Good morning -
I wanted to share some potential opportunities for getting any interested students diving into some social entrepreneurship projects I'm heading up that focus on empowering children through education. There are two initiatives I thought about that are very much in line with Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall experiment and other thoughts on self-education, but with a bit of a collaborative and crowdsourcing twist that I think makes a much bigger and broader impact:
1. Self-education in Nigeria. The father of a recent alum of mine lives in a village called Ugwogo in the Nike region of Nigeria. The children in this village don't have much access to educational tools / technology, and if they do it's not very reliable and consistent. I've got some students here at ISU and some other random folks at universities around the world working on developing ideas to bring self-education to this village (where there is no Internet, very limited electricity, etc.) Would love for a much bigger crowd to work on brainstorming and developing ideas to make a bigger impact (and develop a process that can be transferred to other remote locations across the globe).
2. Self-education for young girls in Myanmar. I have connected with a couple folks who are doing some amazing things in Myanmar (they are building
http://www.squar.asia/). In addition, they have an education perspective. I had this idea that I could pay $150 and buy and ship three tablets (http://ubislate.us/product.php?prodid=1). These tablets are very simple and slow from our perspective, but for someone who has never seen or had access to a computer, these tablets are life-changing. In a "package" of tablets, I would put a note that says something along the lines of "I am Doan Winkel and I teach entrepreneurship at Illinois State University in the United States. If you can use this tablet to contact me, I would love to ________ (this is something I need to figure out in terms of what would be a good motivation for them)" I would have the folks with Squar deliver this package to young girls in remote villages and poorer areas in Myanmar. If the girls can teach themselves to use the technology to contact me, I can engage and be of assistance with their hopes and dreams. If they don't, then at least they have access to technology that they didn't used to. I'm working on putting together other folks willing to chip in between $50 and $150, so we have a whole bunch of "packages" to spread access across Myanmar. The point is to give these girls enough motivation (intrinsic) to learn to use the technology to connect and learn. I'm thinking that perhaps groups of students or groups of business owners could pool together to get $150, and this could be a modern version of pen pals - if these young girls can contact students or business owners, they can begin to form relationships, learn about things happening in other parts of the world, etc.
I'm also trying to pool resources locally to send some students to Nigeria and to Myanmar during Summer 2014. A group of my students in one class is working on the Nigeria idea, and a group in another class is working on the Myanmar idea. Flights to both cost around $1800 each. I'm willing to kick in about $2500, and I'm working to get up to about $15,000 donated so I can send groups of 4 to each spot during the summer. Just a random idea. But how cool would it be if these students can work on ideas all semester, and then go to that location and meet the people over the summer. Hugely impactful!
So, that's that. Let me know if you, your students, your organizations, etc. would like to engage in these opportunities, and how you think we could engage them. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear those as well!
Doan
Dr. Doan Winkel
Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship
Illinois State University
Campus Mailbox 5580
Normal, IL 61790
(309) 438-2736
www.doanwinkel.com
LinkedIn: linkd.in/MPkBDA
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/doan.winkel
Twitter: @Trep_Ed
Free Help From Me:
https://www.sohelpful.me/doanwinkel
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