Mac Slocum's Page

Hi Mac,

My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham, MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. Since you are in the 'e-learning and online teaching' group, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2009, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win a competition for startup funding on ideablob.com. You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975 . We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com

hi Mac! I started out as a tenure-track professor in the Classics department at University of Oklahoma, couldn't stand it (ugh, pretentious, hypocritical, just wrong wrong wrong for me), so I quit and went to work for Information Technology at OU to promote web use among the faculty. That was pretty useless, too, because faculty are so reluctant to try new things, but it was GREAT for me personally, because I learned a ton about computing. Then I took a job (still at OU) teaching fully online courses in a pilot program through the Dean's office. That was in 2002, and I've been teaching fully online ever since. I love it!!! :-)

You have some really fun stuff at your blog - neat!!! I subscribed! I always have journalism students in my classes (big journalism school here at Univ. of Oklahoma), and it's nice to be able to share good web stuff with them. :-)

Hi Mac, I would like to invite you to join College 2.0,
http://college2.ning.com/, an online community for Web 2.0 and online learning for Higher Education