[Reader-list] Wanted: Facilitator for a project on study circles and education

[Chandni Parekh]

From: wisdomdobe
Date: Mon, Feb 15, 2010
Subject: study circles and education

 The following is a pilot project in Tibet to apply study circles to
education. This group is looking for a facilitator with experience in using
the study circles method or peer-to-peer learning.
Their note is below and you can respond directly to
alan at nighttrainconsulting.com <alan%40nighttrainconsulting.com> by February
14th.

>From Alan Webb and Jeff Bordogna:
This is a call to professional facilitators with an interest in education,
who would like to discuss what role the facilitation community could have in
creating new opportunities for educators and students. In particular, what
new market opportunities are created in the education sector for
professional facilitators by the explosion of free, high-quality educational
materials on the web (MIT OpenCourseWare, iTunesU, Open University, etc.)?
For the especially interested, we are also looking for collaborators who
want to participate in grant submissions with us.

There is a lot of conversation right now about how digital tools and
resources will transform education, and we at the Third Arena project know
that technology is only part of the solution. Digital educational resources
on their own do not make a classroom. Face-to-face, human interaction, and
personal development make up the other, bigger part of the equation. We all
know this intuitively; otherwise, why else does anyone go to college, when
you could just buy books and read them on your own?

In a world where students of all ages can now learn from the best
subject-matter experts, for free, from high-quality lectures and multimedia
online, the Third Arena project promotes the vision that communities should
be able to organically organize face-to-face conversations around those
resources to enhance and socially support each other. We are piloting this
approach in Tibet, and we are also in the early stages of building a
toolkit, modeled after my.barackobama.com, to allow facilitators, community
leaders, retired teachers, librarians, parents, even corporations, to
organize study circles around these resources in order to get the same
social and economic benefits you would get from enrolling in a University
(e.g. the social reinforcement of your peers, movie ticket / health
insurance discounts, market signaling to an employer). We would like the
feedback of your community on both our model, and on ways to improve our
approach. For more details, please see our submission to the recent
"Reimaging Learning" grant competition, by the MacArthur Foundation,
National Lab Day, Duke, and others (
http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=556), or visit our
website at www.ThirdArena.com <http://www.thirdarena.com/>.

We welcome feedback from your community about this topic and would
especially appreciate hearing from anyone who is interesting in
collaborating on our current grant submissions!

Thanks!"
Alan and Jeff

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