User:H0riz0n/tasks/Eric and Judy


 * from		Michael Trout 
 * to            Eric Klopfer , jperry@mit.edu
 * cc		Woodie Flowers 
 * date		Jun 3, 2007 7:56 PM
 * subject	Teacher Education Program and MIT Outreach Database (MOD)

Hi Eric and Judy,

Hope all's well. I just wanted to touch base and explore yet another opportunity for collaboration. Judy, I look forward to making your acquaintance. Since chatting last Eric, we now have added six professional grant writer on our team, as a group they have secured over $15m in funding,. A couple have already secured NFS funding. Our software developers in India and Israeli have provided us with our high-level design docs for oss Tool VLC Wikitube and our Community portal EDUITu. And we have started to secure Indian governmental support. We have found significant NFS funding opportunities for us, as well as others, and I want to explore ways of involving MOD and MIT Teacher Education Program in our project development stage and not after the fact -- a notable MIT professor once said: "If I build it you wont come, if WE build it you are already there." We need MIT on board in the development stage and not after the fact.

Nonprofit EDUIT, Inc and TEP/MOD are a natural fit. TEP goal is for undergraduates to become the science and math teachers of tomorrow. " Our goal, among others,  is to become the math and science platform of tomorrow. Outreach must in some way reach outwards toward the external community"-- EDUIT is doing just that, by focusing our solution on flattening the Asia's education system and we want to connect MIT to the process. Our solution is very simple: remove lectures and testing from education and put those components online in a seamless and objective-based video format. TEP also sees "The Need for New Teachers and New Approaches" EDUIT is proposing a new way to teach by creating a community supported lecture modules and a testing delivery system supported by open source tools. Your future teacher could be instrumental in developing objective-based math and science teaching modules. As you know Eric, we are developing our new education approach in a three phase development approach: The Tool, The Community and The Experience (outlined below). We would like to propose a TEP/MOD collaboration with EDUITu.

All we ask from MOD is that you grant EDUIT the public access to and an understanding of the outreach opportunities and offerings of MIT, and enable MIT faculty, staff, and students to see the opportunities available in EDUIT for collaboration and association for the connection and allocation of resources. You both could play a key roll in EDUITs Global Education Movement Initiative to flatten global learning.

So whats the plan? Our short term goal is to write $10m in grant funding to develop The Tool, The Community and The Experience outlined below. I imagine we will supporting a lot of what we are doing with your great research, Eric.

Below is the cover letter that will be going out to the NSF and other funders in the next couple of months to introduce our project and partners -- Eric, we "need" you on it. you are "the authority" on education and gaming. It seems silly not to have your in put and leadership. Right?

I look forward hearing back from you,

Michael -- Michael J. Trout, MFA Eduit.org "Reshaping the way education is played" Skype: eduitorg

- NSF -- grant introduction.

EDUIT, Inc., "Education Utilizing Information Technology," based in Washington, DC, intends to submit a grant proposal in response to the National Science Foundation's Creative IT Program, Number NSF 07-562 as a Pilot Project. Specifically, EDUIT's intent is as follows: Advance Area - "Innovative Educational Approaches;" Research Area - "Educational Approaches that Encourage Creativity."

Major Objectives

The main goal of this project is to create The Tool, develop The Community and provide The Experience to "flatten" global learning, beginning with the areas of mathematics and science, utilizing information technology. The project plans break down into three phases:


 * The Tool - VLC Wikitube Media Player: The Tool is a new generation of open source media player and editor capable of book-marking streaming video segments or to upload audiovisual segments to our global educational media library. The Tool is how the community will get the content used to build Objective-Based Video Modules (OBVMs).  Wikitube open source video player and editor will allow anyone to book-mark small manageable media segments that will support objective-base instructional lectures that can ultimately be linked together to form complete areas of instruction or course-ware.  Whenever, any media is played through Wikitube a user will be able to bookmark any segments and ti will automatically cache it and link/upload it to the EDUIT media archive our goal is to secure the Internet Archive and creative commons as key partners). The open-source Tool will allow the smooth overwriting of sound to make it easy to turn any video into any language and the addition of karaoke bar-style text to cater any segment to the specific needs of any lesson plan without actually altering the original data. No changes will be made to the video segments; all changes are superficially done by simply overlying filters over the original video. The open-source tool will have all the functionality of Jumpcut.com and Spinxpress.com plus a lot of additional features.


 * The Community - EDUITu.com: The Community, or EDUITu.com, is where "anyone can learn anything." It is an open source hybrid between Youtube.com, flickr.com, Cnx.org, and Spinxpress.com.  Built on an open source platform called Plone. The user management system will allow users to push OBVMs and quizzes to any web device.


 * Front-end: Beta Mathematics and Science K-12 education lectures and testing. We also plan to offer free EDUIT Certification programs to community approved course-ware that meets a EDUITu.com community standards.


 * Back-end: We will provide the tools to allow a global community, using Wikitube and EDUITu back-office features, to build Mind-Map Education Lattices (MMELs) in any field of interest and to link community OBVMs so all a front-end user has to do is watch an OBVM, take a quiz, and repeat the cycle, over and over again to learn anything as fast or as slow as they wish. OBVMs will be created from a massive multimedia library of educational video segments that were uploaded or linked by Wikitube.  Math and science OBVMs will be linked to a Math and science Mind-Map Education Lattice. MMELs will be initially developed utilizing a student-based information gathering project in conjunction with the New York Academy of Science is being planned; students will work together to create extensive MMELs on the topics of mathematics and science as an initial guide and model for other participating schools.  This process will be repeated for subsequent areas of education: History, English, Computer Science, MS Word, MS EXCEL, C++ and Mathematica to name a few etc... The proposed system is to build the architecture, back-end user tools and testing templates and education system so that anyone can build any course-ware on the EDUITu so that anyone with broadband access can "learn anything."  Communities across the globe will be able to access this massive multimedia library and learn or push user-defined data simply by utilizing the free, open source Tool -- the VLC Wikitube Media Player.


 * The Experience - K12-Online (beta): The Experience is a software platform that will link OBVMs into a dynamic, professionally built video game. The fusion of current web 2.0 technology with the power of online gaming creates a new kind of online play-learn system capable of educating a billion users in math and science (beta).  The Massive Multi-User Play-Learn System (MMPS) will allow students from around the world to interact, challenge, and compete while learning through a dynamic, visually-based gaming platform which will be accessible through any hardware device with online accessibility.  Intelligence Software will be included, which has the ability to identify high-level and extraordinary users; the Experience has the potential to bring the educational levels in the United States past the point of competitive, affecting not only the nationwide knowledge-base, but the employment and economic systems as well.

Timeline


 * The Tool - completion over a six month period
 * The Community - Completed eight months after the completion of The Tool.
 * The Experience - Completed within twenty-four months after the close of EDUITu.com beta.