Technology Interns with Tutor/Mentor Connection

Comment

Comment by Daniel Bassill on November 25, 2009 at 9:41am

You will need to join their community (free) to see how this works. Here's the page. Crossroads of Learning

Comment by Jonathan Margaluhur on November 25, 2009 at 12:37am

Dan...can you give me the links to the crossroads of learning..i want to take a look at it.

Comment by Daniel Bassill on November 23, 2009 at 5:12pm

At last week's conference, Valdis Krebs and Jean Russell presented information about Thrivable Networks and Social Network Analysis. Valdis is donating 10 licenses to Tutor/Mentor Connection for us to use to map our network. Interns from Loyola will be meeting with me in this space, and working in our Chicago office, to figure a way to use this software.

The graphic below is an example of a network map. It shows the different people who I met at a Drop Out Summit on Nov. 4. If we were to create a map showing the different affiliations of the 150 people who attended the Nov. 19 and 20 conference, it might look like this, but much more complex.

Mapping the distribution of people who attend our events is one potential use of this software. Another way the information could be presented is in this graphic from the Crossroads of Learning web site.

They create this splatter chart based off of the different information fields people subscribing to their site fill out. Thus, the participants choose what categories they fit in. That would be a lot easier than for us to go through our database of 12,000 names and try to assign fields. However, this would only work for future use, not for creating an understanding of networking over the past 16 years.

However, there is another way to map what the T/MC does. Below is a graphic that illustrates different types of groups who we need involved in supporting tutor/mentor programs. The village graphic above is another example.

Can we create a diagram of that shows how we want to display information, or who needs to be involved in helping kids (like a blueprint that shows different contractor expertises needed to do a foundation for a building), and then create input screens that let people self-identify to show up in any of these fields?

These are some of the things I'd like our interns to be thinking about as they spend their holiday vacations in home countries. When we come back together in January, we may have some more ideas of how we might do this work.