Lone Eagle Recommendations for AIHEC Leadership
Realizing the Promise of Broadband for Tribal Communities

After ten years of pushing rural broadband infrastructure, there is a need to reassess how well existing infrastructure has been adopted and utilized and to understand the psycho-social barriers that have been identified and how to implement new social engineering strategies and metrics focused on the desired genuine outcomes. Future infrastructure investment depends heavily on the return on investment and whether citizens are able to realize the promised benefits.

By Frank Odasz, Lone Eagle Consulting,
Distance Learning and Broadband Applications Specialist
Email: frank@lone-eagles.com
Web: http://lone-eagles.com

We share a mutual interest in establishing an entity for ongoing gathering and dissemination on broadband training best practices with emphasis on ongoing mining of bottom-up innovations, developing train-the-trainer programs for local peer mediated skills transfer, and creating socio-economic capacity-building metrics based on the most effective peer mediated skills transfer dynamics.

In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of billion dollar social media business success stories and at the same time confusion regarding the promise of broadband resulting in disappointing take-up rates in rural and Native communities. The economic decline continues and the need for a new form of community education and fast-track action plan is growing dramatically.

The First Step Forward is developing programs to help rural and tribal leaders understand the importance of their advocacy for, and understanding of, the best practical sustainable broadband applications.

The Second Step is developing self-directed online training to engage learners in cost-effective utilization of key online resources.

The Third Step is disseminating existing bottom up innovations and stimulating more such innovations. 

Community coaching services are needed to advise communities on their specific opportunities to leverage local broadband intelligently to minimize costs and maximize the benefits. Leading with how local people can help one another online to establish successful dynamics for skills transfer and mentoring can evolve toward the creation of for-profit knowledge age service businesses. Instructional entrepreneurship in an age of accelerating change meets a community education need beyond the offerings of higher education and K12 institutions. 

The viral (rapid) growth of MySpace is significant because properly motivated by the opportunity to express oneself online and to engage with peers, 100 million teens in only 18 months created the equivalent of the 8th largest country on Earth. The significance for grassroots leadership able to articulate an authentic vision and action plan for meaningful transnational mass engagement is profound mobilization is indeed possible.

A seat at the United Nations for future virtual nations is conceivable, particularly once transnational activism translates into action initiatives regarding socio-economic capacity-building, environmental, and cultural issues. Global Service Learning projects have unlimited potential and may prove to be the only way to meet the huge demands for mass education and collaboration to create a trusted global information society and economy.

Managing the Blossoming Potential
for Everyone both Learner and Teacher, all the time.

The time has come for online learning for everyone, as both learner and teacher.

The recent phenomena of Web 2.0 has produced a global proliferation of bottom-up innovations, particularly regarding the use of new powerful free Web 2.0 tools for the creation and sharing of peer content for special interest groups. What is emerging is the opportunity for peer-mediated skills transfer on a scale never before possible. The vision that needs to be recognized is that anyone can learn to teach others online and make a significant difference in the lives of potentially many, many others, anywhere, anytime. Those of us without necessary information and service retrieval skills will need access to someone we can rely on for essential assistance.

We are entering an age of unprecedented opportunities for mass innovation and action based on shared values and online learning. Everyone both learner and teacher, both consumer and producer, all the time. 

1.      Establish a dynamic clearinghouse of the best bottom-up innovations, most effective online tools with tutorials, online learning modules and courses, and peer mentoring matching services. New peer created video and screencasting tutorials are proving far more educationally effective for a much broader range of learners than text-only tutorials.

2.      Developing a skills transfer metrics methodology to document those who are most effective transferring skills in a motivated time-sensitive manner with emphasis on how many skills to how many people and how quickly can become a major motivator to help others learn. Rewarding those volunteers who are most effective transferring skills with an online social recognition dynamic is fundamental to counter champion burnout as well as to showcase best practices.

3.      Extensibility: Now that one person’s efforts can create online teaching resources potentially effective for an unlimited number of persons, the best such resources need to be continually peer-evaluated and effectively disseminated. Teaching how an individual can have a global impact suggests developing a global citizenship curriculum and many related initiatives.

4.      Online mentoring and encouragement of those who lack confidence in self-directed learning is a teachable dynamic than produces huge satisfaction for both mentor and mentee. The use by mentors of established self-directed online lessons allows them to focus on the dynamics for providing emotional support in a mastery learning format to create confident self-directed learners – has been proven effective. With the global teacher shortage, this is our best option.

5.      Community coaching of local leaders in their successively greater local applications of Web 2.0 skills transfer for growing measurable socio-economic capacity is quickly evolving. Creating a community of communities which allows communities to view online their peer communities’ innovations can accelerate the pace of local innovation.

6.      Confident Predictions for What is Next:
Youth E-entrepreneurship with emphasis in efficient online skills transfer and participation in the global economy has the potential to grow a global entrepreneurial culture in less than ten years. Half the global population is under the age of 20.

7.      Articulating the vision for an initiative which can focus the activity of hundreds of millions of individuals toward positive global change, and creating a global citizenship worldview, is not only viable, it is inevitable. Just as 100 million youth made MySpace a 2.6 billion business with 18 months, so can more purposeful initiatives grow exponentially faster and greater. It is just a matter of who and when. Global transnational service learning projects are quickly evolving.

8.      A weekly vote of confidence online for a unique mass mobilization global initiative can demonstrate regularly the dramatic growth in numbers of initiative supporters.

Proposed Grant Themes:
1. Create a global citizenship curriculum Train-the-Trainers online curriculum with self-directed lessons teaching free web tools for peer instructional content creation with a skills transfer outcomes metric model and social recognition program to document the most effective self-directed learning content and best mentors based on peer-evaluations.

2. Youth service and E-entrepreneurship - mentoring mission model, rural revitalization service learning; meaningful participation in the global information society and economy; and stepped growth path for both skills and global thinking and potential positive global impacts (extensibility skill development.)

3. Clearinghouse of Best Practices, distinction between top down, middle ground, bottom up. Distinguish between best uses of successive mediums both existing and projected as customized to needed of community specifics culturally, literacy rates, economic bases, and development levels.

AIHEC Opportunities for Leadership
Major telco mergers combined with a recent 20 billion dollar FCC spectrum auction and other technological advances have created an immediate need to understand how to overcome rural take-up rate barriers. In addition, oil prices are forcing the issue of creating more mainstream telework adoption, and online shopping for rural citizens instead of driving long distances just makes sense. Add the global competitiveness issue, the boom in bottom-up innovations worldwide, and America’s challenge appears to be how best to stimulate more homegrown American innovation.

 

Motivating learners to build their own knowledge. Constructivism refers to learners building their own knowledge. Social media trends demonstrate young learners being self-directed and building their own knowledge as well as peer communities and contributing to the skill development of peers and participating in supporting causes in a growing number of meaningful ways.

 

Creating meaning, self and group identity via acquiring new knowledge and collaborations is in many ways very much a tribal dynamic. Online social networking has vast potential for all generations, and seniors are the fastest growing online demographic. Recognition of the online medium as a cost effective means for online education and provision of social services and essential information as well as social support is now being broadly accepted.

 

Creating community learning networks to build local socio-cultural capacity is the opportunity of AIHEC and community education advocates. How online education for all tribal citizens can help support local needs at all levels as culturally appropriate will include new cultural behaviors by its very nature as a new communications medium. Applications will be reinvented within the cultural context of each community and tribe.

 

1.      AIHEC can begin by articulating a community e-learning healthy village vision addressing the nine essential components of a healthy village that can be empowered by intelligent use of Internet. http://lone-eagles.com/healthyvillage.htm

 

2.      Advocate online education for all via reinventing social networks, with global voice for cultural expression.

3.      Take on the mission of authenticating and disseminating indigenous best practices

4.      In a very real sense “higher education” today doesn’t exclude those not pursuing post secondary education, but is just the reverse – Phds may well be People Helping make a Difference, online and offline. We need to recognize those with global knowledge retrieval skills as community assets and create mentor rosters as a new form of service learning. Reconnecting the 50% of tribal members who live off-reservation in meaningful ways is quite viable.

5.      Identifying new community action dynamics by sharing stories of community success stories, new content and related socio-cultural innovations can stimulate other communities to reconsider their opportunities and responsibility for leading local change.

 

Viability in the modern day requires knowing how and where to find the information you need on a daily basis and those without the skills will need to know who locally to go to for assistance.

Online mentoring and services open a dramatic new spectrum of viable opportunities for supporting those in rural and remote locations, or those in urban communities who are socially isolated.

 

A Global Citizenship course with self-identification might include:

1.      The Love of Learning, taking responsibility for self-actualization through developing self-directed learning skills

2.      Accepting responsibility to others sharing new knowledge and info-access needs for those without these knowledge access skills; just-in-time-inquiry-based knowledge access

3.      Collaborative capacity building, accepting the responsibility to work with others to enhance everyone’s effectiveness.

4.      Beyond Tribalism: Global shared values, tolerance of diversity, cultural relativism, appreciation for the opportunity to positively impact the lives of others through online mentoring, sharing online content, and much more.

5.      Sustainable lifestyles; environmental, minimal materialism, spiritual, lifestyle careers made possible with ecommerce/telework

6.      Creating global transnational service learning projects as part of mining the best bottom-up innovations of others world wide is but one example of new win-win opportunities.

7.      Best practices need to be separated as those demonstrated by top-down initiatives, such as telcos deploying widespread broadband, and by mid-level  dynamics such as a community organizations rallying to integrate broadband intelligently throughout local community organizations to create a healthy village and a smart community, and bottom-up individuals seeking home-based self-employment and other specific benefits.

8.      Demonstrating U.S. Native responsibility as first to have these abilities – to lead in sharing the vision and best practices with all indigenous persons.

9.      World Values Survey and contributing to a Global Trusted community

10.  Create a virtual community of those who opt in to work toward a better world,

11.  Conduct mutual show of support with weekly voting as a self-affirmation dynamic.

 

New metrics can model the exponential potential of effective online collaboration, self-actualization, motivational mentoring and encouragement growing self-esteem and skills capacity in others, particulary the ability to function as self-directed learners.

 

New trends supporting these concepts are social entrepreneurship, citizen philanthropy, E-entrepreneurship using Internet ecommerce to create micro-multi-nationals particularly among youth.

 

NEW METRICS FOR social recognition programs supporting community education and motivation:


We might recognize and honor:

1.      Those who show initiative to learn and participate and/or support for those who do.

2.      Those who demonstrate self-directed learning skills as a tribal asset.

3.      Those who demonstrate successful encouragement and mentoring of others, online and offline, with recognition for specific skills transferred and ongoing support.

4.      Those who create local online content and instructional resources such as screencasts and instructional videos – there is a need for awareness-raising show and tell for what’s possible once local broadband becomes available.

5.      Citing those with new ideas, rewarding innovative thinking,

6.      Best Mashups by types; content resorce, motivational multimedia piece, graphics, video, animated, audio podcast, music, photos, mixed media, vod/pod casts( subscribable services)

Lone Eagle Consulting – Draft Backgrounder

Lone Eagle published history: http://lone-eagles.com/history.htm
Chapter on Village Sustainability: http://lone-eagles.com/village-sustainability.htm
Resume: http://lone-eagles.com/articles/frank.htm

A Summary of Consistent Online Learning Leadership and Innovations
Over the last 25 years, Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting since 1998, has consistently been an early adapter, prolific online educator/author, and aggressive innovator. The history of innovations consistently demonstrating future trends years before they became broadly recognized, speaks for itself.

FIRSTS:

1988, connecting 100 one-room schools online to share lesson plans.
1989, offering remote JR High students an online advanced mathematics course from
          MIT on Chaos Theory

1989 Hosting a Native digital art workshop with intent to vend art online.

1994 – Major online peer mentoring program with science and math educators from a five state area using a train-the-trainers model with customized online curriculum

1998 – Delivered first Internet workshops to 11 Alaskan Native villages for educators and community members, established cross-cultural self-directed Internet guide (print and online) and custom online curriculum. This Internet Guide as funded by the AT&T learning network, the ERIC clearinghouse and USAID. Created graduate online courses for rural educators for the Alaska Staff Development Network and Alaska Pacific University. Still being actively taught as of July 2008.

2000 rural ecommerce and telework strategies guides and online lessons developed as part of rural road show funded by USDA and sponsored by Idaho State Universities College of Technology Workforce Training office.

2003-2006 Montana Choice national rural ecommerce demonstration project offering a five step community Ecommerce awareness process supported by extensive resources and regional success stories.  Presented for governments of Australia, Mexico, and Jamaica.

2006 – Served as community networking resources coordinator for the CTC VISTA project. www.comtechreview.org  (See the article and resources for “Community Networking.”

2006 Extensive (10) presentations for Alaskan Leadership and legislative committees, and six Canadian rural and indigenous broadband applications conferences including Asia Pacific Economic Council.

2007 – Co-facilitated formal creation of International Indigenous ICT commission of the Americas in Antigua, Guatemala.

2008 Wyo ecommerce support project, Asia Pacific Economic Council

Summary Narrative:
In 1988, the creation of the Big Sky Telegraph connecting one-room schools to share lesson plans produced the first set of online lessons posted by the US Dept. of Education some seven years later. 1988-1998, training hundreds of teachers online through open knowledge train-the-trainer online courses, and sharing extensive resources online without restriction predicated the open source, open knowledge movement.  Frank’s many innovative online and print training guides were funded by USAID, the AT&T Learning Network, the ERIC clearinghouse, USDA, and others.

Frank provided the first Internet workshops for educators in the Alaskan Native villages of the Yukon Koyukuk school district in 1998, supplemented by online courses and examples of online cultural multimedia expression.

Rural Ecommerce and Telework strategies online lessons written for rural learners were created in 2000 and used for a National demonstration project funded by the U.S. Dept. of Labor with emphasis on individuals with disabilities, (2003-2006).

Served as community networking resources coordinator for the CTC VISTA project. www.comtechreview.org  (See the article and resources for “Community Networking.”

International presentations on Indigenous broadband applications have been delivered for the governments of Mexico, Australia, Jamaica, and 23 nations of the Asia Pacific Economic Council. March, 2007, Frank facilitated the first formal meeting of the Indigenous Commission for Communications Technologies in the Americas (ICCTA) http://www.iccta-citca.org/ENG/home.html

Frank’s resume and biographies are at http://lone-eagles.com/articles/frank.htm  A published history of Frank’s innovations as an early adapter of online learning is at http://lone-eagles.com/history.htm  (33 pages) Having presented March, 2008, in Tokyo on Global Rural ICT Best Practices for 23 countries, a formal paper summarizes lessons learned and the recommended direction forward http://lone-eagles.com/tokyo-report.htm   A google search is recommended to quantify Frank’s impact worldwide volunteering his instructional resources and dozens of articles; Search “Big Sky Telegraph”  OR “Lone Eagle Consulting” OR Rural Ecommerce OR “Frank Odasz”  The extent of online resources, shared without restriction, speaks for itself:  http://lone-eagles.com/future-proofing.htm

Offering Presentations on the BIG PICTURE,
and Train-the-Trainer Workshops and Online Training

If your staff is new to Web 2.0 and you're interested in training presentations and/or online training perhaps I can be of assistance. I've been teaching teachers online since 1988. This past Winter I've been focusing on the best Web 2.0 tools for distance learning. I'm finishing up 3 graduate online credits for KI2 educators for New Mexico State University "Web 2.0 for K12 Classrooms."

For the last 7 years, I've been sharing an online rural ecommerce and telework strategies curriculum. What I would like to do next is establish Native Youth E-entrepreneurship online training as part of a global citizenship curriculum. I can demonstrate extensive resources validating this is indeed the future; social entrepreneurship, global youth microenterprise curriculum, ICT Microloans to create micro-multi-nationals, citizen philanthropy, and much more.

I enjoy delivering multimedia presentations that simplify the complex for non-techies. (Rural and Tribal leaders, etc.)  Extensive past presentations and descriptions are documented at http://lone-eagles.com/new.htm

Show Yourself the Future of Peer-Mediated Online Learning
Here's a must-do sample five minute activity to demonstrate how anyone, anywhere, any age can instantly create quality how-to distance learning resources for peer-mediated skills transfer.

Go to www.screencast-o-matic.com  Click on the Demo - it takes three minutes. Then, click CREATE and select screen size of 600x800. Anything you show on your screen online and offline and say into your microphone or webcam will be instantly video captured. Click STOP, and you'll receive a URL to instantly share your how-to tutorial.  Try it now – do a 1-2 minute self-directed experiment. 

Imagine a world where anyone with a skill can learn to share it globally. Imagine: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. “ Einstein stated “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Search by topic for existing screencasts on any topic, like moodle.  If this was a successful five minutes for you, imagine what an hour or two might produce in new capabilities to transfer skills online!

I'm very excited for the potential of next generation youth-driven and elder-driven social media projects! I'm very interested in dialog on these topics with anyone who shares this Big Picture Vision.