changing our minds

Hi,

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

Thanks for making the Dewey forum! I am learning about Dewey in my Educational Foundations course, and I have to do an assignment based on changing the way we fund public schools.
Where can I find out more about urban education initiatives

Hi Skip. I left a message for you on your blog. I'm working in inner city Chicago on two levels. First is a direct service tutor/mentor program called Cabrini Connections, http://www.cabriniconnections.net

Second is an intermediary and leadership role, called the Tutor/Mentor Connection, which focus on helping every high poverty neighborhood have a range of volunteer-based tutoring/mentoring programs similar to Cabrini Connections. That site is http://www.tutormentorconnection.org

I host a conference in May and November and hope you'll connect your network to us via that event. http://www.tutormentorconference.org

Hi Skip. The OLPC initiative is exciting. Do you know much about Intel's efforts to get small, smart computers into kids hands? I don't know much.

Hi Skip,

Thanks for leaving me a note. It sounds like you're at an interesting point in your life. Yes, technology for adult education is definitely a growing field, and not too different from tech for K12.

I've been involved in some workplace basic skills projects, teaching basic skills at a shipyard, various electronics plants, etc. It's always fun to go into the workplace and see what other people do for a living.

thanks for the invite, Skip. Nice page! I'm impressed to see a link to TakingITglobal. I've seen Michael Furdyk present twice in AU. Real inspiring stuff. Feel free to join me @ http://www.mylearningspace.org

Skip,

I feel honoured to meet you and "pick" your blog and brain. You have so much great and stimulating stuff here. I'll have a few moments to do so this weekend and will reply (busy now organizing a teachers summer camp, yikes!).

I love the title of your blog...perfect and it matters so much.

David

I worked with one of my students to produce a video for the Goldman Sachs contest on desertification and environmental impacts of American consumerism. I think it is amazing - a model of what kids can do with digital video using their own native cultures as my friend and inspiration, Howard Rheingold might say. It is posted on Motionbox.com under Youth Filmmaking and is called The Hidden Cost of Cashmere

Hey Skip,

Great blog I am rss feeding it to my nung site for our staff.