Competitions can help create understanding and public awareness

[Daniel Bassill]

This is a graphic created by Jawon Koo, an intern from IIT who has been with Cabrini Connections Tutor/Mentor Connection for about 3 weeks. It's part of an animation, converting a T/MC article into another format that we hope will create greater understanding, and thus more response. Jawon is working with another intern, Eunsoo Lee. In a couple of days there should be a new version of this to review.

The purpose of the blogs, web site, and forum is to share ideas, and to build greater public awareness, so that tutor/mentor programs in Chicago and around the country are more consistently supported by volunteers, donors, media, etc.

Creating public awareness is difficult. Yet if we're creative about it, we have some opportunities.

What if teams of students from universities and high schools all over the world were each converting one of the T/MC essays into an animation, and were submitting their work to this forum, where we could devote a group space to showing how each team has interpreted our idea? We could create a panel of judges, and recognize one project as a national, or international champion. All of the projects would be available to any user, to help them educate leaders in their own community, to provide more consistent support to their own youth.

Faculty from several universities are on this forum. What do you think? Could you recruit teams of students from design and art and journalism schools to do projects like our interns have been doing? It would be a great teaching and learning opportunity, as well as a way to create low-cost public visibility for the work we're all doing.

[Daniel Bassill]

Here is a competition in which students create maps.It's called the Bizarre Map Challenge. This illustrates another creative way to encourage learning, and to build public attention.

[Daniel Bassill]

Take a look at the Competitions page on the Ashoka web site. Good idea.

[Daniel Bassill]

Here is an link to an organization in Europe that sponsors an annual poster contest. This illustrates the idea I'm suggesting.

This is an annual contest, confronting seven of the critical issues affecting today’s world.

Seven charities each provide a brief on a global issue. Anyone who wishes can enter one or more posters on any topic that inspires them. The best 30 responses to each brief – as selected by our jury – are collected in a catalogue and exhibited around the world. All the posters entered are supplied to the charities for them to use as potential communication tools through our free database. There is no ‘winner’, unless you count the charities and their message.

[Daniel Bassill]

I'm not sure Ning is as good a "meeting" place as Google Groups or something other like that might be. You can upload files in any of the comment sections, by clicking on the icon to the right of the image icon. However, there is not a central place to search for the files you upload.

In the groups section I point people to other web sites, such as the conference, where we host information so that I can point to the same info from many locations. We still don't have many people using "shared space" for collaboration. Thus, the Ning may evolved into something better as habits change.

[Deanna Wilkinson]

I've been struggling with setting up a NING site for my YVPAB group. It seems like you do file sharing through blog posts. Is that how it works? I'd like to post meeting minutes, group brainstorming results, agendas, programs, newsletters. I would appreciate any advice you may have for connecting our work.