dfe proposal

David Hutchful SI 575: Community Information Corps Seminar Assignment: Directed Field Experience Proposal 1 December 2006 Job Description As an intern of Partners Worldwide, the student will assess, and recommend improvements where need be, the process of financing entrepreneurs in developing nations. The student will complete the following projects to this end: Projects and/or major areas of responsibility:

PEP: Community Residence Corporation The Community Residence Corporation has the mission of providing people with disabilities living options, life choices, and control of their futures. It has two subsidiaries: the Community Learning Network (provides fiscal intermediary services to the target group), and Community Housing Alternatives (offers housing and home ownership opportunities). The array of services that CRC offers is mentioned in its website:

Most of the organizations I am interested in interning with are large and somewhat bureaucratic governmental organizations or nonprofits, which have very formalized internship programs with lengthy application processes. In most of these organizations, there is not much opportunity to have a direct role in determining the structure of the internship. Potential mentors are difficult to identify, since individuals within these organizations generally point to the formal application process as the required first step. The organizations define the available internships generally, and publish them with internship applications for applicants to then specify which ones they are interested in. These descriptions are what I’ve used to determine which agencies within agencies would be most relevant to my career and personal goals. With all that being said, I’m writing up a proposal for the project that I do have the most details about, although these still seem scarce in comparison to proposals to work with smaller or more localized organizations that others have identified.

I have been talking with Sara Naab about a winter DFE and/or a summer internship with her organization. What would you do? I do not have a detailed proposal developed yet, but going off of Sara's list of possible projects, we have talked about working on issues with the organization's website architecture, particularly with regard to its function as a digital library and document repository. I want to work on a project that is library-related and also builds technology knowledge and skills.

A proposal for a DFE with the University of Michigan OpenCourseWare Initiative at the Sakai Project. Public Interest Justification OpenCourseWare is a newly developing platform for online global education. The concept is that major educational institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Notre Dame University, Kyoto University, and others will publish course materials on the Internet and provide free access to that content. Presumably this access would be provided under a creative commons license with a share alike (a.k.a. “copyleft”) understanding. The goal is to take a previously private good: university courseware and reinject it into the online community as a public good: opencourseware. While there are multiple methods to achieving this goal, the University of Michigan is looking into designing a system built on an open source software platform initially developed by The Sakai Project. Opencourseware has tremendous potential to create a new global knowledge-base for developing nations as well as global independent self-learners and educators.