Lesson Five
Financial,
Business, and Entrepreneurial Literacy
http://lone-eagles.com/academy5.htm
Welcome to Lesson Five!
View this five minute video capture overview of
this lesson.
(Click the link - it might take a minute to download.)
Each lesson recommends four half-hour sessions (per week)
VIEW some excellent short videos online.
EXPLORE some outstanding websites for ideas on what you can do
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS - Send an email to everyone in the class
READ OR LISTEN TO:
Short articles with ideas on trends and opportunities
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Lesson Goals
1. Definitions of Financial, Business, and Entrepreneurial Literacy
2.
The changing nature of business, the knowledge economy and innovation economy
dynamics.
Keeping current in a world of accelerating change.
4. Emerging
trends: social entrepreneurship. Green businesses, corporate social
responsibility,
environmental activism, community organizing, and modern
leadership
5. Instructional entrepreneurship: Everyone both learner and teacher, consumer and producer
6. Finding and sharing relevant ecommerce and telework success stories.
Introduction:
Financial Literacy:
Too often youth grow up without understanding how to keep a personal budget in order to handle their money responsibly. Understanding how bank accounts, credit cards and loans for cars and homes work is very important, and this is sometimes not taught in schools. Many great online resources are available to teach financial literacy.
Business Literacy:
Understanding what free services are available to help you write a business plan, and to get a loan to start a business, and to assist you with the many aspects of running a business. Any business needs three areas of expertise: 1. Financial expertise, 2. Marketing expertise, and 3. the Creative production expertise. Typically no one individual has expertise in all three areas, so you might need to build a team with the appropriate expertise. For example, you might be very creative and have a product to sell, but you might not be a whiz at accounting or be interested in marketing your product.
Creating an online business may not require much capital (money) at all to get started, but you will need to know how to market your business and how to keep up on what your competition is doing regarding effective marketing. On the web the pace of innovation is far faster than with traditional businesses, so keeping current on new innovations you can copy is essential.
Did you know 86% of all jobs comes from micro-businesses with less than 12 employees?
Did you know that via the Web you can create a micro-multi-national corporation and do business internationally? In the previous lessons you have seen many such examples, even with pre-teens.
Entrepreneurial Literacy:
There is a recent boom of interest in teaching entrepreneurship. Typically, 16% of the population have the entrepreneurial spirit. Most would prefer to work for someone else where they do not have to take risks or put out extra effort. There are many free entrepreneurship curriculums, web sites, videos and more available online, however, most tend to focus on non-web entrepreneurship such as getting a loan to open a store front such as a coffee shop.
But, if you are in a small remote village or community your coffee shop has very limited growth potential. But, if you create an online business, you have one billion potential customers already online, with billions more coming. Certainly, you cannot sell log furniture from a remote village due to the high shipping costs, but you could sell carvings and art.
The web makes it easy to be able to “make the living you want, living wherever you want” whether you are working for someone else or running your own business. In lesson one many online resources where shared for rural Ecommerce and Telework strategies.
Risk Management in an Age of Accelerating Change.
It used to be that trying anything new was risky and that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, was good advice. That was when things tended to stay the same. Today, everything is changing rapidly and you put yourself at risk keeping things the same. You can minimize your risk by paying close attention to what is changing around you and adapting as you see others adapt. Some businesses are slowly going away, and some are dying a dramatically rapid death! For example: The newspapers, and the car industry. They were too slow to recognize the changes happening around them and did not adapt in time. They are toast.
New trends for successful businesses are
1. Becoming sensitive to environmental issues – Green business is Good Business.
2. Social responsibility is Good Business. Doing Well by Doing Good. The old “business as usual” model is going away where the excuse for doing harm to others used to be “business is business.”
3.
Social
entrepreneurship is a hot trend – building business models around helping
people.
Advanced resources are in the Lone Eagle whitepaper presented in Tokyo, March
2008
http://lone-eagles.com/social-engineering.htm
Instructional Entrepreneurship
So here we are, halfway through the 21st Century Academy. Thus far, my challenge has been to engage you in exploring new ideas, great resources, and hands-on exploration of your own full potential. Instead of just giving you resources, I have tried to show you a bit on how to find your own great resources. I have tried to keep the lessons short and to address the most important points that you may not know you really do need to know.
If I put myself in your position, I’d ask “What’s in it for me?” Since I didn’t pay anything I don’t really have to do anything. But if I recognize the academy as a genuine opportunity to tap into expertise I would not otherwise have access to, then perhaps I should invest a lot of time and effort just to see what it might lead to.
If you put yourself in my position, you might wonder how you can prove YOUR participants have engaged the lessons and are learning, or not? If your online course is your for-profit business product, your assessments on the outcomes and benefits become pretty important! For ten years I have been teaching online graduate courses for educators, and their big incentive is they need recertification credits to continue teaching, and of course, they want to learn how to use the Internet effectively in their classrooms. I require specific submissions for each lesson, and in return they get a Pass for the Class and 3 graduate recertification credits.
The hardest part of any online class is to establish collaboration and sharing. Using a listserv (mailing list) is the easiest as no one has to remember to check for messages at a web site, as is the case with our Google Groups site. Typically, everyone prefers to “lurk” and read messages but not post any more than are specifically required. Ideally, you will find a way of exciting the learner in your participants and they will get excited about sharing ideas and resources. Often this happens best with one-on-one interaction, whether via email, voice phone, or even 2-way video like www.skype.com
My point is simply that once people learn how easy it is to learn online, they don’t ever want to sit in a classroom again. E-learning is a booming global business and more and more entrepreneurs are learning how to teach online effectively. You can find tutorials on just about anything at youtube, and by using Google (select the video tab). My two graduate courses, and the web-based final projects for dozens of participants are at http://lone-eagles.com/teachercreated.htm but they don’t yet reflect the broad range of tools and hands-on activities in this 21st Century Academy.
Your opportunity is to build on what others have created to make something of your own that is better than anything you have yet seen. The term is “mash-up” using media others have created which are listed at sites like www.creativecommons.com and www.mashable.com and many others.
Your Challenge,
should you decide to
accept it, is to create something interesting (a mashup, a jing, etc.) and
share it with those in the class via our listserv Email to: loneeagleacademy-L@netpals.lsoft.com
See the Advanced Skillbuilder link at the bottom of this lesson for more ideas.
EXPLORE: Take some quality time and explore the resources most relevant to your interests….
Financial Literacy:
- Young Money
http://youngmoney.com/
Young money helps counteract the many consumption messages young people received by promoting an understanding of personal money management and the issues that are involved in making economically sound decisions. - YoungBiz.com
http://youngbiz.com
Free Ebusiness sites and training for youth!
· The Jump$tart
Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy
http://www.jumpstartcoalition.org
Business Literacy:
Many
great links were shared in Lesson one.
Entrepreneurial Literacy:
A million dollar
Fast-trac Entrepreneurship curriculum is at www.kaufmann.org
· National
Youth Employment Coalition
http://www.nyec.org/
· Youth Entrepreneurship
Magazine
http://ye.entreworld.org
·
Indian
Entrepreneurship online curriculum from www.arizonanativenet.com
See also http://www.arizonanativenet.com/news/captcha/mediaInfo.cfm?sect=med&seriesID=3
·
Native
Nations Institute
www.nni.arizona.edu
Information on Native Nation Building, and Entrepreneurship
·
Indianpreneurship
Curriculum
www.indianpreneurship.com
from www.onaben.org is a fee-based
curriculum program.
The Following Links are FROM:
Nativehearts Enterpreneurship
links listing,
http://nativehearts.pbworks.com/Nativehearts+-+Youth+Entrepreneurs
·
Entrepreneur
Magazine's Youth Business Start-up Resources
www.entrepreneur.com/tsu
·
REAL,
or Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning
http://www.realenterprises.org
Provides entrepreneurship education and training curricula for youth and adults
in schools, post-secondary institutions, and community-based organizations.
REAL provides hands-on experience in starting a business.
·
Organizations
with Youth Enterprise focus
http://www.entre-ed.org/_network/youth-or.htm
From Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education. http://www.entre-ed.org/
·
Small
Business Association Youth Entrepreneurship Resources and Curriculum Guides
http://www.sba.gov/young/columbiacollege/k_12.nsf/vwHTMLPages/youth.html
·
Future
Business Leaders of America
fbla-pbl.org
An association of students preparing for business and business-related careers.
·
The
Enterprise Center's Listing of Youth Programs
http://www.theenterprisecenter.com/youth.php
·
Gaebler
Ventures Entrepreneurship Resources for the Young
http://www.gaebler.com/help-for-young-entrepreneurs.htm
·
National
Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship
http://www.nfte.org Expensive but thorough
curriculum is available for teaching entrepreneurship to low-income young
people, ages 11 through 18, so they can become economically productive members
of society by improving their academic, business, technology and life skills.
·
Junior
Achievement
http://ja.org
Works with students from kindergarten to high school to educate and inspire
young people to value free enterprise, business and economics to improve the
quality of their lives.
EXTENSIVE Youth Career and Job Shadowing resources
http://lone-eagles.com/lksd-careers.htm
EXPLORE: Sign up for these two great free E-newsletters. Seriously, the resources are exceptional! You can unsubscribe at anytime, too.
|
The Career News: |
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|
The Job Seeker Weekly
http://jobseekerweekly.com
To Sign up for a complimentary
subscription go to:
http://jobseekerweekly.com/signup.php
READ, LISTEN AND EXPLORE THESE LINKS:
To learn more about the intentions and desired outcomes for this unique public/private partnership, listen to the introductory podcast now. DEFINITELY LISTEN TO THIS SHORT PODCAST!
PRESS Release on IBM's Global Youth Entrepreneurship Week
Harbinger
of what's to come:
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation http://www.kauffman.org/
and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration http://trade.gov/index.asp (ITA) are
pleased to welcome you to the new online resource intended to help build
economies that foster entrepreneurship worldwide. http://www.Entrepreneurship.gov and http://www.Entrepreneurship.org
together are a new public-private partnership focused on leveraging
entrepreneurial leadership to advance economic growth around the world. To
learn more about the intentions and desired outcomes for this unique
public/private partnership, listen to the introductory podcast
now. Entrepreneurs are global citizens bridging the gap between their
communities and the world. They are a catalyst for producing jobs, creating
wealth, and stimulating economies around the world. United by the power of
ideas, they are creating new industries and growing strong economies for a
brighter future.
VIEW
the Global Entrepreneurship Week Video:
http://video.kauffman.org/services/player/bcpid1811456713?bclid=1612721919&bctid=14857347001
Check out the
Kaufman Foundation’s Entrepreneurship Multimedia Library
http://www.kauffman.org/KauffmanMultimedia.aspx
While this objective sounds simple, achieving it will require extensive cooperation at all levels of government and key involvement from the private sector. These recommendations for policymakers are outlined in the full report that was presented November 18th during Global Entrepreneurship Week www.unleashingideas.org and is available at www.aspeninstitute.org/yesg or contact: Julie.kantor@nfte.com or Gloria.sandiford@nfte.com (202) 215-6383 or (212) 232-3333 x 331.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:
Share your
thoughts on the themes, links, and readings in this lesson either by posting a
NEW POST in our Google Groups Discussion or by sending an email to everyone via
our academy listserv email address: loneeagleacademy-L@netpals.lsoft.com
Did this lesson work for you? Was it too much? Not enough?
What was of greatest interest?
What would you like to see more of?
Lesson Feedback: Optional, but much appreciated.
You're invited to privately email your instructor:
1. What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this
lesson?
2. What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?
3. Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?
4. What improvements would you like to suggest?
5. Tell your instructor how much time you spent on this lesson.
Advanced Skillbuilder:
http://lone-eagles.com/academy5-advanced.htm