Videos Created By Interns

Since 2005 interns from Korea, China and local universities have been creating visualizations and videos to communicate the ideas and strategies of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and to draw volunteers and donors to programs like Cabrini Connections.

This page was created to serve as a library of these. I hope you'll visit and share these ideas. I also hope that youth from high schools, collages, non-school tutor/mentor programs and other organizations will create their own videos, with the same ideas and call-to-action, drawing volunteers and donors to youth organizations in every part of Chicago, and every city in the country.

New Assignment. A Quest!

I've created a variety of PDF essays that are intended to help people learn ways to support the growth of volunteer-based tutoring, mentoring and learning programs in high poverty neighborhoods. While these can be read on line, I've also presented them to students and volunteers. Going through this information using the PDF can be quite boring. So I've been looking for new ways to introduce these concepts. This is an animation I made to introduce this concept. New Assignment. A Quest. by tutormentor1 on GoAnimate

Video Maker - Powered by GoAnimate.

Here are a couple of other animations introducing students to a web quest.

Making a map, class assignment, animation.

Doing a web quest.

Look at work interns have done in the past to guide people through this information. As new projects are created we will add them to our web sites, and they become tools students can use to bring more people together in their own neighborhoods to do the work of building and sustaining mentor-rich non-school programs. Try it!

Expanding Networks Supporting Inner City Youth

This is a presentation done in May-June 2011 by Interns from Illinois Institute of Technology. It is an example of the type of work youth in high schools and colleges throughout the country could be doing to help solve complex social problems. Social Network Analysis - Mapping growth of a Network Visit the Tutor/Mentor Connection Intern group and add yourself to this project.

Introduction of Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC

This presentation was created by IIT intern Mina Song in May-June 2012 using Prezi.com

T/MC Intro on Prezi

Students Sparking Global Thinking

In the articles on this blog you can see how interns have been looking at ideas that I originally launched in the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blog or in Power Point essays and then creating new visualizations to interpret these ideas in their own words. Visit the Intern Project pages for Spring 2012, Winter 2012, Spring 2011 to see how I coach this process.

I've been reading a book by Curt Bonk, titled The World is Open and it is providing me with a wide range of ideas for sharing information and supporting on-going learning of students and adults from any part of the world.

In Chapter 6 of the book he shows how millions of people are sharing ideas on platforms like YouTube. In one example he described how a power point presentation created by a teacher in Colorado had been viewed by more than 10 million people. This is that first presentation.

After the first version of the PPT was created and viewed by thousands of people others began to remix the video for their own purposes and locals. This is a version created by a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Because of the ways that many people have shared the original video others have created versions that many more people have viewed and shared. Bonk writes in the book "With the participatory power of the Web 2.0, one person in a high school setting in Colorado could now spark global thinking as related to school change ---not from a book or a series of speeches, but from a compelling six-minute video posted to the Internet."

In this page I describe a goal of students from throughout the world constantly creating and sharing new versions of the ideas I've originated over the past 18 years of leading a tutor/mentor program in Chicago and a strategy intended to help mentor-rich learning programs be available to youth in every high poverty neighborhood.

One chapter of The World is Open talks about the rise of open source technology and how universities are now putting their entire curriculum on the web for anyone in the world to access it.

Bonk writes "today a thought or idea can truly make an impact on anyone anywhere on the planet. It might not be today or tomorrow when that thought or idea is needed. However, once posted on the Web, it will likely be reflected upon or employed by someone sometime in the future."

Students and faculty who look at the ideas I've shared and who remix those ideas as part of their own learning and sharing can be part of this movement. Our collective thinking can be the catalyst for new and innovative strategies that increase the distribution of high quality learning and mentoring to young people in more places.

Browse through this blog and visit this page to see some of the projects that have been done. Join the Tutor/Mentor forum and become a part of this process.

Interns Map Growth of Network

During the May-June 2012 internship Mina Song and Chul Wan Park have been doing some very important work for the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC.
Chul spent his six weeks learning to use Gephi.com Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools and create a set of maps showing how the network at http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com has grown from three people in 2007 when it was created by Daniel F. Bassill, D.H.L., founder of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC, until May 31, 2012. The map below is one of many that you can see in Chul's report.

This map shows the 209 people who joined the Ning site by the end of 2009 and shows how some have begun to build networks of "friends".

While Chul was learning to use Gephi and pulling data from the membership files on the Ning site, Mina Song was reading articles from the various Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blogs and web sites. She used these to create five new presentations introducing the Tutor/Mentor Connection and describing the four-part problem solving strategy. Then during the past week she created a final project describing the importance of expanding social networks for inner-city kids and demonstrating how the social network analysis maps created by Chul could be used to show the growth of networks to potential donors and partners.

Mina posted links to each of the presentations she did. Click here.

Chul and Mina are college students from Korea who have spent six months studying at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Tutor/Mentor Connection has had a partnership with IIT for several years in which interns join us each winter and spring and work on projects like the ones Mina and Chul have worked on.

Our goal is that students from high schools and colleges all over the world will join in this project. You don't need to be in Chicago to look at the ideas we share and develop your own presentations to show how these ideas might apply in your own community.

What the Social Network Analysis project shows is the power of network-building. If just one person in a community has an idea for solving a problem, that person can share that idea and invite others to join in. If the person is persistent, creative and able to acquire needed technology and financial support, the network of people working to solve that problem should grow.

Using maps and network analysis tools can provide transparency to the process and can be tools for bringing people together who share the same geography and/or are affected by the same problem.

We're really grateful for the work Mina and Chul have done this past six weeks and for the partnership with IIT that has connected us with these talented students.

If you'd like to get involved just join the http://tutormentorconnection.ning.com group or introduce yourself on Twitter or Facebook.

Sense-Making. Role of Interns

This is a project created by Mina Song, IIT intern, to show the knowledge management strategies of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Mina had to read through many pages of information to build her own understanding before she could create this presentation. Mina is part of an internship program sponsored by Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) which has been working with Tutor/Mentor Connection for several years.

This is the second project Mina did, which shows the efforts T/MC makes to increase the number of people who look at the information we collect and share.

If you browse through articles posted on this blog since 2006 you can see the work of many interns and volunteers. This collective effort is intended to increase the number of people who are strategically involved in helping youth in high poverty areas of Chicago and other cities have access to non-school adult support systems that help them move from first grade to a job and adult responsibilities over a 10 to 20 year period of continuous support.

As one volunteer wrote in 2010 in an article titled Thinking like Google, "It occurred to me that this forum is essentially modeled on a similar format as Google's. Tutormentorconnection.ning.com a) looks for information, or content, and people relevant to the cause of tutoring and mentoring; b) organizes, analyzes, and archives that information for future reference; and c) utilizes those references for targeted advertising campaigns, social networking, grant-writing, and the like. Even more to the point, this forum is a way of attempting to grow the idea of tutoring and mentoring to scale, or to a point where it "tips".

The "In-Forming" Process works something like this:

1. Uninformed people interact with information and become informed.

2. Informed people interact with uninformed people, producing more informed people.

3. Informed people interact with each other.

4. To the point where new information is being passed along to all parties involved, starting the process over again."

With the help of students from hundreds of colleges and universities we can dramatically increase the number of people who are becoming informed, and then interacting with others, so they also become informed, and then more strategically involved in helping a city-wide network of youth supports grow and be sustained for many years.