By Frank Odasz, frank@lone-eagles.com

This proposal is a template for action by teachers and students to quickly raise local community Internet awareness through a step-by-step community presentation series to generate interest in skills training available at local community technology centers. This project will create a replicable model for youth leadership in cultural communities showcasing youth-driven digital storytelling, art and music to quickly raise awareness and motivated interest on those uses of the web which best empower their local community and culture, and to create local web-based content.

This project is specifically designed for easy replication at minimal cost. Building upon extensive existing "open source" training materials developed by Lone Eagle Consulting, additional "open source" online instruction and resources will be created specifically to allow other cultural communities to replicate this timely project.

Lone Eagle Consulting strives to maintain the small circle of the very best Internet learning pathways, requiring the least time and effort, to deliver the highest levels of benefit and motivation for people of all cultures and literacy levels.
http://lone-eagles.com

Community networking as a field for local initiatives suffers from an enigma, no one has yet defined how to measurably grow collaborative capacity. This project presents a step-by-step self-assessing model with progressive milestones presented in an entertaining and easy-to-understand citizen engagement program. This project will create the first complete cultural Internet self-empowerment program.

Background

While Internet access is rapidly being deployed within Native communities, the vision for the best culturally empowering Internet applications lags with potentially damaging results. The opportunity exists to help Native communities leapfrog ahead of mainstream Internet applications through introduction of the best resources and applications for motivating Native communities. Unique strategies with emphasis on social Internet interaction, and creating local web-based cultural content, will dramatically accelerate the local understanding, acceptance, and adoption of Internet capabilities.

There are many communications and attitudinal barriers to rural innovation and change. The need exists for a strategy to kickstart rural community awareness in new and innovative ways. In every community there are early adapters to innovation, but they are often shunned instead of celebrated. This unique program would offer these early adapters the opportunity to show new Internet applications they have discovered which can help support the local community. These innovative applications would be shown at regularly held community technology events hosted by students and teachers.

In all cultures, youth today are the technology leaders and technology change agents, and can play a very important part assuring the sustainability of their communities. For rural communities to survive, they need to retain their youth by supporting them in identifying Internet employment opportunities that will allow them to remain in the community to assure its future.

As more and more communities are getting fiber optics, wireless, satellite, and other high speed Internet connections, they are beginning to realize they don't have a clue how to turn high speed Internet access into community sustainability.

Rural communities are looking for proven models of communities who have succeeded in creating inspired, motivated citizens able to use the Internet to continually innovate and teach themselves anything, anywhere, at anytime.

This project will create such model communities, and document the process, as a contribution to the futures of all rural communities.

1. Raise and maintain local awareness of what Internet benefits exist.

2. Engage citizens in training programs to quickly create motivated ‘self-
directed learners,’ and generate local Internet searching expertise,
allowing creation of high quality local content gathered from both
global and local sources.

3. Initiate citizen engagement programs to enlist citizens as local mentors
to establish a community talent database through which to create new
relationships that define, measure, and build community collaborative
capacity.

4. Develop local expertise able to maintain community awareness on an
ongoing basis on how best to take advantage of those Internet
capabilities which can produce sustainable communities in a world of
accelerating change.

Project sites need to provide their own Internet access, noting new less expensive high speed two-way Internet dishes are now available from multiple providers.

A community technology center will need to be provided, noting school and library computer labs are often unused after school hours, and that PC’s can be leased for as low as $25/month from multiple providers.

A sequential program of "Train-the-Trainers" workshops over a three-year period will be presented to youth and teachers to provide them with the best free web tools and culturally empowering applications possible within a limited budget. Online interaction and instruction will continue between the two face-to-face workshops led by Lone Eagle Consulting, at the beginning and end of each semester, to assure the development among all participants of the ability to continue to learn online. Locally hosted community technology events will be held monthly.

A fast-track strategy to create citizen awareness about the benefits of the Internet for rural communities is to provide community access to key technologies and engage youth to provide demonstrations and technical assistance as needed. One key technology is a fastfold portable screen which can be set up anywhere to provide a huge 10’ by 10’ viewing area. With a modern compact multimedia projector, the result is literally a portable theater that can be set up easily anywhere!

Other key technologies will be provided to enable digital storytelling, art, and music as tools through which they can tell their cultural history. These tools allow citizens to engage in culturally appropriate Ecommerce marketing of local crafts as well as online educational products such as cultural histories.

One key technology is the Sony CD-1000 digital camera. Using mini-CDROMs this camera can quickly create multimedia storytelling slideshows involving still photographs, photographs with up to 40 seconds audio narration, and mini-movies. A single digital camera in a rural community can allow anyone interested to literally become an author of digital content with the push of a button. Such digital stories can be shared via Internet to help other community groups kickstart their local awareness programs.

A family scrapbook can become a CD-based multimedia historical archive in the time it takes for an elder or citizen to narrate each photo. The Sony camera allows the convenience of taking photographs of photographs from as little as two centimeters away. Another application is anyone in the community can post a picture of their items for sale on online auction sites like Ebay (www.ebay.com.) With a digital camera, anyone can create a personal website with a personal photo in just minutes, to include photos of their kids, business, location, etc. Programs like Adobe Photoshop allow professional quality photo manipulations of every description.

A digital art tablet allows art and special effects to be added to photographs, or for original artwork to be created using over 100 artists tools. Such art and photographs can be printed on fabrics to create promotional T-shirts, quilts, and other many other creative products. Graphic artists use such tools to live and work from anywhere they choose. This technology was once prohibitively expensive. Today, a digital art tablet and software costs only $350.

MIDI musical keyboards costing as little as $99, and inexpensive composition software, can allow an extreme range of creative tools for publishing sound and music on the web, multi-track sequencing, auto-transposing and much more. Hawaiian elders have 700 hours of oral histories on the Internet in a searchable database, preserving forever their knowledge which would have otherwise been lost when the elders passed on.

Offline browsers, such as Web Whacker, cost around $45 and allow easy collection of literally thousands of web pages on laptops or PC’s for use delivering Internet presentations without the problems of slow display times, or the need for Internet access at the presentation locations. Offline browsers are profoundly important tools for use in computer labs with slow Internet access. Thousands of the most popular web sites can be easily stored and automatically updated for instant access locally. Web Whacker is available for free 30 day trials at http://bluesquirrel.com

CD-Write drives, costing as little as $130, allow for local creation of multimedia CDROM’s for preservation, expression, and sharing of local culture and knowledge.

As the web becomes more multimedia due to increasing bandwidth and evolving technology, access to community-based expertise for digital photography, art and music will become more and more important for both social and economic development applications. It is NOT necessary, or viable, for all citizens to attempt to develop all these skills. It IS important that they have access to this expertise, locally. This creates opportunities for new services businesses and for youth to create local jobs to allow them to remain as contributing citizens to support the future of the community.

The costs are so low, as more and more citizens understand both the fun and economic applications, more and more citizens will be able to purchase these technologies and create new entrepreneurial applications through using them. The challenge is to create new local relationships focused on the ongoing sharing of new skills and capabilities new technologies and Internet make accessible.

Building on the extensive existing instructional resources of Lone Eagle Consulting, participants will initially present a series of community Internet awareness presentations adapting provided resources and presentation materials for the local culture and context. Teachers will receive recertification credit and web-based integrated project-based learning curriculum with emphasis on culture, community service, and technology, for use with their students.

Similar to United Way’s visible Thermometer, which graphically shows local progress toward fundraising goals, a public display showing the teleliteracy level of the community and the number of participants at the workshops will provide visible ongoing self-assessment of each community’s progress toward its own self-sufficiency. Attendance at community technology event presentations will be linked to this visible display of support for the school and community.

The opportunity is to create a community competition to produce the best digital story on how their model community succeeded in achieving the best attendance for the most events, generated the best local content and innovations, and effectively engaged and trained the most citizens with the best skills.

Short surveys will monitor the changes in attitudes before and after each event generated through this program as well as collect suggestions for future events. Community incentives of additional equipment will be provided to encourage broad participation in all events, such as the opportunity for more public Internet access computers. Individual incentives will be provided such as the opportunity for creation of electronic portfolios for job-seeking, and participation in an Ecommerce apprenticeship program, as well as the opportunity for students to travel to other villages to present their multimedia storytelling.

Those communities to be the very first to implement this vision and strategy would post on the web pictorial narratives on how they led their community from vision to implementation, to measurable results. Those communities seeking model programs will be offered mentoring assistance by the successful communities, potentially creating a local cottage industry helping other communities create similar successes, worldwide!

A major purpose of these presentations is to encourage citizen participation in hands-on skill development through the local community technology center. Rural communities have an advantage of small size which allows them to leapfrog ahead to literally become among the most teleliterate communities in the world in the short term. Sequential skills achievements by citizens will be publicly showcased as important milestones linking individual skill development to community sustainability.

The recommended successive skill milestones and community self-assessment measures
         entails documenting those citizens who have:

Received their first email account and instruction on using email
Record number of citizens with email addresses!

Learned basic searching skills and searched successfully
Record number of citizens with searching skills

Learned to cut and paste URLs to a web page to collect resources for the local community, save and insert images, and create original text.
Record number of citizens who created community resource pages

Offered their expertise via online and/or offline mentoring services, as listed on a public community mentors page. (Community Talent Database)
Record number of citizens offering mentoring by topic, and list topics

Created and lead a successful online discussion on a topic of local interest
Record number of citizens leading, and/or participating in topical
discussions. Record volume of interaction.

Posted products for sale on a Web page or Ebay.
Record the number of citizens who have bought or sold via Internet

Created a culturally supportive web page or business.

Record cultural contributions and online teaching beyond the
community (identify culturally appropriate ecommerce and self-
expression examples, create a local cultural authenticity button and
review process.

                    Participated in a grant-writing and project-planning workshop

Record number of proposals completed and submitted

Individual Incentives
Those who contributed significantly during year one will become eligible for higher level training and opportunities. They will receive assistance to create individual electronic portfolios documenting skills achieved, their contributions to the community, and their personal employment interests to assist their job-seeking. Those who have benefited the community in measurable ways will receive training on viable Internet jobs which allow them to live and work from anywhere, as a reward for their contributions. Record the number of portfolios created.
Mt. Edgecumbe Student Electronic Portfolios
http://www.mehs.educ.state.ak.us/portfolios/portfolio.html  

Participate in a Lone Eagle Youth Ecommerce Apprenticeship program with
an instructional cooperative business offering online mentors and community
curriculum to other communities. Participants will create online instruction
for those at other project sites and their effectiveness teaching skills online
will be assessed by unique evaluative metrics designed specifically for this
project. More details at http://lone-eagles.com/cultureclub.htm

Methodology (Workshop Series)

The following community Internet awareness events offer citizens and communities initial workable event models from which to create their own Internet training and capacity-building programs with multiple levels of formal facilitation, structured training resources, and ongoing assessment metrics possible. The key being the step-by-step means to measure progress in simple but effective ways for ongoing community self-assessment.

The project begins with a presentation event, led by Lone Eagle Consulting, giving an overview of Internet possibilities, candid risks and benefits to traditional culture, the challenges rural communities face realizing these opportunities, and the goals and structure of this project intended to create a model program. An informal competition between participating communities will include prizes, recognition and potentially additional funding and equipment. Citizens will be asked to add their names to a listing of local project supporters with the goal being more will join as the program grows.

Digital stories of community successes will give credence to the following sequence of programs and services. Emphasis would be on how this project can assist participating communities in creating their own successful citizen engagement programs, web-projects and training materials.

The uniquely motivating kickoff presentation will feature digital photography, art, and music in a story-telling format and set expectations for broad local participation and opportunities. This presentation begins the visioning process,  to include consideration of the following tangible  Short-term, Low-cost, Action Initiatives for Measurably Effective Citizen Engagement.

As an initial participatory visioning exercise intended to help communities articulate a shared vision, and the tangible possibilities, a competition will be held for the best Press Release on what your community could, or will, accomplish in the next 6-12 months. (At minimal cost, through the sheer will of being determined to make something good happen.) And then, the main challenge will be literally to commit as a community to making the story a reality.

Initiate Youth-driven digital storytelling presentations as entertainments. Begin regularly scheduled community technology events to raise awareness and provide a showcase for local innovations and to connect those who need tech-training help with those who can provide it. (Youth and elders, particularly!)

Citizens need frequent informal opportunities to see how other citizens like them are benefiting from Internet innovations. Regular (weekly or bi-monthly) entertainment-style 1-2 hour presentations emphasizing visual web pages, digital art, digital photography, and digital music, presented by locals, particularly youth, would provide the means for generating initial awareness leading toward motivation to learn more. These exciting new creative tools will be announced as intended for everyone’s hands-on use and storytelling!

The social recognition for local innovators would be self-reinforcing. A sustainable local community-driven awareness program would result, supported with local and global web-based resources. The following community technology events are only suggestions, and it is expected these ideas will be adapted as necessary to suit the local community.

Effective searching skills can be taught very quickly, to allow posting locally the best-of-the-best the Internet has to offer. Literally putting phrases in quotes and using the "AND" command to combine keywords results in dramatic improvements in searching efficiency. Cut and pasting web addresses into a draft web page allows fast creation of resource listings which can immediately become posted on the web as local community resources. Searching for "email tutorials" results in long lists of email tutorials, as is the case for many similar topics. Everyone can learn to become both learner and teacher, both consumer and producer, all the time.

2. Hold a Community Web-raising;  

Similar to barn-raisings, bring your web-literate youth and citizens together with those who need help creating their first web pages. Youth would take digital photos of citizens as the enter the room, to be immediately placed on a web page and posted along with statements of support for local youth and this community project, and/or topical interest and perhaps a few lines of personal philosophy. Citizens would learn that support for their continuing to add to their web pages to benefit the community is now conveniently available. Everyone would also receive a free email account and be listed on a community "Online Citizens" roster and resource web pages.

3. Create a Community Talent Database …

4. Create a Community Web Content Competition    

with prizes for the best instructional site, best local resources listings, best collection of resources from other communities and sources, best Ecommerce site, and/or the most entertaining site. Or, hold a competition for the best (fun, or most rewarding) hands-on 15 minute web tour; a self-directed learning experience using only text and web addresses. A variation might be a public vote on the best digital storytelling and/or cultural expression creative efforts.

5. Ecommerce "Ebay" Web-raising;

Everyone with something to sell would be invited to attend the event and bring a sample product. Youth would take digital photos of each product to be sold and would post them on Ebay. Ebay is an online auction site projected to exchange six billion dollars in 2001. The local paper would report on how many items were posted and after two weeks, how many sold. A 10% commission would go to the youth for products sold, only, for purchase of community training equipment for the youth hosting the Ecommerce Web-raising. An alternative is to post all products on a local "Web Mall" web page.
Ebay http://www.ebay.com

Citizens would become aware of the effectiveness of Ebay, the ease of posting local products on the web, and would learn the basics of researching online to see what similar products are selling for. The collaborative interaction about Ebay will set the stage for local sharing as new ways of selling online are identified.

Native Alaskan Crafts
http://members.aol.com/glincoln45/Kipusvik.htm
Toksook Native Alaskan Crafts marketed worldwide!

Free Ecommerce curriculum, resources and replicable models of success would be shared via web pages created by local youth. A local Ecommerce club would post the most relevant successes for local replication and inspiration on an ongoing basis.
An example listing: http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks.htm

Simplest Ecommerce Start-up Models for Home-based businesses will
be detailed with successively more complex models in a step-by-step
format. Citizens would participate in creating local online courses
based on gathering the best Internet Ecommerce curriculum from
global resources, and adding to it successes from their local proving
ground.

7. Culturally Appropriate Ecommerce Models

will be identified and discussed along with similar examples for cultural community building, web expression, and online teaching. Instructional entrepreneurship can include teaching online about cultural histories.
See http://lone-eagles.com/alaskan.htm for relevant examples.

Alaskan Natives have been electronically lobbying the Alaskan legislature for years on behalf of subsistence living, from the remotest of locations. The global implications for political empowerment of indigenous peoples is unlimited. More examples need to be identified and discussions are needed as to how to share the vision more broadly.

Today, we’re hunting and gathering resources to fuel the home fires of local innovation! With the number of innovations in rural communities expanding exponentially, rural citizens need to learn the process by which their community can benefit from the innovations of other communities. Seeking out the best resources and innovative models, to inform and inspire local innovations, is a process that needs to be modeled for widespread replication. Emphasis on display of this content should be to create an attractive, simplified display in combination with ‘learning pathways’ and sequential skill-building online instruction.

Define the process of gathering the most beneficial resources, and replicable innovative Ecommerce models from other communities and sources to present locally to support local innovation. As rural innovations continue to proliferate they will be organized and disseminated, based on replicability, to inform and motivate rural citizens to emulate these successes.

‘Digital storytelling’ multimedia presentations would provide a local forum for raising awareness. Sharing presentations between communities via Internet and CDROM can provide awareness-raising opportunities for other rural communities without the funds for formal training.

This sets the stage for community-to-community mentoring and multi-community regional cooperatives. Development of training solutions for other communities, perhaps with a citizen-to-citizen mentoring component becomes increasingly viable. As broadband becomes more common among rural communities, regularly sharing highest value files of this type will become a very viable application of broadband.

Kellogg’s MIRA project (Managing Information for Rural America, http://www.wkkf.org) demonstrated a regional model for training citizens in applications of information technology and proposal writing during 1998-2000. A low-cost local version of the regional MIRA team-building model would be created where teams focused on specific shared interests are created with the incentive of assistance creating a community resource web site for their team’s cause or organization. Learning grant-writing skills and project-planning skills would include submitting real grant proposals for funding. http://lone-eagles.com/miramodel.htm

The existing Internet Guides and online courses created by Lone Eagle Consulting, listed at http://lone-eagles.com/guide.htm   would be offered as core resources to be locally customized as both print and online Internet guides with emphasis on local Ecommerce successes, examples of local web self-publishing, and local social Internet innovations. For example, "Echoes in the Electronic Wind" is a Native American version of "Common Ground – A Self-directed Cross-cultural Internet Guide."

With a CD-Write drive, costing only $130, multimedia CD’s will be created to preserve local culture and wisdom. CDROM High School yearbooks have proven to be wildly popular with students, and develop marketable skills in the authoring process. Other CD’s can be created as fund-raisers such as an audio-CD talking tour for tourists, and a pictorial tour of the local area covering the beauty of all four seasons. Unlimited creative possibilities will be explored. A local business could be created helping families turn their photo-scrapbooks into CD-based multimedia narrated slideshows, safeguarding the preservation of family histories. Multimedia resumes showcasing individual’s multimedia skills can be used to help those who are job-seeking.

United Way holds fundraising drives using a highly visible ‘thermometer’ to show the community how much money has been raised as an ongoing self-assessment tool.

Using a similar self-assessment tool, your community could become the first community to achieve a specific percentage of teleliteracy as measured by:

1. The number of citizens who have sent and received email and
    have browsed the web, and/or

2. Use email regularly, and offer their expertise via email
    mentoring to the community and/or

3. The number of local citizens who maintain a topical
     resources page and offer online mentoring as a
     way to contribute to the communities’ learning goals.

4. The number of citizens completing one or more of the
     following short courses and the number of citizens having
     mentored others in taking these courses.

15. Create a Community Skills Mentorship Program 

using the following three short online courses as a train-the-trainers program. Reward with social recognition those with the most mentees who achieve the important skill milestones in the step-by-step mastery learning lessons.

Three Easy Online Mini-Courses for Internet Beginners

Each of the following free online short courses for citizens could be offered as part of a community teleliteracy program with a certificate of completion and/or an embroidered patch awarded to those who complete the lessons.

Each of the following mini-courses require only four hours to complete and can be modified as necessary. Determine what your citizens need to know, and create opportunities for them to learn these skills online, either on their own, or with peer mentors.

Mini-course 1:  Self-directed Internet Learning
http://lone-eagles.com/eagle1.htm
Successive hands-on experiences are simply presented to quickly build the skills for using search engines, free web tools, and the Internet to learn anything from anywhere at any time.

Mini-course 2:  Mentoring and Teaching Via Internet
http://lone-eagles.com/eagle2.htm
Learn to help build the learning capacity of your community through successive hands-on experiences using Internet collaborative tools and instructional authoring tools for citizen-to-citizen instruction, and mentorship.

Mini-course 3:  Easy Internet Ecommerce for Beginners
http://lone-eagles.com/eagle3.htm
Successive hands-on experiences are simply presented to quickly build skills and concepts using free Ecommerce tools, services, and resources, with emphasis on identification of existing successful models that are the most easily replicated, such as Ebay auctions.

 

Baseline data will be collected immediately prior to beginning the project implementation. Quarterly reports will be created and submitted as required.

Pre and post surveys will be given to all citizens taking advantage of the workshop and online training programs showcased in this project. The pre-test surveys will include assessment prior to participation in the project of the level of motivation to learn Internet skills, attitudes toward learning about Internet and computers, current levels of Internet awareness and skills, and basic demographic and economic background information.

Monthly surveys will continually gather information on changes in motivation, attitudes, Internet awareness, and specific skill development plus time spent on specific learning tasks. The degree of peer mentoring will be assessed as well with awards going to those who help the most other people learn specific new skills. This project will demonstrate aggressively innovative evaluative metrics as well as new motivational techniques that will set a new standard for how best to deal with creating inspired and motivated citizens among those within digital divide populations.

A. A Social Recognition Evaluative Metrics Model for Skills Milestones

If it were clear what the step-by-steps were for self and community empowerment, it would help all concerned. If a member of a local community could conveniently see who has already accomplished a given step via a community web page, they could then request mentoring assistance from any of those persons.

Using existing online training resources, successive skills, and successful mentoring of others to acquire specific skills, would be publicly recognized and rewarded by a physical reward such as an embroidered patch or colorful lapel pins. Another alternative is a web-based "award" buttons for display of their achievements on their personal web page.

A unique program could be created where specific skills are taught by volunteer mentors, and mentees are tested to validate both their successful learning and the mentors’ successful teaching.

This is a simple, but community-driven model. The social recognition would be self-reinforcing. Volunteers could show off colorful arrays of pins showcasing their contributions to local teleliteracy and the public good. Suddenly, the path forward would become clear, for individual empowerment skills as well as for the collaborative dynamics of "building learning communities."

Social recognition of who has volunteered lots of time to the community is very important as an incentive to their continued motivation.

Community is the sum of what we give to each other.

Community is those to which we give our time.

The next step would be to assist those volunteer mentors that have proven their mentorship skills to learn how to easily create local online resources and mini-courses for citizens. Then, multi-site training and sharing becomes viable, with opportunities for similar recognition of effective online mentoring and sharing.

Specific instructional entrepreneurship opportunities for culturally appropriate online mentoring of youth and citizens in other cultures will be specifically explored.

B. A Non-intrusive Evaluative Metric Approach for Mentoring
      and Collaborative Capacity-building
          All project participants would have private email accounts and total security.

Each would be asked to participate in a volunteer program designed to access their measurable success learning to interact with others and to offer mentorship and teaching via Internet. Each participant would learn to create a simple web page featuring at a minimum a personal photo, a sample voice statement of purpose (sound files,) and statements of personal beliefs and commitment. Formal electronic portfolios will be created for those who meet the minimum time investment for contributing to their community.

While conducting project programs, participants would voluntarily archive and document messages they received validating effective mentorship, support, and relationship building, each message adding documented successes to the goals of the project and to their electronic portfolio. Annual assessments of who has touched the most lives, mentored the most individuals successfully, and perhaps invested the most time mentoring, would become the basis for social recognition "Community Contributions" awards.

Similar web-based button awards would give social recognition for successive empowerment skill development, mentoring assistance helping others develop specific skills, Time invested in helping others learn would be recorded along with time spent developing personal skills.

Peer assessment is recommended for assessing the value of the content contributions to the community’s self-empowerment resource pages, community service activities and innovations that support the public good.

Voluntary pre and post testing of motivation, attitudes toward technology, self-confidence with technology and self-directed learning, and perceptions of uses of technology to support kinship relationships would be measured at all community technology events. Volunteered anecdotal stories would be an alternative method of assessment, allowing for informal testimonials, storytelling, and critiques of the program at all levels.

Non-obtrusive measures of the volume of messages, and average message length over time could be supplemented with likert scale assessments of the value of messages. (Do messages get longer as people become more comfortable? Or do they grow in preceived value regardless of length, over time?) At issue is keeping this volunteer self-assessment methodology simple and as non-tedious as possible.

Replication of this evaluation component could be extremely important as the first proven method for measuring growth in community collaborative capacity, skills, attitudes and self-confidence both with using the technology and for self-directed learning. These specific measures give citizens something tangible to rally around and work together to achieve. Thus, building a Sustainable Learning Community becomes tangible for the first time.

Communities can compete in a friendly way to see who can rally the most support in the least amount of time. Many vision articles and cultural empowerment resources developed over the last ten years by Lone Eagle Consulting are listed at http://lone-eagles.com/teled.htm

A three year timeline will provide for thorough integration of digital storytelling and culturally appropriate web-based expression and instruction. Two, two-day workshops by Lone Eagle Consulting per semester in combination with monthly community technology event presentations conducted locally, would be the overall plan with local choice of the sequence of the 14 suggested community engagement activities presented in the methodology section.

Project Director: Bart Mwarey

Workshop presenter and online instructor: Frank Odasz

Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting, has extensive experience providing innovative Internet training and will be integrally involved in both the training program design and the thorough pre and post evaluations. Frank models the rural possibilities of becoming a Lone Eagle by teaching online through use of a high-speed 2-way Internet dish from a very rural location.

During 1997-1999, Frank spent 80 days presenting a series of three successive workshops for 11 Native villages on the Yukon and Tanana river drainages, following installation of their first 2-way Internet satellite systems, and for homeschooling families enrolled in the IDEA online correspondence program.

Lone Eagle Consulting strives to maintain the small circle of the very best Internet learning pathways, requiring the least time and effort, to deliver the highest levels of benefit and motivation for people of all cultures and literacy levels.

Frank Odasz,  averages over 50,000 air-miles/year presenting state-of-the-art workshops for educators and communities. Frank served as a teacher educator for 13 years at Western Montana College of the University of Montana, in Dillon, MT.  From 1988 to 1998, he was director of the well-known Big Sky Telegraph network, providing online courses to rural teachers . All Frank’s resources, courses, articles,  and services are accessible at  http://lone-eagles.com   Articles and resources specifically related to this project are listed at  http://lone-eagles.com/teled.htm

Biography and Resume: http://lone-eagles.com/articles/frank.htm

Budget Total
         $400,000 over 36 months

Sony CD-1000 digital camera for each site $1400
Provides high capacity storage for images, images with up to 40 seconds audio narrative, and two formats for mini-movies. Comes with slideshow software and is very easy to use to create multimedia slideshows in just minutes.

Wacom art tablet with Painter 5 software $350
Over 100 professional artists tools and special effects. Easy enough to elementary students to use, robust enough for accomplished artists.

Yamaha MIDI Keyboard $350
100 voices, styles, and songs on board. Includes autoaccompaniment.

Cakewalk 9.0 Software $90 allows multitrack sequences, auto-composition and transposition, and printing of sheet music.

Multimedia projector $3000
Projects crisp colorful display for both video and computer displays. An additional sound amplifier and microphone are recommended, perhaps also a hands-free microphone.

Fastfold Screen, $1000
Sets up quickly to provide a theater sized display area anywhere for motivating presentations.

3 laptops per site @ $1800 each

1 desk top per site with CD-write drive $2000

Digital video camera and editing software $1500

Educational site license for Macromedia Director $850

Site licenses for educational versions of Webwhacker offline browsers, Adobe Photoshop, and other presentation and authoring software should be considered.

Travel:
          Two site visits per semester for first 2 years @ $2000 travel costs/ visit

Instructor Stipends:
          $1500/day on site, $500/day offsite online work, always negotiable depending on special circumstances.