Saturday, June 21, 2008

[Net-Gold] WatchKnow - New Educational Video Project

Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:12:06 -0400
From: Larry Sanger <sanger-lists@citizendium.org>
Reply-To: Net-Gold@yahoogroups.com
To: Net-Gold@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Net-Gold] WatchKnow - New Educational Video Project

.

WatchKnow - New Educational Video Project

All,

I'm writing to ask you to help get a free,
non-profit, K-12 educational video contest,

WatchKnow

<http://www.watchknow.org/>

off the ground. It is currently under planning and
development, and I'm taking the lead in organizing
the project. I'm the lesser-known co-founder of
Wikipedia and now Editor-in-Chief of the much newer
Citizendium project

<http://www.citizendium.org>

which you're also welcome to join!


Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos
explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public
schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content),
non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall,
to see whether we can create that. We will set the
topics and invite teachers--and everyone--to submit
videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point,
we'll select a winner for each topic. We'll give the
winner(s) within each topic small prize(s), such as
$75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly
yet. We might award substantially more for certain
topics.


You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers,
but we are not affiliated with American Idol.
The project is being carried out as a new program of
the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired
Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American
education. I'm the project's Executive Director, and
we're now in the process of looking for and hiring a
technical contractor who will actually build the system

See:

<http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/724417944.html>

Read more here:

<http://www.watchknow.org/>

For future updates, please add yourself to the project
announcement list, watchknow-l

<http://mail.citizendium.org/mailman/listinfo/watchknow-l>


Because it's non-profit and open content, we of course
don't expect to make money from this project; it's
charitable. Thankfully, our start-up capital is more
than adequate for purposes of the beta-test project.


But we will need the help of volunteers to make this
work. Educators, ed tech specialists--especially
educators who make, use, review, and otherwise care
about educational uses of online video--are needed to
participate in a Video Review Panel, which will choose
topics and rate videos. On the current plan, panel
ratings will compose half of the score for any
individual video. We could also use your endorsement
and support for the idea!


See:

<http://www.watchknow.org/#3.%20Participation>

If you've complained about the paucity of
high-quality educational content online,
here's a chance to do something about it.


Regards,
Larry


-----


Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/
Executive Director, WatchKnow | http://www.watchknow.org/
sanger@citizendium.org

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