? That sort of insight from teachers really led to us creating. several different gateways on the platform. So you have book lists, which are thematic curated book lists. You could have a STEM book list. You could have something on phonics, et cetera. And then we also have programs on STEM that actually allows teachers to not only just use the storybooks, but also enables them with how to use that particular storybook for that concept in the classroom. What are the project ideas that you can use leveraging that storybook? We have a foundational literacy program, a joyful reading program. So all of these programs came through insights of our work with teachers on the ground. [00:13:14] Alan Levine: You've given some indication about the breadth of language that are meeting the needs of readers in India, but it's much broader than that. Like I know I've seen Cree and there's Farsi. What are some unusual languages that maybe you hadn't thought would be in the mix or just said, wow there, we have this book, we have this story now in this language from this part of the world. [00:13:38] Purvi Shah: Like you rightly said we have books in Farsi, we have books in Khmer, we have books in Urdu, we have books in Bahasa Indonesia... Actually I'm taken back to my first few weeks of StoryWeaver when mentioned this question. I remember we were in the office and there's an email that hits us that says I discovered your wonderful platform. I can't see the language Mam. Can you please add it and that was really our first experience of, honestly what StoryWeaver would mean down the road. We suddenly started Googling, what the language meant and even more importantly, what the script of the language was. And it's a very interesting script. That was our first experience of a language that at least I hadn't heard of or wasn't familiar with. And in 48 hours, though, the language did go live on StoryWeaver. And soon after, we had the user translating storybooks in Khmer. Because this is an OE platform and the award is for OE, I do want to talk about a little bit about Unicode, Alan, because again, as a publisher, when we were migrating those 800 story books on the platform, we had books in, I kid you not, 5, 000 proprietary forms across the languages. [00:14:55] Alan Levine: Wow. [00:14:56] Purvi Shah: And we had to make the effort to convert all those books, re-typeset, re-lay them out and put them up on StoryWeaver and made them Unicode compliant. It took us two years to do that, but it takes a user sitting anywhere less than 10 minutes to translate and publish a book in a language of their choice in Unicode-- in 10 minutes. That's really the power of, open licenses, open fonts, all of that, right? But yes, the languages that we have on the platform, some of the interesting ones, we have Farsi, we have Korku, we have isiXhosa, we have Marwari, we have Mixe, we have Chalchiteko, which we have only a few stories of, but less than, I think, 10, 000 speakers in the language. Yes, this is the spectrum of the languages that we have. And interestingly, because we're at 370 languages now, close to 70 percent of the languages represented on the platform actually are from underserved and indigenous communities. [00:15:55] Alan Levine: That's so fantastic. Oh I'm thinking lots of questions. Community Contributions and Favorite Stories --- [00:15:58] Alan Levine: Can you share what some of your favorite stories are in the collection and why. [00:16:03] Purvi Shah: You're putting me on a spot there, 60, 000 stories. I have to tell you my favorite story. [00:16:09] Alan Levine: You haven't read them all? [00:16:10] Purvi Shah: I must tell you, Alan, there was a time when we launched StoryWeaver, actually every new story that would come on the platform, we would have read it by the end of the day. We were that hands on. Now, of course not. I don't know all 60, 000 stories, but two or three. Can I talk about two or three stories? Would that be okay? [00:16:31] Alan Levine: Absolutely. I have plenty of time and I want to hear the stories. [00:16:35] Purvi Shah: I love telling stories, obviously I'm a StoryWeaver, at Pratham Books! [00:16:39] Alan Levine: Yes. [00:16:40] Purvi Shah: So the first story that's, very top of mind and it's topical. So Pratham Books runs this annual initiative called One Day One Story on 8th September International Literacy Day. We pick one or two stories and we tell our entire community of volunteers, readers, teachers, champions to use that story with the children that they work with. This year's story I particularly like because it's a story called "Goal!" written by Neha Singh. It is a story that's celebrates sports, celebrates the story of a girl wanting to play football. It's a story of freedom and empowerment. It's a story that's come from a collective that works with these girls. I think it's very freeing and empowering, empowering. We've seen how this book has been used in classrooms and what it's done for. boys and girls who have read that book from underserved communities. That's the first book that comes to my mind. The second book is a book that, I love presenting that book when I'm talking about STEM storybooks. It's a book titled "Why do Sunflowers Love the Sun?" it's about a little girl called Viveka who runs to the sunflower field and paints sunflowers in the morning, comes back home. In the evening, when she compares her painting with the sunflowers outside she's " Oh my God, I've got this terribly wrong!" She does this for three, four days and every day in the evening she realizes, how is she getting the direction of the sunflowers wrong every single time? But what that story does is it actually talks about, without talking about it, talks about data collection, observation, critical thinking, and how, when you put all of these things together, you can probably understand a phenomenon that's actually happening in nature. That's really how, a little story can help foster a STEM mindset. That's my second favorite story for today only. The last one that I totally love-- this is a story that actually the team shared with me. It's absolutely brilliant, Alan, because it's not a story by any publisher. It's a story that's written and illustrated by the community. It's a story that's called 'What Will Today Bring?". It's a story that the author wrote because of the experiences that the author had in her family and the traumatic situations that, sometimes happen, whether it's war, it's displacement, it's natural disasters. That was a trigger for this author to write the story in her personal voice. And augmented by illustrating the stories, interpreting the story in their own way. It's really a story of hope. But the way the story has been written and illustrated, it can be interpreted in many different ways. And if it's okay, I'm just going to read one page of the story. " What will today bring? Something is burning in my eyelids. I opened my eyes and look around. Where am I? Sea, sun and hot sun. Is it a beach? What is all that noise? How did I get here? Where are mommy and daddy? Where is hope?" So I'll just leave you with that for now. But, it's really a very beautiful story. [00:19:59] Alan Levine: I have to say, I just enjoy your enthusiasm and I'm so glad that you read a story. I loved your sunflower story because I worked on a project with a librarian in the Ukraine on their resilience through the war. One time I noticed she had a sunflower in the background. I have tall sunflowers and we started talking about sunflowers. Now we send pictures back and forth. They're just such a symbol of hope and strength and resilience. So I'm gonna I'm gonna look for all the stories. But let's get back to some of the questions. Translation and Language Diversity --- [00:20:31] Alan Levine: What kinds of stories or what stories have had the most translations done? Cause I know when I go to the site, I look through and it's great to see the, so many, like I might scroll through a list of maybe five or 10, but do some stories have hundreds or large numbers of translation? [00:20:48] Purvi Shah: Many stories have hundreds of translations. I think choosing a book to translate is a very personal experience. Sometimes it's driven by just that it's a great story I want to translate. Sometimes it's I'm going to use the storybook in the classroom for this particular reason and so I want to translate. So the reasons to translate are many, but some of the books that have got the most translations, like this one book, which is Rani's First Day at School. I think every teacher uses it in grade one, to make the children feel a little bit more comfortable. That particular book has been translated in 138 languages, but there are 300 versions, which means that there could be two translations in Hindi as well. And this often happens on the platform because, dialects vary. So while, I might have a translation in Hindi, it's spoken in a certain way in one particular city and just 200 kilometers down, it might be spoken in a little different way. So the platform sort of transfers that agency to the user to make variations, even if a language may be existing and translated already on the platform. So that's really great. But I think there is another book called "Angry Akku" which is really a fantastic book. It hasn't been translated as many times as Rani's First Day at School. But I think it's been translated about in 70 languages. It's been used in so many different ways. We have Badan Bahasa, which is our partner along with the ministry of education in Indonesia that has translated the book in Badan Bahasa Indonesia and shipped it to island community. So they've downloaded the book, printed it and shipped it. We know that book is being used by Worldreader in their app to teach children about emotions. Again, and the book has been translated in Nepal. We recently used that book in a project in a very in one part of the state in Maharashtra where gender is a big issue and gender rights is a big issue. And that book was used as part of a program there. And it was so amazing to see a little girl, share her emotions after reading that book on two aspects. One that it's okay to be it's an emotion and everyone can have that emotion, but more importantly, she just blurted out saying, I wish my dad and I could talk about our emotions because it's it was always taught that the child will share the emotions with only the mother. But in this book, it's the father that's cooking for the child, the father that's helping the child navigate emotions. Yeah so the, translation is one part of the story, but how that story and how that translation gets used with the children is a whole different story. How to Get Involved with StoryWeaver --- [00:23:35] Alan Levine: So just so I understand, combing through the stacks of StoryWeaver and I find a story that is not available in my language. And then, so how do I go about, helping get it translated? [00:23:46] Purvi Shah: So one is. There are two aspects to this problem. One is you may not find the language, like our first user couldn't find that Khmer language. So if you can't find your language at all, you please write to us at our IDs and we will help onboard the language. If you, if the language is already enabled but you can't find it translated, there are many which ways that, we could work together. One is, you could translate it if you're good with the language or if you have a community around you that's Fairly well worth with the language. If not, you could again, write into us and we could make the appeal out as well, because we do have a large stack of translators or better translators across languages that do jump in when we say, Hey, here's a story that needs to be translated and children need this story in this language. So yes, we always, community is a big thing for us. [00:24:36] Alan Levine: That that must be a fun work to do. Oh, just a oddball question. Cause I've always been fascinated when I go to the site and I see the octopus and like you said, the art is very inviting, but for some reason the octopus always captures my attention. Is there a story behind the octopus? Oh, [00:24:54] Purvi Shah: Oh gosh. So the story is that when we were, every few years we do Go back and revisit the user interface, we revisit what is it that we can do different, what is needed for the site. So this version of the octopus that you see came about, I think, in 2018 or 2019, where we said that, if we had to help our users find that One story that's right for us, for them, what is it that we need to do? So that was a brief to the designer, right? And so that came up with this idea is that can we, it's what we call a story finder, can we help you find a story today? And I think her belief was that StoryWeaver is such a multifaceted. So she found the octopus with the eight hands really appealing. And that's, that's how that banner came about. But really the motivation behind that entire design element was that How can we help you find the right story for you? [00:25:55] Alan Levine: that's so beautiful. Thank you for that. And I noticed that on the main menu, there's a create a option or a button. What can I create there if I click it? [00:26:05] Purvi Shah: Any story that you want, Alan, any story that you can find on StoryWeaver, that's what hundreds of teachers and creators have done. But yeah, so you, so there are two ways that you can create stories on the platform. One is that we have a bank of 80, 000 open licensed images on the platform. So if you have a story to tell, but you don't have the illustrations, then feel free to use any of those 80, 000 images to create your own story. You could also upload your own images. In the case of the Hope story that I read out, we had an author who had written a story and she collaborated with an illustrator who. So I created those illustrations specifically for the story and they uploaded that story together. So that's another way to do it. Yeah, so you could, it's very simple. You just go to create, figure out what you want to say, open the image library, pick your images, write your story, and hit publish. And the minute you hit publish, within a few seconds, you'll find the story on the platform. That's the beauty of StoryWeaver. [00:27:06] Alan Levine: Oh, that is a beauty. And have ones come in that kind of like, Oh my gosh, "this is like amazing!" Do some , fly around the office and everybody stops and say, you got to look at this. [00:27:18] Purvi Shah: Yeah, like this story that I just read out today was one of those stories very early on in StoryWeaver's journey. There was one story on mangoes. I don't quite recollect the title, but it was an author who brilliantly remixed illustrations on the platform-- and told a whole new story which really caught our attention so much that we actually commissioned illustrations for that story because it was such a lovely story and deserved its very own illustrations. And there was another publisher who actually became interested in the story as well. Yes, all sorts of things have happened. [00:27:52] Alan Levine: I think we've talked about this, but what are some other ways that people who get really inspired, how can they get involved or contribute to StoryWeaver? [00:28:00] Purvi Shah: I think we've talked about it throughout our conversation. If you have children around you, of course, you can, choose a story, read it out to them. The good thing about the platform is that even if you are in internet dark areas, you could always save the story in your offline library. And then use it forever without internet with the StoryWeaver experience. There's a lot of functionality built into the platform. I do want to talk about one or two ways that librarians and teachers have used the platform because it could ignite some ideas for your listeners as well. In Mexico, for example, we had the privilege to visit this library. library that had taken stories from the platform, the images from that story and created a whole language acquisition literacy program. So you had this several weeks program around this one book called " Chintu and his Dog. " I remember seeing this plastered all around the classroom. And you had Match the Column, you had Fill in the Plans, you had worksheets being sent to the kids, and finally the book being read in their mother tongue, which was tricky. And then from tricky to Spanish as well. If you're creative about how you want to use the assets, the tools and the functionalities on the platform, like this particular use case, we didn't do anything except tell them here is StoryWeaver and here's what you can do. They ended up creating this whole program all by themselves. And then this other teacher here in India in West Bengal, they were translating books in Kora, which is a only a spoken tribal language. They used the state script to translate the language. After translating many books, he said, you know what, I want to create my own storybook in Kora with words in Kora that are dying. For example Alan, like even if you come here in Bangalore or in India, instead of saying "namaste", it's now getting replaced by "good morning" or "hello, how are you?" Even the most regular greetings are over a period of time getting replaced and then that becomes a norm, right? So children end up saying "good morning." But except saying, Namaste which should have been the case, right? He actually said in Kora, there are some words that are completely being used by the the mainstream language. So he created a bilingual book to say what was the original word for those commonly used objects. That was quite fantastic. [00:30:22] Alan Levine: And that there's so many places and languages you could do that. What a brilliant idea You've given us a lot of time. Future Milestones and Conclusion --- [00:30:29] Alan Levine: We talked about numbers and milestones for StoryWeaver. Is the growth almost hard to track? [00:30:35] Purvi Shah: I think it's quite fascinating because there was a time when we benchmarked and said, if we get to a hundred languages that's it. Our work really is done. And we reached a hundred languages very quickly, in the first three years of StoryWeaver, if I'm not mistaken. We reached a hundred languages and then we reached 300 languages. And I remember telling Amna, Yeah, I don't think we are going to see more spike in languages now, it's 300, but today there are 370. So I think now we are going back and saying we'll be ambitious for the breadth of languages, but we also want to be ambitious with the depth of stories that we have in each language because some languages have fewer stories. How can we work with the communities to increase the depth of languages? So that could be a potential future milestone. . We were just discussing this in office the other day that it's so interesting that while the platform has 370 languages and that's a milestone in itself, but the real milestone is that for that one child reading the first book in their mother tongue is really the milestone. We hit that milestone almost every day because every day a child is discovering a book in their mother tongue for the first time. That milestone will never get old, I think. And yeah, some of the other sort of milestones have been, yeah, I think there are two other milestones where. Just not being a platform where we allow for stories, but say, when we created this whole different platform, the white label StoryWeaver for Room to Read in Indonesia and that helped kickstart their own platform called Literacy Cloud. That was a pretty important milestone because whatever we have learned, we could empower other organizations. to build off our investments, our learning, in countries that they work with. And very recently milestone was when we launched our Foundational Literacy Program. As you know, Alan, everything on the platform is open to use, free to use. We have two state governments in India who really liked the program and the resources that we had curated out as part of the program. They actually printed all the books that were part of the program and distributed it to every single school in the state. And to give you an example, like in Chhattisgarh, millions of storybooks went to every school and I think it's about thirty or forty thousand schools in the state. Every school now has a printed pack of the Foundation Literacy books distributed under government funding. The government had funds allocated to use for these schools and they chose to invest it in high quality children's literature, which would have never happened had it not been for the power of open, for the power of technology, for the power of platforms. I think that's a significant milestone as well. [00:33:24] Alan Levine: That's excellent. And I'll ask what's coming down the road or in the future, is there something exciting or maybe you can hint at? What's in the future for StoryWeaver? [00:33:33] Purvi Shah: Absolutely, more of what we do because we've clearly not reached every child yet. Like I mentioned earlier, more depth within each language. I think that's something that we are committed to and we want to work towards. We've also realized that the secret sauce of StoryWeaver is the community. We are thinking through that in the next phase of StoryWeaver. How can we work with all these different communities, all these different stakeholders, and how can all of them, while they are using the platform in different ways, is there a way that we can get these communities to interact on the platform for the mission of ensuring that every child has a book in her mother tongue? [00:34:13] Alan Levine: Oh my gosh I am just overwhelmed, Purvi, because everything that, that you described embodies everything about openness that, that is good and gives it this hope. And I just get the sense that it's the mission that's infused into everybody who's involved there. I just want to congratulate you. The award. It's just an award, but it's recognition and we think it's very important. I will be doing everything I can to make sure more people that I'm in contact really know about StoryWeaver. I just want to say Namaste and thank you again for your time. Your joy in this work is evident. [00:34:49] Purvi Shah: Thank you so much, Alan. And I want to do a big shout out to the entire team of Pratham Books and StoryWeaver, because honestly, for all the past and the present members of our team, they brought a piece of themselves every day to make what Pratham Books and StoryWeaver are today. [00:35:04] Alan Levine: This is so fantastic. And I want to thank anybody and everybody who's listening for joining us for this episode of O E Global Voices. . My heart is moving from what Purvi has shared. I think you should go and spend some good time investigating StoryWeaver. Just as a reminder, this is very relevant. In a week, we're going to be announcing the next round of prize winners who we're going to bring to you again, around the world, advances and interesting projects and people who are involved in open education and discovering many stories and many new languages as Purvi has described that we find this with the people that we come in contact with. I'm so glad that we've been able to meet like this. Each episode of our podcast, I pick a different music track and I select it from the Free Music Archive. I found a track called Fairy Tale Story by Serge Quadro, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non- Commercial license. You'll find this episode at our site voices dot oeglobal dot org. We also have follow up conversation with our guests or anybody in our OEG Connect community. If you're listening now and you want to share your work or suggest a future guest please let us know. You'll find out how to contact us, but I just can't urge anybody listening right now just to drop what they're doing and go spend some time with StoryWeaver. It's an inspirational project and give our thanks to everybody there who are doing this important work. [00:36:32] Purvi Shah: Thank you, Alan, and all the very best to everyone who's on the shortlist for next week's award.