The post eduFire expands its tech curriculum appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood.tv
We met up with Jon Bischke, founder of eduFire, in San Francisco to learn about the launch of eduFire’s new Tech Channel, an online video learning platform that provides live, interactive video classes in social media, PHP, WordPress and other tech areas.
In this video interview, Jon describes the new Tech Channel’s offerings and tells us how eduFire is using social media throughout the company’s platform. Continue after the jump for a full transcript of the conversation.
Full transcript
Katrina: So here we are in San Francisco. I’m with Jon, the founder of eduFire.
First of all, what is eduFire?
Jon: Sure, eduFire is a platform for people to teach and take live classes over the internet. So we’ve got thousands of teachers and thousands of students who are conducting live classes online using video, text chat, and audio, and other types of technologies.
Can you tell us about the new classes you’re launching now?
Jon: Sure. We feel one of the biggest things that are in demand right now are technology skills. And it’s an opportunity for people to learn something and find a new job or directly apply it to their existing job. So, we’re launching a tech channel where we’ve got dozens of teachers who are teaching classes in things like PHP, how to effectively use social media, how to implement WordPress, skills that a lot of employers are looking for right now.
We think that learning online is great for people because they can do it in their own time, they can do it from home, it’s very flexible. And we’re really excited for the potential for the Tech Channel, and are looking forward to bringing onboard lots of good teachers and people interested in learning those skills.
How are the teachers vetted? How do these teachers qualify to be teachers?
Jon: Yeah, so what we do is we have the community basically vet who’s a good teacher and who’s not using some crowdsourced techniques. So, teachers come on eduFire they post a profile, it’s kind of similar to a LinkedIn profile where they state their credentials and other things they’ve done in their past. And as students take classes from those teachers they rate those teachers. And what we do is we use an algorithm to have the top teachers rise to the top teachers rise to the top of our list and the not-so-good teachers kind of fall off. So over time you’re only seeing the best teachers on eduFire.
What classes will you be offering related to technology?
Jon: You know we’re really excited by a wide range of things. So we have programming classes, things like PHP and Ruby on Rails, classes around things like social media marketing have been popular -– some things like Facebook and Twitter and how you can effectively use those in your business. Other skills, like implementation of things like WordPress. And then other things too –- more casual learning, Photoshop, how to optimize your Macintosh, or whatever. So it’s a really wide range of things, but all related to technology.
How are you getting the word out using social media?
Jon: That’s a great question. We get a lot of our visitors who come from Facebook, who come from Twitter. A lot of our teachers will post messages when they’re teaching a class. Our students will often post messages to Twitter as well that they’re taking a class on eduFire. So we feel that social media is kind of a key component of next-generation education because people want to learn with their friends, they want to see what their friends are doing. If people are following a certain person and they find that that person is teaching a class that would be very interesting to them… So, social media has been very effective for us and we feel it’s only going to grow over time.
How much do these classes cost?
Jon: It’s all over the board. We have a lot of classes which are free, which is a great way if you want to dip your toe in the water and experience what eduFire has to offer. We also have classes that range anywhere from five dollars to anywhere up to fifty dollars. We also have a subscription service too, so you can pay thirty dollars a month and for that price you can really get access to almost all of the classes on our site. And that’s unlimited access. So if you really want to ramp up your tech skills in a quick amount of time, that’s probably your best value.
Do you find that the teachers are coming from all over the world or are they mostly here in the Bay Area or in the U.S.?
Jon:We have over 200 countries represented on the site. So it definitely is a global audience. The majority of our audience is in the U.S., certainly with technology, a lot of people in the Bay Area [as well]. But yeah, we get people from all over and that’s really interesting because you can learn how to program PHP from a guy in Germany. And when have you had a chance to do that before in the past?
Where can everyone find you on the Web?
Jon: It’s eduFire.com.
And on Twitter?
Jon: Twitter is twitter.com/eduFire.
Reposted from the envisionGood.tv site.
Related
• eduFire: Real-time Web learning (Socialbrite)
• MindBites: The how-to video marketplace (Socialmedia.biz)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b288bfc0-82d6-4a82-be53-54f65ff53c69)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
The post eduFire expands its tech curriculum appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>The post GoingGreen: Innovations in green tech appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>
Photo by Salem Kimble
By Salem Kimble
East Bay Green Tours
Earlier this month, amid the picturesque backdrop of the Cavallo Lodge in Sausalito, Calif., a flurry of venture capitalists and industry innovators came together at the GoingGreen Conference from AlwaysOn. There were all manner of industries represented, from cement that absorbs carbon (Novacem) to low frequency wireless technology for long range monitoring (On-Ramp Wireless) to completely architected materials (Nanosys) and everything in between.
In fact, there was so much going on, let’s break down a few of the more intriguing elements.
Smart designs for buildings
Project Frog, a slick and friendly outfit from San Francisco, showed off their super quick building construction from partially pre-fabricated buildings that minimize waste during construction, save 50 percent in energy once built, and go up in an incredible six weeks’ time. Their smart designs take into consideration the building process and include things like designing doors and walls to fit the size that the wall material is when sold. Their flagship installation is at Crissy Field in San Francisco.
Buildings are important, but perhaps more intriguing are the people who are re-engineering the building blocks themselves, as Novacem has done. They have an alternative to Portland cement (standard material used in the majority of construction) that has a lighter carbon footprint at the outset and over the long term. Says Novacem’s Stewart Evans, “The big win is that Novacem has the potential to not only remove the 5 percent [of carbon] from creation [of the cement] but to take out 4 percent of carbon [from the atmosphere] over time.”
Electric cars: From sports cars to ‘bicycles’
Aptera is a company with an entirely different strategy that currently has them legally classified as a bicycle — a car designed with only three wheels. Aptera’s strategy has been to tackle aerodynamics first and foremost in design so that less energy is needed for transport in the first place.
Tesla, the most widely known and covered in the press, strikes one as the equivalent of an Apple — emphasizing value beyond price and design focused development in which they build all their own software. Their most recent project, the upcoming roadster, is being created from scratch, which will allow a clean slate for the chassis and battery to have greater efficiency.
The less sexy but very economically savvy Bright Automotive, Inc. is tackling the commercial fleet market of delivery vans. They might seem ho-hum, but as an investment at scale they provide the highest economics savings, says Bright Chairman Rueben Munger. As investments, electric fleet vehicles “are price positive on day one,” he said.
Energy: Biofuels and geothermal
There were quite a few biofuels folks. It appears we’re more than fine when it comes to the availability of fuels as there is no shortage of biofuels solutions. Jatropha, the miracle plant of SG Biofuels that is easy to grow, doesn’t compete with food crops. They say they could produce cost-competitive biofuels at a price point equivalent to oil’s $42 a barrel. Similarly miraculous, Rentech offers “synthetic fuels for jet and diesel engines [made from] trash, sewage sludge, forestry and agricultural waste, energy crops and fossil resources.”
Then there’s the perennial grass feedstock Miscanthus from Mendel Biotechnology. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were engineered so effectively as to walk off the field and pump our gas for us.
Geothermal is something I haven’t heard much about lately as a feasible option, but Potter Drilling, backed by Google.org, is working on a patented technology that would allow much deeper drilling than is currently possible, which suddenly makes geothermal a viable option in many more regions. They are beyond the first stages of research and are working with a physical prototype.
There were also a few gasifer companies, including Sierra Energy and Zeropoint Clean Tech. Sierra Energy has an added bonus of focusing on tying in existing steel mills into their business design to revitalize old steel towns where many jobs have been lost.
As far as efficiency solutions and carbon tracking, the contenders in the field at this conference included Joule Labs, Greenbox Technology and FirstCarbon Solutions.
Technology: data collection applications
One of the striking presentations came from San Diego-based On-Ramp Wireless, a company with technology that harnesses uses and prices for wireless that don’t currently exist on the market. In simple terms, their technology harnesses low-frequency (non-regulated) wireless and allows for data collection within a range of up to 10 or 12 miles. That data collection application can be used on everything from finding a leak in a tube under city cement to automatically sensing that a farmer’s field needs watering.
Another technology leader was Nanosys, a San Francisco company with a vision for architected materials to become the modern equivalent invention of assembly lines.
Some applications of their work have shown up in reduced data center power consumption from (using higher density Nano Flash drives) and improved battery performance (re-engineered battery anode material) and remote phosphor for blue LED backlights. One of their intriguing materials is an engineered substance that when separated into various sizes in tubes causes the tubes to reflect light from an LED pointer in the colors of the rainbow. Unlike others in their nano-tech field, Nanosys has been working on technology development that is designed with the eventual large-scale production in mind from the beginning.
Altogether, it was enough new technologies to leave one’s head spinning, but in a hopeful direction. The overlap of sustainability and profitability is undeniable, especially when it comes to natural resources and large industries. I was surprised by the impression at this event that the greatest challenge lies not in innovation and creation of new technology, but in how those inventions and improvements can create a pathway to market and eventual widespread use.
Salem Kimble is operations manager of East Bay Green Tours. This is her first article for Socialbrite.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
The post GoingGreen: Innovations in green tech appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>The post Toward a Web of open video appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>Toward open video on the Web from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
A few weeks ago, before and after the Open Video conference at NYU, I sketched out the proposition that open video is a requirement for an open Web in two posts: The promise of open source video and Boxee and the promise of open media.
By some estimates, 90 percent of the traffic on the Internet will be video by 2013, so this affects free and open discourse online. Above is a 7-minute interview I conducted with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, who talks about how video is really separate from the rest of the Web in that it’s a much more closed system. “We need to look at how to make video a first-class citizen on the Web,” he said.
Surman said he hopes a concerted push toward open standards will “shift the market away from a black box video plug-in, where the video is separate from the rest of the page, to something where video can interact with Javascript” or other elements on a Web page.
Video today is locked up (technologically) and locked down (legally). In order for video to become part of the Web’s innovation ecosystem, Surman said, we need to be able to play, manipulate, transform and remix video in the same way we can with photos and data.
In the past two years, the vast majority of video hosting sites have settled on Adobe’s Flash as the format of choice because more than 95 percent of desktop computers and laptops can play them. But Flash isn’t an open source system, and video producers have been limited in how they can make video interact with other Web page elements.
“That may not sounds interesting to those who just watch videos, but it’ll be interesting first to video producers who can do all kinds of innovative things that we can’t even imagine now,” he said.
Firefox 3.5 may be a game-changer
With the recent release of Firefox 3.5, Web developers can now program video within the browser, bypassing Flash, QuickTime, DivX and other codecs altogether. “That means 300 million people will [eventually] have access to native video in their browser,” Surman said. Other browsers, including Safari, Chrome and Opera, are also on board the open video bandwagon.
Where firefox 3.0 was an upgrade for users, “we say Firefox 3.5 is an upgrade for the Web,” he added. That doesn’t mean we’ll see a shift away from Flash .flv video in the next few years, but now the door is open to innovation and experimentation.
Online video “will always be a contested space, but enough people love the Web that they’ll make it happen,” Surman said.
Watch, embed or download video in Flash on Vimeo
Watch or download video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download the original video from Archive.org or watch it in Ogg
Related
• Mark Surman’s tak at the Open Video conference in Ogg Theora
• Breaking: Firefox 3.5 is Released — A Historic Day for Web Video? (beet.tv)
• RiP: A Remix Manifesto: A movie by Brett Taylor
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4b5ba78b-6ce1-4b0b-8fb5-28dc29323648)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
The post Toward a Web of open video appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>The post Helping nonprofits grapple with technology appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>Nonprofits + technology = NTEN from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), talks about the organization’s mission in helping nonprofits learning how to effectively use technology and social media.
She talks about three new reports that should be of interest to nonprofits — including the just-released 2009 Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report and Small is the New Big: 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study — as well as We Are Media: Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits, a workshop/training series led by Beth Kanter.
All of the conference’s sessions are available as free audio downloads (plus PowerPoint presentations). In addition, several webinars are available as well, such as Using Facebook Pages for Social Good, $30 for members, $60 for nonmembers.
The interview was conducted at the conclusion of NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco on April 28, 2009. (Holly’s a friend, so we got a little silly at the end.) We had to find a makeshift “set” on a staircase at the San Francisco Hilton because there was no place anywhere to shoot with decent lighting and that wasn’t crazy-loud.
Next year’s NTC will be held in Atlanta in early April, and I hope to be back.
Coming up before that: ForeSee Results’ Nonprofit Website Study: Building Donations and Loyalty through the Web Channel, a free webinar on May 27.
Watch or embed the video on Vimeo
Download the video in H.264 at Archive.org
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
The post Helping nonprofits grapple with technology appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>The post Tools galore at Women Who Tech Telesummit appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>The summit Women Who Tech brings together talented and renowned women breaking new ground in technology who use their tech savvy skills to transform the world and inspire change. We provide a supportive network for the vibrant and thriving community of women in technology professions by giving women an open platform to share their talents, experiences, and insights.
On May 12, 2009 the second annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit (held via phone and web) brought together hundreds of women from across the US and abroad in the non-profit, political and business world for an incredible lineup of thought provoking panels featuring technology change makers such as Joan Blades of MoveOn and Moms Rising, Allison Fine of Personal Democracy Forum, Lynne D Johnson of Fast Company, Charlene Li, Holly Ross of NTEN, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Lisa Stone of BlogHer and more.
I had the great honor of moderating the panel Tools Galore in Online Communications:
From Google Earth to Wiki’s and Twitter this panel will give you the nuts and bolts of the latest tools organizations can utilize to ramp up their next online campaign. Panelists: Natalie Foster, DNC; Rebecca Moore, Google Earth Outreach; Laura Quinn, Idealware. Moderator: Amy Sample Ward, NetSquared
The sessions were short (only 50 minutes!) but packed in a tremendous amount of information. Here’s a rundown of the Tools Galore session. See the slide deck above and notes from the panelists below:
Websites, Email & Constituent Management from Laura Quinn
Your website is you, online.
For many people who find you online, your website is the organization. Does it say what you really want it to about your organization? Your website should tell people who you and what you do. It’s also a good idea to use a content management system to manage your website’s content and updates, like WordPress, Joomla, and Squarespace. There are quite a few options for doing this, some open source and free others not. Idealware.org has reviews of many of these tools as well.
Email is a critical channel.
Use email to reach out to your constituents to let them know what you’re up to or to ask them to take action. New tools get talked about a lot, but don’t get caught up in new sexy tools and forget about the power of email. With email newsletters and emails as part of your campaigns you can move your supporters up the ladder of engagement to take more actions and help you more and more.
The details of your emails are critical. Things to consider and target include:
- sender line: who is your email “from”
- subject line: what are you saying before the email is even opened?
- opening: do you make your email seem personal, use your database to insert members’ names
- design: is it clean? does it rely on graphics/images?
- spam filters: are you using spam-like words in any of your content?
- take action: are your calls to action clear and immediately stand out
- footer: is there an option for opting out or unsubscribing?
There are quite a few tools for creating, sending and managing your enewsletters and email campaigns. Two tools include:
- 10,000 emails per month free for 501c3s
- After 10,000 emails, prices are reasonable.
- Reliable and sophisticated, though complex in areas
- Strong in deliverability and integration
- $29.95/month for up to 20,000 emails, and $2/thousand after
- Great template options, including custom designs for $199
- Reliable and sophisticated, though complex in areas
- Sustainable product and solid support from a nonprofit specialist
Don’t forget your Constituent Database.
Think carefully about your constituents when setting up your database or management tool. Consider the groups you will want to track or by which you will want to arrange members: donors, activists, organizers, stakeholders, partners, volunteers, supporters, and so on. Depending on your goals and your work, you may want to use a constituent management tool that is really good at tracking actions and activists, but not as good at other things. Or, you may need to get one that can work for many kinds of groups. Everything revolves around the audience.
Social Networks & Twitter from Natalie Foster
Two Principles:
1. Firstly, know what you want to get out of your campaign or communications online. What is your real output? 2. Prioritize your ROI around the biggest impact, whether that’s raising funds, engaging people, or something else. Email still gets a good response – if it will best help you reach your desired output, don’t feel obligated to short change your capacity there to try to use social networking or something else.
The trust that comes with using social networks (engaging people you know, who engage the people they know, and so on) is what creates the power of using social networking tools.
Facebook General Growth data:
- More than 200 million active users
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
- More than 3.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
- More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day
- More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day
A couple of examples:
- GreenPeace didn’t have everything they needed to conduct an email campaign so they set up a Myspace profile. They were active and dedicated to making it work and raised 90,000+ friends. They were able to use the platform for organizing offline events, finding and collaborating with volunteer organizers, and more.
- Natalie has found that many more people are online and available to take action or respond in the evening – sending a message or call to action via Facebook in the evening can garner far more responses
Twitter still has a small user base compared to all those who are generally “online” – compared to those with email, for example. But, if you have a good percentage of your constinuents who are early adopters and tech savvy, it’s a great place to be. And it’s something to monitor regardless as it is growing more and more.
Twitter data:
- An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are registered each day.
- Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
- Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
A couple of examples:
- Recently, Rep. Butterfield was speaking from the floor about the proposed energy bill on the hill. Representatives from Energy Action Coalition were present at the hearing and were using Twitter to send updates from the White House in real time to those on the outside following along. This was a great way for EAC to create a meaningful channel into the discussions and to maintain transparency.
- The White House opened up their Twitter account during the peak of the Swine Flu hysteria. They accepted questions via Twitter and then had an expert reply via the White House blog. A great example of using Twitter for real information exchange and for conversation.
Helpful resources on Twitter:
- Pew Internet report
- O’Reilly New Radar Report: Twitter and the Micro Messaging Revolution
- Deanna Zandt wrote this great beginner’s guide
- Very cool project from 2008: Twitter Vote Report
Google Earth Outreach from Rebecca Moore
Google’s mapping tools may seem like an obscure tool to use in your work but these aren’t traditional maps: the new generation of mapping technology is fully interactive, enables storytelling, and more. (Did you know you can embed an audio file in Google Earth?) You can embed Google Earth into your website to present information to your community that really helps tell the story of your work and your issue.
Google’s Mapping tools include:
- Google Earth
- Google Maps & MyMaps
- Google Sketchup
- Google Earth API (plugin)
- Google Maps API
Examples:
- Neighborhoods Against Irresponsible Logging (NAIL): When planners distributed a confusing and hard-to-understand map, many people in Rebecca’s local community didn’t “get” what kind of logging plan was really in store. She re-mapped the data in Google Earth and shared the new map with community members, local politicians, and presented it at the community meeeting to a much different response. Al Gore signed the petition, other politicians wanted to see it, and more. The new map galvanized the community because they were able to really understand the impact of the plan. With the information and story this new map was able to convey, they were able to stop the logging plans. Read the full case study here.
- Appalachain Voices: With ILoveMountains.org, Appalachain Voices created an always-available tour for politicians, activists, and interested citizens to fly over areas of the Appalachain area of the USA devestated by coal mining. Raising awareness and providing local communities a venue for sharing their story. You can read the full case study here. Impact of the campaign: 13,000+ people from every U.S. state and 30+ countries signed their online petition to stop the dumping of mountaintop mining waste into waterways; More than 150 congressional co-sponsors from the U.S. House of Representatives; EPA just halted all new permits and ordered a review of the practice.
How Google Earth & Maps can help Non-Profits:
- Show what is at stake – don’t just tell people
- Raise awareness for your cause and projects
- Reach a broader audience: More than 500M Google Earth users today; Drive people to your site; Gain members, volunteers, donors, media coverage
- Plan and visualize your projects and results: Where are we getting (or giving) donations? Organize projects, such as a volunteer beach cleanup activity.
- Educate, inform and move people emotionally – inspire action
- Influence decision-makers; impact public policy
To get started and to review more case studies, visit: http://earth.google.com/outreach
Questions & Answers
What do you think about the idea of organizations only using social media tools as an online presence instead of a traditional website?
Laura: Your website acts as a home base; where you can tell people who you are, what you do, and so on. If you are able to accomplish that and create a homebase elsewhere, then consider it. This isn’t about using social media so websites aren’t important; consider what your goal is online and how your website and other social media support that.
Natalie: It’s really about numbers as well. There are many people on Facebook; but far more people have the internet and are not on Facebook than those who are.
Rebecca: It can be generational as well, with some groups not necessarily wanting to or visiting your organization’s website and others not wanting to or visiting your other spaces online. It really depends on the audience you are trying to engage.
We are all after real world changes, so how do we measure our use of these tools on real world impact?
Laura: What are your goals? Link to things that can be measured. Web metrics, talking to people, emails (who opens, clicks, etc.). Don’t measure things for the sake of measurement. There are myriad things that “could” be measured. Focus what you measure on things that translate into real world impact.
Natalie: This is the question that I think the whole session is about. Tools are just tactics, just like phone-banking or canvassing. What are the tools that get you there – the number of friends you have on Facebook doesn’t mean you’ve won the campaign. If you start with a theory of change, you can then design tactics around it.
Rebecca: Need to be careful with sexy tools; we can forget what we’re really using them for, what the actual goals are. Think about what your trying to accomplish, then what kind of work, maintenance, and so forth will be required. In the Google Earth case studies, the projects all had real world impact but they remained focused on that, and not on just using everything that maps can do.
Why is Joomla listed twice? Is it considered more complex or simple?
Laura: Joomla can work for both a simple site and a complex one.
Can you talk about difference between keeping in touch, vs. call to action. What about idea that e-newsletter is “dead”? Mixed opinions all over the place.
Laura: the difference between those are relatively straightforward – keeping in touch is about passing on your good work, keeping people invovled with what you’re doing, while a call to action specifically asks them to do something. I don’t know people other than that psuedo-Obama-staff guy who would say that e-News is dead. Though that guy had an interesting point about possibly breaking enews down into shorter bits, and less of “newsletter” format. but I would argue strongly that updates are critical.
I see on the slides different services, is there one comprehensive program where we can manage everything?
Laura: that’s a really hard question to answer – it really depends on your needs. vendors will say they do everything, but the more they try to do, often, the less powerful they are in any one area. and more expensive. something like Salesforce is very configurable, so it can be a good option to track lots of types of constituents – but it will take considerable time and expertise to setup.
What is difference between a blog, social media tools, and websites?
Laura: Social media is a big umbrella term that includes blogs, social networks, other online methods by which people pass your message online from person to person. A blog tends to be specifically personal posts, in date order. A website could include some of these things, but tends to be more of a “home base” for your organization, including basics like your mission and programs.
Learn more:
This post originally appeared at Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
The post Tools galore at Women Who Tech Telesummit appeared first on Socialbrite.
]]>