Use AI to understand and share Tutor/Mentor ideas

Below is a graphic I've shared for over 25 years. It encourages people to read my newsletters, blog articles, PDF visual essays, etc., then create new media that shares their interpretations with their networks, so more people become strategically engaged in building and sustaining programs that reach K-12 youth in high poverty areas with support and learning opportunities that help them through school and into jobs and careers.

If you browse through articles posted on this blog since 2006 you'll see many examples of interns taking this role. I continue to encourage high schools and colleges to set up formal programs where students learn to do this as part of an active community-building effort, focused on the area surrounding the campus where they are located.

Last week a retired college professor from Western Kentucky demonstrated this.  The graphic below is from a blog article he posted. Included in the article was a podcast where two people discuss the material Terry was reviewing. 

In his article Terry introduced me to an artificial intelligence tool called Google Notebook LM.  The podcast has a man and a woman talking about the information being reviewed. They sound real.  In fact, I had to ask Terry if they were real. No.

I tested this over the weekend, asking it to look at some of my blog articles.  Yesterday I asked it to look at two article I'd written in past years about the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.  

I posted the notes created by this review in this article on the Tutor/Mentor blog.  In it, I included a link to the podcast where that material is discussed.

The podcasts have some inaccuracies.  They often over-state what I've been doing and add in extra thoughts that were not part of the blog articles being reviewed, and were not part of any work I've been able to do.  

Yet, they demonstrate a long-term goal, that groups of people would look at the information I share and start discussions that create a better understanding, and support actions that build and sustain youth-serving programs in high poverty areas of Chicago and other places with concentrations of persistent poverty.

I encourage you to test this out. On the www.tutormentorexchange.net website are links to blogs, videos, PDF essays, past newsletters, etc. that I've created since 1993. 

They were seen by too few people. You can bring them to life and to more people and perhaps create the movement needed that changes what communities, businesses, philanthropy and government does to make high quality, mentor-rich programs available in more places.

Share what you create with me on one of these social media channels. 

I continue to depend on contributions from a small group of people to keep sharing these ideas. Visit this page and add your support if you're able. 

Take a learning journey through Tutor/Mentor web library

In 2010 a volunteer who was looking at the resources of the Tutor/Mentor Connection wrote a blog article titled "Thinking like Google", in which he compared the T/MC to Google. He wrote,

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".

I've built a huge web library and I've created a variety of PDF essays over the past 20 years 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 I point to these via email newsletters and social media, I've been looking for new ways to introduce these concepts.

How about a WebQuest?  How might I motivate students and adults to take Michael's advice and begin to journey through my web library, and as they do, share what they are learning with people in their own network, so they begin their own journey through this information.

Several years ago I began to learn about WebQuest and I created an animation to introduce this concept. You can view it on YouTube

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

Making a map, class assignment, animation.

Doing a web quest.

Interns were on this journey for short bursts of time every year between 2006 and 2015.  Here's a page that shows work interns have done in the past to guide people through this information.

I've been updating the links on the web library so all are working, and I keep adding new links. I also keep adding new blog articles here, here and here. Some of the articles written 10 years ago are as relevant today as they were then, so while it's important that you subscribe and follow new articles, it's also important that you visit the past and read some of those articles.

Here's a visualization done by one of our past interns that illustrates the goal of supporting groups of learners in many sectors, who each look at maps to determine where youth and families need more help, and what programs are already operating in those areas.....who need constant support to constantly improve and stay available.

The links in the web library point to more than 200 youth serving programs in Chicago and others around the country. They point to research articles and to business and foundation web sites.  They represent a large ocean of ideas you can use to help programs grow, by borrowing good ideas already working in different places, rather than by starting from scratch on an on-going basis.

Students could be looking at the web library and could be creating their own presentations to draw adults and other students from their own community into this information, and into actions that lead to the growth of more programs in more places that help kids move through school and into careers.

If you're doing this, please share your links so others can learn from you. If you're interested in exploring this idea with me, let's connect on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

10-13-2021 update - in the Cabrini Connections program that I led from 1993 to 2011 we created a COOL CASH program to try to motivate teens to go into the Tutor/Mentor Connection library, looking at links in specific sections, then writing about the ones they found the most interesting or useful.  Here's an archive page describing that program.  Unfortunately I left before we were really able to instill this form of learning among our teens.

New Interns at CC, T/MC

This graphic was the way Cho In Hee introduced herself today in the Tutor/Mentor Connection on-line Forum.

She and Jongseop Won are starting six week internships with Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection. They will be creating visualizations to help communicate T/MC ideas to leaders all over the world who might understand the T/MC through these presentations and reach out to support us in the ways suggested.

In addition, Joseph Kreul has also joined us this week, as part of a six month internship program sponsored by The Adler School of Professional Psychology

As each volunteer and intern goes through this service and learning loop we hope they know more about poverty and ways leaders need to provide consistent, long-term support to organizations helping kids grow up. We also hope they learn to share this with the colleges they represent, their friends and family, and with people who visit our web sites, so that more people will become involved because of what these students communicate during the time they are with us, or in the future.

You can see from this post that the service learning loop graphic was created by an intern from Hong Kong who was with us in 2007.