Steli Efti :: Blog

Now we wouldn't be able to call us "education revolutionaries" if we'd not spread the word about this:

Students in Italy are protesting against huge education budget cuts - 1.5 billion Euro (that's about 1.9 billion US-Dollars).

Silvio Berlusconi's reaction to the students protests? He announced that any further protests will be broken up with police force.

You can see pictures and read more about the protests in Jared Katz's article, which has been featured by the Wall Street Journal & Newsweek online.

And I'm just gonna quote this one from freestate.tv:

"Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga has offered a solution to
the Italian government in dealing with widespread demonstrations by
students and teachers over a cut in state funding of education - use
agent provocateurs to start riots and then have the police “beat the
shit out of the protesters”."

Do you think students protesting because of budget cuts should be treated like that? That's more like something I'd expect from a conspiracy movie, quiet frankly...

It just shows that we need to find new ways to educate, teach, learn and share knowledge. Because if we leave it up to the government, this is what we'll get.

Be well,

Ramin

At Supercool School we strongly believe not just in the power of education, but also in the importance of business.

If you look at the current education system all over the world, it's pretty clear that education should NOT be laid in the government hands. Because they are really not doing a good job at all.

Business and education should go hand in hand, because let's face it: that's one of the main purposes of school. To prepare you for making a living later on. But currently, what school does is basically churning out "factory workers", in a time when the demand for factory workers is diminishing rapidly.

Last week I talked with Nick Stamoulis from Brick Marketing. Nick is also in the business of education - educating people to succeed online.

And he very much believes in the power of learning, developing your skills and wrote about Supercool School on the Social Marketing Journal. If you are interested in online marketing, then you find a whole library of knowledge waiting there for you, that ties in perfectly with the online marketing classes at Supercool school.

Want to make your websites more search engine-friendly? Check out the Search Engine Journal. Or how about Email marketing? I found a guerrilla online publicity strategy that I'll employ to get the word out about Supercool School. Local advertising? I found the strategy to get a blog featured on national media really interesting. And the Brick Marketing guys shared a really interesting tip how you can even bid on highly competitive terms for lower prices than the competition.

If you're an information junky like me, there is some dangerous stuff in there, because with all the info he shares, you can really dig deep. That's why I just LOVE the Supercool Classes, because interacting in a class with others is really the best way to get clarity and counter information overload.

Talk soon,

Ramin

PS:I know some there are some education fanatics like us out there, but they view business differently. They often think that business and academics can't join together, and yes, there definitely is a big divide between schools and coorporations. But I think that's part of the problem - because if entrepreneurs and educators unite, that's a very mighty force for the good of the world. Don't you think so?

Dear supercool underdogs, web socialists and hidden champions!

We are searching for Developers who would like to do an "Internship" at Supercool School.

Supercool School is a highly purpose-driven
startup that was founded by a team of underdogs from Europe and India
to change the world using the amazing powers of learning.

We  are bulding the first demand-based online learning marketplace that empowers people to request
classes, join them as students or teach them using a simple webcam. Launching our alpha version on Facebook five months ago, Supercool School has attracted over 3.000
users that requested over 300 classes ranging from "How to start a business in
China" to "Advanced Java" and "Thai Soup Recipes". We're going to have our
global website launch in January 2009 and are already involved in some super secret projects with well known global organizations.

We are driven by our believe in the power of learning. We believe that education is the
answer to all the challenges that we face today. And even though we
don't have all the solutions yet, we believe that they can be found in
the hearts and minds of the people. So empowering them to learn and to
develop their true potential means empowering the world to become all
it can be: a better place for all of us.

We don't care for your degree, your age or your nationality ...

BUT that you're inspired and committed to accomplish great things with us.

Essential hard skills are:

- Experience with Windows and Linux development environments


- Basic knowledge of web based database driven applications


- Knowledge of especially Ruby on Rails + HTML, Javascript, CSS and SQL

Essential soft skills are:

- Purpose driven personality


- Constructive team player


- Independent, enduring and self initiative personality

Nice to haves:

- Project Experience


- Every language is a plus (especially: Greek, German, Russian, Hindi)

Responsibility:

- Modular feature and product development

Frame:

- You can start immediately


- You can work from home or in the office


- The office is in downtown San Francisco

We offer:

- A bad ass business model to change society


- An international team


- No hierarchy


- A T-Shirt


- Future full time employee in any business field + stock options


- Work with state of the art technologies (VOIP, video stream, API, Widget, Ruby, etc.)


- A lot off responsibility and challenges


- A bright future

Application:

- Send an Email with the subject "supercool internship" to bjoern@supercoolschool.com

- Attach a CV + any examples of your work

- Describe how you fullfill our expectiations stated above

- Tell us very briefly about yourself (1. What inspires you? 2. What are your goals? 3. Why are you different?)



Further Procedure:



1. You will receive an answer + quick feedback in 2-3 days

2. 30 min general Interview on skype (1st round)

3. 30 min specific Interview with extended supercool circle on skype (2nd round)

4. Final decision will be made asap but latest until the 24th of december (We will take 3-5 People)



Now that you know a bit about us, we would love to hear from you! Just contact me at bjoern@supercoolschool.com



supercool vibes to all of you,



Bjoern Lasse Herrmann

Dear supercool friends,

my name is Bjoern Lasse Herrmann. I am another German dude fighting for a better "education for the future". In the coming weeks I will join Steli and Ramin posting on the supercool blog and keep you up to date with everything around and beyond supercool school. Also I will write about learning and education in general. I am looking forward for a fruitful discussion.

Science Tower, Moscow 07

I was fascinated of supercool way from the beginning. I am by heart a passionate learner and have always been a radical in the "learning institutions".

The learning of the "like minded" and the "democratization of learning" are two missions supercool school pursues. I can feel how Supercool School will change the institutional education as we know it today. I believe everybody is experiencing the intense philosophical discussions about education based on very different understandings of the definition of education and learning. This discussion shows me that the structural and mental change is under way. To some of us intuitively some traditional goals of education as the replication of "god given knowledge" (Bible ;-)), the process of social adjustment (Francis Bacon) or the guarantee of conformity among soldiers (Prussia/Japan) appear to as a dangerous atavism that is still very present in our education systems and our mindset. But the evolution of our education institutions left an aera that has been dominated by strong hierarchies (at least in the Western World) and is now heading towards something new. I believe supercool school will one driver of this supercool change for a better and more democratic learning!

Here are the posts of our amazing virtual speakers in this years EduBlogger Even:

• Vicki Davis aka CoolCatTeacher on Throw Down the Gauntlet: Break the Chains of Bad Practice
  
  



• Jeff Utecht on The Wacky Ways of the Wiki



• Jonatan Castano Munoz on The contradiction: Digital learning style & old teaching methodologies



• Dr. Daniel J. Guhr on Web 2.0 and knowledge acquisition



• Alfred Thompson on Going where the students are



• Mark Alier on Irresponsible teaching with ICT?



• Gabriel Kent on Shifting Focus in Education from the Answers to the Questions



• Cynthia Jimes on Collaborative Creation of Educational Materials: Lessons from the Field



• Alfonso Dehesa on Educating Creativity



• Alberto Elisavetsky on Brainstorming about how to use e learning to reduce digital gap in Latin America



• Alexa Joyce on Helping Kids become researchers



• Peter Bihr on Edublogs: Unite!

Just wanted to send out a big THANK YOU to all of our amazing speakers and participants!

You made this event very special with your fantastic posts and the great discussions. YOU GUYZ ROCK!!!!

There are so many passionate people out there who are devoted to improve the future of education and change the world to the better and bringing some of you together for one day, was a special honor for us!

Another big THANK YOU goes out to Max, who helped us organize this years EduBlogger Event08.


Without him this event wouldn't have been possible.

Much power to you!

Steli Efti

EXTRA BONUS SPEAKER: Peter Bihr - Web Strategist

Edublogging is blogging about education - no more, no less. So let's
have a look at how we can harness the power of blogs to improve our
learning & teaching experience, shall we? Let me give a summary up
front: The two most important things I see are your network and your
tools.

First and foremost: network!By networking I don't necessarily
mean networking in a strategic
let's-meet-up-and-start-something-big-together sense, although that
might be very helpful at times. No, it's even simpler! Just look at
what's out there and connect with them. There's plenty of blogs and
blogging educators out there. Plenty of organizations. Maybe even a few
of your students.
Where to start? Have a look at Technorati. There are institutional blogs like the UNESCO Chair of E-Learning. And don't dare missing out on Vicky Davis' website, Vicki can be found online using the alias CoolCatTeacher.
If there's one person to watch in this space, it's vicki. She's
everywhere, from YouTube to Twitter and back. (More on these tools
below.) And there's a very neat project called the Open Educational Resources Map, a Google Maps-based list of organizations and players who contribute to the ever-growing world of open educational resources:

Heather Ford (blog), director of the Icommons
organization and one of the most active persons fighting for Internet
rights along Europe and America, created some months ago this Open
Education Map that seems to be a very interesting project.

Everybody can contribute to this map, it's a global collaborative
effort.
Once you start looking around, you'll find plenty of interesting stuff
out there. Get to know the people who make it. If you get a chance, say
hi. Start simple: For example by writing a comment on their blog.
Have you networked your students yet? Says CoolCatTeacher Vicki Davis:

I find it ironic that pet networking would probably have a higher success rate than educational networking, and yet, Classroom 2.0 has almost 11,000 members, and I actually meet people on there.

Know your tools (and experiment)!
Once you know who's out there, it's time to look at your own stuff.
What tools do you work with? If they get the job done well, then all is
good. No need to read any further.
Still with us? Then maybe not all is quite perfect yet and you're ready
to take a few new tools for a spin? Again, don't be afraid of new
stuff. With a bit of commons sense you won't hurt anybody, and nobody
gets everything right the first time they try. Be prepared for a mishap
or two, and don't get discouraged. (Who said being a teacher means not
learning any more?) There are plenty of tools out there that may make
your life easier, and help you get your message across.
Again, let's have a look at the Cool Cat Teacher - on her website
you'll find 16 links to social media tools, sharing services or other
web outlets. Just to name a few: On del.icio.us she shares links, on Flickr photos. Videos go to YouTube, small info bits on Twitter.
Then there's a whole bunch of wikis she contributes to, a number of
blogs, an event calendar. There's even more.
The point is not to be on each and every service, or to drink all the
Kool Aid: It's to think about what makes sense, and then just doing it.
If you're facing problems, questions, obstacles, worry not: "When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
Be prepared to experiment a bit, and just ask your friends, colleagues,
or online acquaintances. Chances are they've run into similar problems
and are glad to help.

BONUS SPEAKER: Alexa Joyce - Communications & Development Manager, European Schoolnet (www.eun.org)

Many kids find learning science dull and boring - but research (for example, the Rocard report)
indicates that hands-on science, where kids "become" scientists in the
classroom through inquiry-based techniques helps overcome this
perception. By inquiry-based science education, we mean processes where
children are investigating issues that they find interesting, and even
designing their own experiments to help them verify hypotheses.
At the same time, there are two great trends colliding right now:
science is becoming more open and participative (the UK's Gardenwatch
for the public schools
is a great example), while the the technical tools for carrying out
scientific work are getting cheaper and cheaper (for example, MIT's Scratch and Xplora's web experiment). Open source software, freeware and free online services, and open content for remixing
are all contributing to this, along with the arrival of cheap
electronic sensors and remote-controlled laboratory tools. These trends
can only help in getting inquiry-based learning into schools, and help
to create the next generation of scientists.
Here are some examples of interesting "cool tools" for science
education.

a)
Climateprediction.net is
"the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in
the 21st century." It's a downloadable client based on BOINC, the same framework that was used to build the famous SETI@home
tool. It's a British project from the University of Oxford. Schools can
download the client, and run the global climate model. There are
teaching resources for all kinds of levels a available and a discussion
forum for school participants. The visualisation tools are great!

b) Concord consortium probeware

Concord provides a wide range of exciting science methodologies and projects. Their probeware
tools combine low cost sensors with analytical software, so that
students can run experiments, and track their results in real time.
Even a basic temperature probe can be used to run a huge variety of experiments and investigations,
on thermal conductivity of skin, thermodynamics and more. Once kids get
the hang of the tool, they can come up with their own ideas to
investigate.

c) Sustain.no
On this Norwegian site, teachers and students can join running
experiments that other schools are involved in. Together, schools can
collect and share data, and compare their results. There are lots of
different projects available to join. An interesting one is Global POP. 31 schools so far collected data on the level of environmental pollutants in fish.

These are just a few examples of tools that combine technology with
science to make the learning process more authentic and motivating.
What other tools are out there that can help kids get more enthusiastic
about science, and play the role of researcher while in the classroom?

In case you're wondering: the education revolution has gone
underground. We're currently working overtime in Triple-S mode (Triple
S stands for Super-Secret-Stuff) to get things going, don't be fooled
by the quietness of this blog in recent weeks (it's the calm before the
storm - just kidding, we'll be posting here more often soon).

So we decided to go on twitter, because it's easier to tweet than to blog, and we can squeeze that into our busy schedule: http://www.twitter.com/supercoolschool

Every single one of you is extremely important to us and the open
education movement, and we found that twitter is a better way to stay
in contact and interact with you currently.

Also, check out upcoming Supercool School classes (but remember to log into your facebook account first).

Here's our twitter link again, click it and follow us so we can stay in touch: http://www.twitter.com/supercoolschool

Yes, it's true, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian Prime Minister join the education revolution. See what PM Kevin Rudd said:

"An education revolution is our response, investing in the quantity of
money we put into the education system, the quality of that investment." (Source)

Now, should be noted that they might mean different things then we mean when we talk about an education revolution.

No matter what you think of Rupert Murdoch - he's a "big picture guy", and he says some things that we at Supercool School have been vocal about for some time already. For example - that we are still stuck with a 19th century education system in the 21st century.

Maybe we should recruit Rupert for SCS? (Na, wouldn't work... that guy has a different vibe) ;-)

Something more serious... experts warn that some of the steepest price increases in college tuitions might be just around the corner - pushing education yet further out of reach for many. Government always likes to cut the edu-budget. That's just another reason to take things in our own hands.

(I just have a friend visiting from Guinea. Education is basically being run by NGOs from what she told me, because the politicians are busy "mange l'argent" (eating money). But internet connectivity is really good in Konakry and lots of young people start to get into IT. That might be a good sign - maybe Africa will soon have it's own "Bangalore" success stories).

Ramin

Now we wouldn't be able to call us "education revolutionaries" if we'd not spread the word about this:

Students in Italy are protesting against huge education budget cuts - 1.5 billion Euro (that's about 1.9 billion US-Dollars).

Silvio Berlusconi's reaction to the students protests? He announced that any further protests will be broken up with police force.

You can see pictures and read more about the protests in Jared Katz's article, which has been featured by the Wall Street Journal & Newsweek online.

And I'm just gonna quote this one from freestate.tv:

"Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga has offered a solution to
the Italian government in dealing with widespread demonstrations by
students and teachers over a cut in state funding of education - use
agent provocateurs to start riots and then have the police “beat the
shit out of the protesters”."

Do you think students protesting because of budget cuts should be treated like that? That's more like something I'd expect from a conspiracy movie, quiet frankly...

It just shows that we need to find new ways to educate, teach, learn and share knowledge. Because if we leave it up to the government, this is what we'll get.

Be well,

Ramin