Dear Donors, welcome! kindly join us in celebrating the completion of phase 1 of the HBL project that you made possible.
All of us at HBL have much to be proud of.
HBL is possibly the biggest community created collection of materials and tools for early Cantonese learning. Keeping the project open source and copyright free under a CC 4.0 license has become the gold standard that is now seriously considered by new initiatives in academia and publishing. Our use of written Cantonese is now being followed by more and more authors.
Automation that we built allowed us to write, illustrate, voice record and layout an average of 2 new titles a week. This output is faster than conventional publication methods by many multiples. In addition, we build the automation to generate interactive H5P videos, TPR Lesson generation and CEFR based conversational practice. Remarkably all of this was achieved by one full time colleague and the founders, working over 2 years with the very generous help of volunteers.
The project, funded by the founders, sales of books and donations, demonstrated that with the right design and clear-headed execution, a lot can be done with very little outlay.
We demonstrated a new way of viable community based open-source publishing that significantly lowered the entry barrier and included the neediest.
As a result, we now have a diverse selection of stories, lessons, videos and learning materials on our website. Covid-19 restrictions helped us accelerate this process as exceptionally talented volunteers made themselves available for much longer.
Today, to our delight, our faster, inclusive and more modern method of publishing has been upended. Large Language model (LLM) based Artificial Intelligence has exploded on the scene and advancing at a dizzying pace. This is a hugely democratizing moment. Education in general and early Language learning in particular is being reimagined as you read this. An AI based personal tutor is a very achievable reality in the near term. For those who want to learn, high quality education will no longer be the privilege of the entitled few.
All of this at a fraction of the cost and exponentially wider scope than what we achieved! We are overjoyed that the barriers to entry into publishing that we had lowered, AI is completely smashing. Now, anyone with a computer and imagination can generate content in many forms. As a matter of fact, customised content can be generated on demand. The possibilities are endless.
Ending on this high note, I am now taking a break and passing the baton to the new wave of content creators. HBL was a terrific experience and privilege for me and I look forward to upcoming initiatives that propel open-source Cantonese learning to higher planes.
https://hambaanglaang.hk/the-end-of-the-beginning/ Please visit the blog for more !
Thank you,
Viveik (on behalf of the HBL team)