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.