The Alaskan Native Innovations Incubator

A Social Entrepreneurship Proposal by the Annette Island School District

and the Metlakatla Indian Community

 

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF ORGANIZATION AND MISSION (2-3 SENTENCES):

 

The Annette Island School District (AISD) is a unique organization with a long record of stimulating innovation in education. To appreciate the unique character of AISD, one must understand just how unique Annette Island is, as the home of the Metlakatla Indian Community; Tsimshian Alaskan Natives, and as a one-of-a-kind sovereign Native Island Nation. AISD (501c3 status) is fiscally responsible with an annual budget of over $7 million dollars; fiscal audit documentation is available on request.

 

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF PROPOSAL (2-3 SENTENCES):

 

As a unique model for all 250+ remote Alaska Native villages, this proposal will create a sustainable local innovations incubator, and a statewide online entrepreneurship training center, for remote Alaskan Native entrepreneurs of all ages, serving as trusted family support network, celebrating regularly updated Alaskan Native entrepreneurship success stories, and a training innovations “best practices” clearinghouse.

 

 

Alaskan Solutions for America’s Challenge:
            Julius Genochowski, former FCC chairman, is quoted as saying, “Broadband democratizes opportunity for all Americans to participate in the $8 trillion dollar global Internet Economy.”  And, related to the need for all Americans to adopt broadband; “We’ll make it or break it at the local level.”  But, BTOP funded only 3.5 per cent of $7.2 billion for adoption innovations, and currently there is no scalable social innovation to motivate and inform those who could benefit most. There are many federal initiatives seeking to provide connectivity to low-income citizens which need a motivational engagement strategy; ConnectEd, Lifeline, Linkup, Erate, and others. The funding for all the NTIA State Broadband Mapping Initiatives, did not fund many activities at the local level, with the exception of Alaska’s Digitizing Alaska Pilot Project.

 

The biggest potential impacts of broadband are the opportunities for generating mass income-producing innovations for the 1:2 Americans who are low income and/or in poverty. The first step is getting them excited by showing them what's already working for others like them. Then, engaging them directly in creating and sharing something amazing, that they've been able to create themselves in less than an hour. There is huge latent human potential, even without the faster broadband speeds, that could be implemented in the short term to raise awareness and expectations for what regular people can now truly learn to do, for themselves and others.

 

It is a fact that mobile devices outsell PC’s 4:1, and that everything digital is getting more powerful, easier-to-use, more interconnected, integrated, personal, and essential to common tasks like smart shopping, mobile commerce, family health, and socioeconomic sustainability. Social innovation via social media can help us all overcome the technofear in our world of accelerating change through participation in a friendly trusted mutual support network capable of keeping us all current on our best solutions for meeting our essential needs.

 

The huge opportunity is that mining raw human potential is now possible via new digital delivery methods of appropriate education, and peer support, which can now be delivered en masse at minimal cost; MOOCs, Khan Academy, and other distance and mobile learning models, have opened the door for even greater, scalable, social innovations.

 

Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting, offers 25 years experience teaching educators and citizens online, and extensive resources, available online without restriction. Since providing the first Internet workshops for educators, students, and communities for 11 villages on the Yukon in 1998, Alaskan Native specific online courses, grant templates, and more, have been generated and shared by Lone Eagle Consulting. Bart Mwarey, director of this proposed initiative, was central to the creation of the first Alaskan Native charter school in 1998, when we first met. This proposal is our joint vision for excellence based on our decades of diverse grassroots educational innovations.

 

The goal of this proposal is to show what individuals and communities can do for themselves without federal funding, creating social enterprises to create sustainable families, communities, and cultures.

 

Proposal Summary

As a unique model for all 250+ remote Alaska Native villages, this proposal will create a sustainable local innovations incubator, and a statewide online entrepreneurship training center, for remote Alaskan Native entrepreneurs of all ages, serving as trusted family support network, celebrating regularly updated Alaskan Native entrepreneurship success stories, and a training innovations “best practices” clearinghouse, created by Alaskan Natives, for Alaskan Natives.

 

A Summary Overview of Alaska’s Political Environment

          Alaska’s telecommunications companies have spent over one billion dollars installing Internet access in remote Alaskan native villages, but are quick to state; “We’re not in the training business.”  The 2013 legislature stopped all funding for the 14 regional economic development organizations, and for the Alaskan Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Alaska’s politics are notorious, perhaps infamous.  But, as always, the independent spirit of Alaskan Natives, seeks sustainability for their families, communities, and cultures. 

What’s very new, is the sudden popularity of mobile devices and social media, which sets the stage for fun, social, learning; - mobile learning, offering everyone an opportunity for sharing newentry-level entrepreneurial opportunities. Ex. An Alaskan Native youth posted photos of painted tennis shoes on Facebook and was inundated with orders, though he was not trying to create his own business. The same thing happened when another youth posted, with business intent, Native art on Iphone skins, and was also inundated with orders. Used wisely, social media can build local and regional socioeconomic capacity. But, as is already in evidence, without guidance, social media can be disruptive.

Youth need appropriate training, in ethics to create a moral compass, and in Native appropriate social entrepreneurship, if they are to have the option of working and living within traditional villages, now enabled with broadband and cell service. Alaska’s older generation legislators often bear minimal understanding of the digital opportunities now available, and top-down innovations are traditionally resisted at the village level.

This proposal will demonstrate how to leverage the bottom-up boom in innovation, and how individuals, families, and communities can gain ownership of the innovation process, and reclaim their tradition of successful creative adaptation in a world of accelerating change.

 

Provide an Overview of the Organization:

           The Annette Island School District (AISD) is a unique organization with a long record of stimulating innovation in education. To appreciate the unique character of AISD, one must understand just how unique Annette Island is, as the home of the Metlakatla Indian Community; Tsimshian Alaskan Natives, and as a one-of-a-kind sovereign Native Island Nation. AISD is fiscally responsible (501c3 status) with an annual budget of over $7 million dollars. Fiscal audit documentation is available on request.

 

Following the Alaskan Native Tradition of Creative Adaptation;
           The Tsimshian village of Metlakatla was founded over one-hundred-twenty-five years ago, when 900 Tribal members left British Columbia to follow Father William Duncan, a minister of the Anglican Church, in search of religious freedom. Paddling their canoes across 1,000 miles of ocean, the group settled on Annette Island in southeast Alaska. At that time, native culture was suppressed…but now, native culture and language are enjoying a resurgence of attention and celebration. The Tsimshian tradition has always been about creative adaptation as well as entrepreneurship.

This tradition continues today as the use of smartphones, digital tablets, apps, and the WWW show us how much technology is already a part of Native culture. Tsimshian authentication of how existing mobile devices, and Internet access, support Alaskan Native values and sustainable families, villages, and cultures will serve as an ongoing showcase, and as an online training center, for all Alaskan Native villages. This has recently begun to be a topic of discussion among both local and state leaders.

The Annette Island School District (AISD) has many educators who grew up in Metlakatla, and regularly celebrates those educators who have dedicated decades to teaching locally. Albert Booth, for example, a revered elder, taught for 40 years, is a WWII veteran, and a cultural leader.  AISD has been aggressively successful with winning grants for teaching Alaskan Native language (Tsimsala) to primary and elementary level students, and for encouraging cultural learning as a fundamental part of all K12 instruction. AISD is actively involved with all community stakeholders as a leader, and convener.

           AISD has been providing robust digital professional development for all educators and community leaders for many years. Many very positive advances have been recently achieved; all schools (elementary, middle, High School) now enjoy 6 megabyte broadband. Ipads, and laptops are now available to all students in the schools. Ipads and tens of thousands of new innovative apps, have created viable effective new learning opportunities for one-year olds and up.

 

Global Impacts Possible

Empowering celebration of specific cultural identities, while embracing the worldview as global citizens, makes this project relevant to all ethnic groups, and cultures, worldwide. Both Facebook, and Google, are planning global innovations to connect the remaining 3-5 billion who are not yet online. Recently, the Google Kansas City Gigacity project cited that this is 90 percent sociology, and 10 percent infrastructure.

"The world's diverse cultures jointly represent the full cultural genome of humankind's search for individual and group identity and meaning." Emerging globally is recognition that we are all the same in that we derive our unique individual, and group, self-identities from our respective cultures, and that together, we are jointly one human family. It is time we all begin to “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

 

The Target Demographics Our Project Will Serve Directly:

          This project will directly impact the Metlakatla Indian Community, population 1,452, which is primarily Tsimshian; Alaskan Native, but will be visible online to all 250+ Alaskan Native villages; consisting of 11 tribes and languages; with a combined population of 250,000, half remote, half urban, and to all Native American and Hawaiian Native communities, est. 2 million.

The goal is to inspire through example all indigenous communities worldwide; 150+ million. The recent examples of viral social media rapid growth, not the least of which is one billion people joining Facebook within 5 years, presents very real opportunities for very large numbers of people to benefit directly, in the short term, from this project.

 

Building on a Successful “Digitizing Alaska” Pilot Project

                        September, 2011, the first traditional potlatch in decades was held, with over 500 attendees, and was broadcast statewide by KACN TV. As a direct result, a Virtual Potlatch concept paper resulted in the funding and implementation of the NTIA/State Broadband Initiative demonstration project "Digitizing Alaska." Multiple successful “proof of concept” models have laid the groundwork for broader next steps. 

In the spring of 2013, The Association of Alaska School Boards, with the help of Connect Alaska and Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting, launched the “Digitizing Alaska: Broadband Strategies” pilot project to research the level of digital innovation, and related future opportunities, in remote villages.

 

Recent community learning events (February-April 2013) based on one–hour “Create and Share” hands-on train-the-trainer activities:

During a one-hour web-raising community event, free web sites were created for a local non-profit “Alaskan Native Girls,” for a cultural eco-tourism venture (Tsimshian Fish Camp), local weavers, and others. E-publishing was of keen interest as they learned new tools and methods for digital self-publishing and creating multimedia e-books, and more.

Within minutes, a “live” demonstration turned an elder’s half-dozen photographs into a narrated e-book. A mother who attended this event created a 20 page narrated storybook with her 5 year-old daughter in just two hours. Young and old can learn together how to tell their stories and inspire others, in a format that will endure for generations to come.

Thanks to a new generation of local mentors, free websites for all community organizations and purposes are not only possible, but are now proliferating. The new non-profit “Alaska Native Girls” is in the lead for demonstrating website innovations; inspiring others.  Such innovations shared on Facebook will reach everyone in the community within a day, as the new reality, and represents an immediate opportunity for ongoing viral seeding of new family-oriented innovations across the community.

 

                       Showcased online for all to see - what’s possible when good people take action to raise the GPA (Good People Acting) of the entire community; Numerous short videos, an Ibook multimedia manual, Native language Ebooks, community websites, and more, have already been created; http://lone-eagles.com/digitizing-metlakatla.htm
            AISD is uniquely capable to champion this timely, inclusive, new community learning adventure.

 

Growing a Entrepreneurial Culture in 3-5 Years

Alaskan Native youth represent the first digital generation, and the opportunity exists to grow an entrepreneurial culture in 3-5 years, starting in primary grades, based on rapidly growing their awareness, and “Opportunity Literacy,” by sharing peer success story videos regarding cultural digital storytelling, free self-directed educational resources, online entrepreneurship, and online video examples of family empowerment. Youth, as the first generation of “digital natives” can learn to serve as hunters and gatherers of that specific new knowledge which can fuel the home fires of local innovation. Intergenerational learning, such as engaging elementary students with elders to create digital storybooks to preserve elders’ wisdom and stories for all future generations, is one of a growing number of timely opportunities.

 

To create the home-based lifelong learning environment vulnerable children need to grow up in; All family members will be invited to participate in learning the best educational and entrepreneurial opportunities accessible by modern smartphones, digital tablets, and Internet access, by which they can all make the choice to improve their socioeconomic conditions. There are many dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors that proper incentives and creating new social norms can reverse. Showing adults the value of education, and how to improve family incomes via online entrepreneurship best practices, and rewarding positive contributions to the community, can be accelerated by the new self-efficacy and confidence possible via the “training best practices” recently piloted by the NTIA/State Broadband Initiative’s “Digitizing Alaska Pilot Project.”

All family members can learn together with their youngest members to use Ipads, educational apps, online resources, and to quickly create and share their own meaningful multimedia content with others locally, and regionally. The opportunity for utilizing home-based learning for primary and elementary students, promises to create a local learning society based on multigenerational fun, social, learning. Preschool youth as young as one year old are motivated by the Ipad’s ease-of-use to engage in self-directed learning.
           Preschoolers, family members of all ages, and pointedly “elders” can all learn together the newest, easiest forms of digital literacy and basic literacy, as well as Native language (using existing Ebooks and new apps.) 21st Century success requires embracing innovation and ongoing access to new knowledge in order to be competitive and sustainable. The continuing Native tradition of creative adaptation applied to today’s changing global economy requires Alaska’s Native villages to self-assess how effectively they encourage innovators, and engage all citizens, as an active local learning society. Our opportunity to encourage one another in gaining self-confidence for digital creativity is based on the fact that 'If we all share what we know, we'll all have access to all our knowledge.’

 

         As other villages become aware of Metlakatla’s own reinvention of digital (Native) applications, they will be invited to learn directly from Metlakatla’s innovators – from all generations.

 

How this proposed program relates to entrepreneurship and education:

Combining caring and connectivity with common sense, this proposed Innovations Incubator model, will demonstrate innovations for scalable Alaskan Native appropriate social incentives, providing individual and community ongoing self-assessments, and social recognition, for local mentors who choose to share their talents. Our strategy is to document the value of their new media community contributions, and mentoring successes, in online portfolios to generate future new income opportunities.

           Mobile devices, and the unprecedented proliferation of useful, free “apps” for mobile self-directed learning, shopping discounts, health monitoring and more, need to be assessed for relevant best practices by family members and shared via local trusted mutual support networks using social media and related easy-to-use communications tools. 

           Currently, mobile devices and social media have become very popular in most villages, but also have created real problems with cyberbullying, rumor mongering, and other abuses.   The voice of all generations needs a new peer mentoring dynamic that rewards positive community capacity building behaviors with social recognition, and provide disincentives for toxic negative behavior. Recent advanced work on these scalable local sustainable incentives models will be applied to allow individuals, families, and communities to celebrate their own ownership and discoveries of what’s possible, with the goal of sharing their creative reinvention of living by Alaskan Native values, with all other tribes, in Alaska, nationally, and globally.

 

Reuniting Families to Live and Work Together, Coming Full Circle

Alaskan Native family engagement traditionally is all generations living and working together. For the last couple generations, this tradition has been disrupted by family members having to leave the village to find work. The recent availability of broadband in over 200 villages opens the door to returning to traditional family life. Certainly retaining youth is essential to the future of all villages. Particularly exciting for the fifty percent of Tsimshians who are urban, previously forced to relocate to find work, will be the opportunity to return home and reunite with family and the community!        

 The exciting new online work opportunities, and new unlimited affordable educational opportunities, need to be showcased and distributed as they continue to evolve. Well beyond mere financial literacy, imparting the understanding of how the new online business models reflect Alaskan Native values, such as social enterprises, presented in an Alaskan Native values culturally appropriate context, holds great potential for reversing the rural outmigration of dwindling villages.

Metlakatla has a long history of seeking freedom, both religious and cultural, and now sustainable economic freedom, with the current challenge as to how best to keep youth employed locally to assure the sustainability of both the community and the culture. This particularly exciting challenge and vision is already a subject of local conversation; how to become the first Alaskan Native digital village in Alaska?! As recent video interviews with elders attest; “Digital is already a part of native culture.” “Technology has created new interest among the young in their culture.”  “Now it is possible for tribal members to live and work anywhere.” 

Metlakatla can become the model for all Alaskan Native villages, across Alaska and potentially globally, as to how to sustain families, communities, and cultures by learning to leverage the collective individual talents empowered by new digital tools for education and how to “Make the living you want, living wherever you want.”

Local social media “trusted” mutual support networks with new mirror metrics will be validated by the actions, and voices, of locals of all generations.

 

Locally Maintained Egov Portals

A specific planned “Next Step” innovation for the Alaska Native Incubators is to connect parents and youth with the local anchor institutions to create a local Egov portal of the best online resources, and applications (apps) best practices to support local families. All community institutional stakeholders will learn how to identify best practices specific to their functions within the community. The state agencies, and separately, the associated local institutions, will post online their pick of the best appropriate resources by sector for meeting local needs. We’ll show tribal members how to create original online videos, accessible via mobile learning, showing the best online resources and broadband applications (and apps), from their Alaskan Native perspective, for public safety, health, education, entrepreneurship, energy, and more. Parents and youth will be tasked to have a voice authenticating their selections of what the best applications might be. 

 

The free web tools available make it easy for everyone to near instantly create and share meaningful video and rich media content in under an hour. For example: The Jing tool allows anyone to become a “citizen video professor” and to contribute to the community narrated online videos of their newest online discoveries, via mobile learning on a regular basis, to create a vibrant local learning society.

            Leveraging social media, the best educational, health, family income, and related apps will be shared among families on an ongoing basis, with parents and young students learning specific apps (Jing is just one of many such tools) that allow creating online videos to share with others how to use these resources, on an ongoing basis, as newer and better apps continue to be identified with increasing frequency and utility. 

            How digital access to new knowledge can preserve the cherished rural lifestyle of Alaskan Native communities, and create new connections with tribal members living outside the community, creates a social environment that gives a joint global voice to all to share those Alaskan Native values of generosity, sustainable living, and preserving our precious environment, as stewards of the Earth, and of each other.

Proposed Metrics and Deliverables

 

Everyone Becoming Both Learner and Teacher, Consumer and Producer, All the Time

New Mirror Metrics will allow everyone in a community to visually see, updated frequently, the positive contributions of citizens, such as the number of new participants, types of new media contributions shared, the number of new skills transferred, and the number of new mentoring relationships. An Alaskan Native appropriate model of learning new skills by creating new content of value to share with others, speaks to the tradition of Alaskan Native communal generosity.

As online portfolios document these volunteered media creation “gifts,” a portfolio to support future for-profit social enterprises emerges, both locally and beyond. All generations (including elders) will engage in multigenerational digital learning, including basic literacy, to realize their joint full potential.

Broad participation of the AISD schools, families, and community anchor institutions, will create the Alaskan Native Innovation Incubator as a sustainable Native Learning Society; a virtual village of villages. The following model will evolve based on local innovations, as a simple beginning;

 

Create a Model Alaskan Native Local Action Plan

The most effective way to implement rural innovation diffusion is to create the first Alaskan Native Digital Village Success Story; showing by example what’s possible. Our strategy is to work closely with the Metlakatla Indian community, as an intentionally innovative village - using digital tools to adapt to a changing economy and environment with emphasis on long-term sustainability.

 

“New Mirror Metrics” will showcase the expression of Alaskan Native Values by providing public online social recognition for those contributing to the community. We’ll post public progress regularly celebrating the number of active participants, the number of mentors and new skills shared, the number of new websites, the locally generated innovations, and more.

 

          We’ll model a self-assessment initiative for individuals and communities, whereby individuals and the community, lead by parents and youth, document their local skills and talents, both digital and cultural, their current websites, both cultural and entrepreneurial, and will identify who is interested in sharing what they know with others, and/or in learning specific new skills.

 

1.           Launching a MOOC as an Open Education Resource. The project launch will be a Massively Open Online (short) Course to announce the project goals, and provide free access to the methods and training resources, inviting other villages (without funding) to participate. Multiple social media feeds will allow monitoring daily progress by anyone, anywhere, and will be a key incentive for participation and creativity locally, and regionally.

2.           Provide Short 1 Hour “Create and Share” Awareness Events, including hands-on workshops, focusing on creating online celebrations of local culture. A key social innovation will be to include publicly visible social recognition for those who gave their time to help others gain digital skills. Emphasis would be on an initial community self-assessment, with ongoing celebration of online public measures of progress.

3.           Create Online Self-directed Educational Activities for Parents to Engage Online with Their Children on a daily basis to provide an educationally supportive environment in the home. An emphasis would be on "Growing an entrepreneurial culture across all generations."

4.           Create Intergenerational Activities Where Elders and Youth Can Learn Together About culturally appropriate broadband applications with emphasis on digital storytelling activities that result in preserving elders wisdom and stories via rich media for all future generations. We’ll reunite the generations by having youth identify how elders can benefit from health apps, online telecare, online shopping, and how to overcome elders isolation, loneliness, and depression by reconnecting with distant family members via Skype and social media.

5.           Create an Online Clearinghouse of "Show-Me" Video Examples of outstanding broadband innovations and applications from individuals, other villages, and global sources, to raise awareness in all Native communities as to how they might consider leveraging their available digital communications opportunities. Free online short lessons will quickly show how anyone can learn to teach others online, easily; Everyone both learner and teacher, consumer and producer, all the time.

6.           We’ll Seed Local Digital Entrepreneurial Businesses to deliver digital skills training and expertise locally, offering advanced entrepreneurship training to volunteers who agree to create free websites and online videos to serve local needs, to be used as product examples for their future online services offered to native villages both within, and beyond, Alaska. The media creation community contributions that volunteers post online will be dedicated, in potlatch fashion, to honor individuals who have lived by Alaskan Native values. These innovations will build robust Eportfolio online resumes to support for-profit “instructional entrepreneurship” social enterprises.

7.           Create the Means for Ongoing Sharing of Local Innovations Between Villages as a functional “community of communities” sharing innovations, resources, and mentors - in recognition of the benefits of a mutual support network; the power of all of us, as has been the Native Tradition for millennia.

 

Risks and Contingencies:

The core challenge, as Google’s Kansas Cities projects attest, is 90% sociological, 10% infrastructure. Our priority will be on establishing ownership of the project at both the individual and community level, by celebrating the new media creations by citizens, for citizens, establishing the value of new knowledge for creating a sustainable community. Alaska’s connectivity options vary widely, creating an outstanding testbed for innovations on how to assure specific needs are met with specific resources. This is a very exciting area for innovation as “Value Bandwidth”, and “Human Bandwidth” can be proven to effectively supplement the lack of fast broadband.  This proposal will showcase many scalable “Low Cost, High Imagination” solutions.

 

Expected Outcomes at Conclusion of This One-year Grant:

The potentially viral design of our proposed scalable “Innovations Incubator New Metrics Model” will create - literally - a new “communities of practice” social media network leveraging the yet unacknowledged bottom-up boom in innovation. Mass inclusion and motivation is our goal; giving voice to all those good people currently frustrated by the negativity they see around them, and on the world news. Global change on a mass scale is now possible, and necessary, as we all come to understand we are one human family, now reunited in purpose, and increasingly empowered, online. Data on improvements in family incomes, student achievement, and much more will be documented.
We are limited only by our imaginations.

 

Timeline for Implementation: February 1, 2014 – February 1, 2015

 

Project Launch event: February 2014

Bi-monthly Inclusion training events

-              Online training and social media outreach initiated

-              8 three-day monthly events led by Lone Eagle Consulting

-              8 three-day monthly events led by local innovators

-              Concluding Celebration and outreach planning and marketing

 

Note: Summertime is fishing season June, July, August

 

Contact information

 

Project Director

Mr Bart Mwarey

Principal

POB 100

Metlakatla Alaska 59333

PH; 907 617 0667

Email: bmwarey@aisdk12.org

 

Social Entrepreneurship Training Specialist

Frank Odasz

President of Lone Eagle Consulting

2200 Rebich Lane

Dillon, MT 59725

PH: 406 925 2519
Email: frank@lone-eagles.com

 

Personnel Backgrounds:

Bart Mwarey is currently an administrator for AISD. Bart was a key innovator for the first Alaskan Native sponsored online charter school in Alaska in 1998. Dozens of innovative charter schools have since resulted from this first visionary effort. Bart has a broad and diverse background working in villages across Alaska, Hawaii, and the South Pacific Islands. Bart also has extensive Native American contacts. Bart and Frank met in 1998 when Frank was asked to provide the first Internet workshops for 11 villages on the Yukon. Ever since, we have talked about creating opportunities to work together to create the most scalable village digital empowerment model possible.

 

Biography: Frank Odasz, President, Lone Eagle Consulting

Founded in 1998, Lone Eagle specializes in fast-track online Internet training for rural, remote, and indigenous learners. Lone Eagle offers strategic design for local, regional, state, and national broadband awareness and adoption campaigns, specifically for vulnerable populations.

 

As Lone Eagle President Frank has been a prolific and aggressive advocate and presenter at national and international conferences on rural and indigenous broadband training leading practices, 21st Century Workforce Readiness, Rural Ecommerce and Telework Strategies, and online learning *for ALL. Broadband awareness and adoption training programs require motivational incentives for collaborative engagement, volunteerism, and instructional entrepreneurship, utilizing social media and Internet video, focused on new social metrics and measurable outcomes.

 

While serving as faculty at the University of Montana; Western, 1985-1997, Frank founded the Big Sky Telegraph network; connecting one-room rural schools online. Since 1988, Frank has been teaching teachers and citizens online courses via multiple universities and rural workforce projects. Frank currently teaches online graduate courses for educators on best use of the Internet in the K12 classroom and designing online courses for K12 for Alaska Pacific University and Seattle Pacific University.

 

As one of the early pioneers of both online learning and community networking, Frank served on the founding boards for both the Consortium for School Networking and the Association for Community Networking. Resume and bios: http://www.bbcmag.com/2013s/13bio/Odasz-frank13.php

 

State-of-the-Art Epublishing and Fast-Track Entrepreneurial Examples:
http://lone-eagles.com/digitizing-alaska2.htm  Created for “Digitizing Alaska”

 

Lone Eagle Consulting’s Online Alaskan Native Specific Entrepreneurship Curriculums

http://lone-eagles.com/guides.htm

15 years experience providing online recertification courses for Alaskan Educators, and creating online courses for Alaskan Native youth and adults focused on “Rural Ecommerce and Telework Strategies” and 21st Century Workforce Readiness (digital entrepreneurship for Alaskan Native High School Dropouts.)  National and International activities summary; http://lone-eagles.com/expertise.htm

 

Background:  Strategies for Measurable Mass American Innovation
http://lone-eagles.com/Americas-Challenge.doc