This short but powerful video creates a dynamic portrait of students today - how they live, learn, and work - and in doing so it points out how the current educational system has failed to respond to these characteristics and the needs which stem from them.
The video was written and produced collaboratively by students as part of a class project and shared online using a Creative Commons license both on the class blog and YouTube. The video has been making its way around the web amassing over 800,000 YouTube views and 5,000 comments since it was posted just over a month ago.
The content of the video is moving on its own but the way that it was made and distributed shows how technology can be used to engage students and leverage both their skills and experience to create a collaborative educational exercise that results in a deeper learning experience.
Last week was Non-Profit Week on Read/Write Web, where they featured a series of articles on how non-profits are using the web framed under the question “is the Web still a windfall for Non-profits?“. Unfortunately I was away from my RSS feeds last week and I am only now catching up, so I decided to write this post-week summary of what R/WW had to offer.
- The Non-Profits Web Tool Kit contains a great list of tools available to non-profits to leverage the power of the web. Tools listed range from the well-known to the waiting to be discovered and include blogging platforms such as WordPress and volunteer finding tools such as VolunteerMatch.
- Beth Kanter shares her experiences with Web 2.0 and the non-profit sector and highlights her recent experiences at the Cambodian Bloggers Summit. It was interesting to hear about how she was able to use these tools to raise money and awareness for the event but I also appreciated her take home message of non-profits taking creative, low-risk experiments in order to test out the Web 2.0 waters.
- Richard MacManus provides a nice breakdown of how Facebook and MySpace are being used by non-profits. MySpace’s Impact service is being used primarily for political campaigns whereas Facebook’s Causes are being used primarily to raise funds for a variety of causes ranging from Global Warming to Breast Cancer. I’m curious about the root of this distinction and how much of it is due to the functionality each site offers and what role demographics and socioeconomics play, if any.