dfe proposal

rough draft - i'm speaking more with the director thurs. AGRARIAN ADVENTURE What’s the organization? “Teachers, parents and community members are working together at Ann Arbor's Tappan Middle School to transform the way school children think about food and eating. Their goal is nothing less than overhauling the school lunch program and in doing so, offering schoolchildren an alternative to the fast-food messages and values that saturate our lives.” -Ann Arbor Public School newsletter

Description of the job: The student will focus on developing professional skills in instruction and program evaluation. (S)he will primarily be involved with the provision of adult computer training classes at the library. After a period of observing and assisting in classes, the student will begin teaching. (S)he may also have the opportunity to develop and teach a new class based on community needs. The student will also conduct an evaluation of the classes to assess their impact, resulting in a report of findings and recommendations.

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.*

I have two possible ideas for a DFE proposal at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton OH. One is definitely doable from a distance, and the other would at the very least require several trips to Dayton. These ideas are different than from what I presented in class for Texas Forums. I think working with Taylor Willingham on wikis and online deliberation would be wonderful, but I know I am not in a position to do so with my current skill set. I am interested in talking to the Illinois students about their work with Taylor.

Background

Please note the final version of this proposal: Tracking Social Performance Indicators. With much help from alumnus Sara Naab, here is my DFE proposal. I'd like to do this as an independent study this winter, if possible. The organization is "Freedom From Hunger," a training organization focusing on microfinance, health and food security. They have also have a CMS up. Edit: I wonder how the public goods/public information work concepts map to FFH. Their mission is to build capacity in microfinance institutions. Micro loans aren't public goods. I guess you could argue that the knowledge FFH provides to institutions is a public good. ie. My using the knowledge to make my institution better doesn't stop you from using the same knowledge to make your institution better. And it's difficult to exclude people from benefiting from the knowledge ...Is that right? Knowledge is hard to fence in, and all of the recipients of loans are benefiting from the dispersal of best practices. (However, FFH is trying to make money by training people in those best practices, so there must be some barrier to using the knowledge.) If this works, then my proposed DFE fits into our Public Information Work scheme as "enhancing the internal operations of organizations that perform public work." It's an information input to public work.