Day 3: Learning Community through Online Conferences

Hi everyone. During today's conversation I want to show how the Tutor/Mentor Connection applies elearning and on-line collaboration strategies to achieve its goals. Face to face and eConferences are part of our strategy.

If you search Google for the words tutor mentor, our web sites come up first out of more than 350,000 thousand. In some combinations we're in the top 10 out of several million.

We are not a large or wealthy organization. We have only 3 full time people on staff. And most of their time is focused on our Cabrini Connections program which has 65 pairs of 7th to 12th grade teens/volunteers and more than 300 alumni.

The only way we could do the work we do and reach as many people as we reach is by using the internet for learning, collaboration, planning and daily communications. We recognize that our partners, friends and volunteers can be located in any part of the world and we're constantly humbled by how large the world is and by how many people are already doing great work.

We just need to find them and find ways to help each other.

First I'd like to introduce a couple of concepts. Maybe someone already has written a thesis on these. If that's true, please post a web site address so I can connect with them.

I'd like to draw a difference between horizontal and vertical learning organizations. I've created two power point essays to illustrate these concepts: They can be found at the links shown at the bottom of this message.

I believe that at present, most on-line learning and networking web sites are horizontal organizations. They collect lots of people who have a common interest, such as in technology, or politics, etc. and enable people to share ideas in a variety of formats. They are great for networking and exchanging ideas. However, most of the participants represent organizations with different missions and focus areas. The host of a horizontal learning organization is not the CEO of a busiess intended to accomplish a specific result as an outcome of a sequence of eConferences...unless it's a generic result, such as better uses of technology, or better understanding of a problem.

The Tutor/Mentor Connection is what I call a vertical organization. We focus on actions that help kids living in poverty connect with adults in structured tutor/mentor programs that aim to mentor kids toward jobs and careers. In the OHATS section of www.tutormentorexchange.net you can visit a documentation section where we document actions that intend to achieve the goals of the organization. If the action does not further the mission, why do it?

This shows that to achieve our goals we, and a growing number of partners, need to repeat the same actions over and over for many years, constantly improving what we do based on our own results, what we learn from others, and what we learn from the community we serve. This starts with creating a vision of what you want to do, and then building a team of people to share that vision and do the work. To to have an impact on education outcomes for kids living in a big city like Chicago requires a big vision and a huge army. It can take decades.

I participate in a variety of horizontal learning forums, such as Tech Soup, because I learn ways to improve the work of my own organization. In these forums I often connect with others who become future partners and co-collaborators.

I'm a co-host today because I met Janet Salmons a few years ago in another on-line forum. Many of the volunteers who work in the T/MC live beyond Chicago. Most of us met via the Internet. The conferences that we host in May and November are almost entirely organized via Internet collaboration.

I'm not an expert on the technology of eConferences. I'm fortunate that I've found partners like Andy Pincon, http://www.alado.net/econference , and Nathan Harris at IUPUI, http://econference.uc.iupui.edu/. These are leaders who are willing to take the lead on organizing econferences using their own technology and extensive networks.

To us the conference is part of a sequence of events intended to draw people together, to energize them, and to support on-going collaboration and learning in the months between conferences. We're learning as we go and we're patching together our technology with the help of volunteers and partners. We have very few dollars available to do this work.

We launched our first eConference in May 2004, repeated it in November and now are in the third wave, starting May 6. Rather than have one host organization, my goal is to find organizations in different parts of the world who are already spending time thinking of ways to help kids move through school and into careers, and who would be willing to host an econference hub from their organization during the May or November period. That way the responsibility for collecting speakers and marketing the conference is shared, yet by linking the conferences, people have more opportunities to participate and will be linked to a larger network of people. Most importantly, our collective efforts create a much greater public visibility for tutoring/mentoring strategies, which we hope leads to a greater flow of volunteers and donors to these types of programs.

Below are web sites that explain some of our concepts and where you can read more about the goals of our conferences. I hope that today others will log on and describe the type of econferences they do and the strategies behind these conferences.

Tell us if you are a vertical or a horzontal organization, or if you describe yourself differently. I'll look forward to learning from you.

The two power points that illustrate the work we do:

eLearning and Collaboration in Vertical Organization


Creating an eLearning and Collaboration network

The Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference web site is: http://www.tutormentorconference.bigstep.com

I have participated in internal (within an organization) and public online conferences. I love them! I love the convenience, the ability to go back to the archives later for more, the low cost, and the sense of community. Best of all, I never have to completely miss a session because I want to attend another session happening at the same time - they are archived.

The best online conference I ever attended was by LearningTimes. You can go to their site and see what I mean.

I've logged into the Learning Times web site and agree there are many ways to learn and collaborate.

Yesterday Paul Collins, http://jordan-webb.net/tmc posted an introduction and told how he has been volunteering time for several years to support Tutor/Mentor Leadership Conferences.

So far our conferences have succeeded in creating a meeting and networking place. However, they have not yet gone to the next stage of asking "what works and what could work better, or what are the biggest challenges, and how can we work as a group to solve them"

Paul has been doing surveys using on-line tools. You can visit the site above and take the survey and see the results posted by you and others.

As we find partners who will help summarize and publish this information on the web, and who will help lead conversations that reflect on the information provided by the surveys, we feel we'll move both the conferences and the econferences to a group meeting process, where we're working to improve quality and capacity on a continual basis.

The May 12 and 13 Chicago conference will have several workshops led by Paul and others that begin to go from shared learning to shared inquiry. I encourage people interested in the issues we address to take a look and see if there are ways you'd like to get involved. The conference web site is http://www.tutormentorconference.bigstep.com

Dan:

Perchance, is your organization both horizontal and vertical? Some of those models seem really effective. The Electronic Emissary project comes to mind, for instance, which promoted situated learning by using subject matter experts from industry who created authentic projects for schools. The wrinkle: these mentors worked with both students and their teachers. This gave the students both asynchronous and face to face support, but also meant that each mentor could achieve great economies of scale, supporting large numbers of students through their teachers.

In the UK, the Open University serves hundreds of thousands of students with a similar strategy: using part time "tutors" (we'd call them adjunct faculty over here) to facilitate courses created on CD-ROM's.

I wonder if that sort of virtual "franchising" might be a means to build effective networks for public advocacy. (?)

Coachman,

You are correct. We're horizontal in the way we are a platform that provides networking and resources for anyone interested in these subjects. We're vertical in terms of our day to day focus of doing things that result in more and better volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs.

We're also small. The UK open university is one of many excellent examples of universities collecting and sharing information. We post links to some of these examples at our web sites because we're fishing for people at universities to become partners in the vertical part of our work.

Here's one link that shows promise of engaging university resources (people, ideas, alumni, technology) in on-going problem solving.

The Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program (IE) at the University of Texas at Austin. IE is a vision and philosophy of education extending to public charter schools, undergraduates, post-docs, faculty and the connections between universities and society. IE is a way of conceptualizing the identity, mission, organization, and operation of universities in the 21st Century--in a world whose challenges require radically new approaches to education capable of transforming lives for the betterment of society. https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/

This represents the type of collaboration the Tutor/Mentor Connection seeks to create with business and universities in Chicago and in other parts of the world. When a unversity, or a department within the university, becomes both horizontal and vertical, focused at goals beyond increasing funding for the university, we can unlease tremendous resources to support the work that many of us throughout the world are doing.

The horizontal nature of our work is intended to attract a wide range of visitors. It's like advertising. When I worked as an advertising manager for a nation-wide retail organization, we sent out three waves of ads each week to 20 million people in 40 states. We were casting a wide net trying to get shoppers to come to our stores where we hoped they would become customers.

I'm doing the same thing. I use the internet on a daily basis to cast a wide invitation to people and organizations who might want to be part of the vertical part of our mission.

Since hosting this forum in 2005 I've created much more content and a map-based tutor/mentor program locator to support this strategy. I've also moved from a non profit structure to forming the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in 2011 to find new ways to continue.  I'd like to see if old discussions can be renewed.  With the Nato summit in Chicago in May 2012 it's a good time to look at strategy maps and ways that teams from many organizations might work to solve complex problems.  See this and many similar ideas I've posted at www.scribd.com/.../93233051-Planning-Cycle-War-on-Poverty

This concept map shows networks I'm sharing ideas with.  It was built using a CMap tool. However, maps like this could be built using Social Network Analysis tools which would make them easier to update and more useful in helping connect people in different networks with each other. 

In the groups section at this forum I've been working with interns and volunteers to develop some of these tools. I'd love to be joined by volunteers or even potential business partners.