There are many models of alternative education and each has its place.

Shai Reshef founded University of the People in 2009 and I think this is a model that we should sit up and take a look at.

Here is what UofP says about itself.

Economic and geographic constraints exclude millions of people from higher education. With the aid of technological developments and the help of volunteers, however, access to a tuition-free online education is within reach courtesy of University of the People.
University of the People is a nonprofit venture that is beginning to revolutionize higher education by providing universal access to tuition-free online education, even in the poorest areas of the world.

I love the way Reshef looks at what he has started, not as competition with other institutions, but a model that fits a space where nothing is being offered.

We’re not here to be an alternative to Ivy League universities, we are here to be an alternative for people who have no other option to get access to higher education. We hope that this model will be duplicated and adopted by universities and governments of developing countries to educate even more people around the world. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re just taking everything that’s out there, wrapping it together and creating a university out of it. Everyone can do this.

Imagine just for a moment if each and every traditional university had a people’s university arm!

And I am not so sure that this would even be a difficult task.

The 1st question people ask is why am I leaving Zayed University after 12 years?

Zayed University has been a great place to work and a fantastic personal innovation incubator for me.

But how often are you given the opportunity to not only dream about how you might teach journalism, public relations and advertising for the world we live in but actually do it? In this world almost never.

Well, I have been asked to join the faculty of CUD and not only dream but do.

Very soon I am going to find myself with my feet in 3 places.

I will be a teacher.

I will be an administrator.

I will be an innovation lab leader.

In all 3 scenarios there is going to be a need for extreme motivation.

New programs have very particular emotional ups and downs for everyone making motivation job #1 for me.

As would happen Inc.com has an excellent set of tips on just that, motivation!

Every one of the 14 Inc suggestions are great.

Here are my top 5 picks.

 Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

Avoid weak goals.  Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with “I’ll try …”  Always start with “I will” or “I must.”

Treat inaction as the only real failure.  If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can’t even learn from the experience.

Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

This course has changed a lot since we first started it, but it has always stayed very true to the core idea of combining what has been learned in the curriculum of the communication college to real world activities.

My latest projects are all based around sound.

Part of the motivation to work with sound is my love for radio and the ability it has to be the ultimate education tool.

And then there is the fact that my students have a huge amount of technology on their person daily.

Laptop, phone, camera, MP3 players and more.

So what if we could use a students personal technology, their skills and my passion for radio to create a learning tool for UAE Nationals and expats alike?

The project involves students finding a sound that reminds them of something in their life.

Students record the sound on their phones and import them to their laptops.

Once the sound is on the laptop they record and intro and description of the sound and edit the whole thing together.

The result is magic!

And the reality is that while my students are not recording experts they have all the tools and talent to work in sound NOW.

It is incredible what we can learn from others and never seem to get a chance to.

This is also the magic of a TED conference.

TED puts a group of people together for 6 days and stands back to see what happens.

Yasser and I hooked up on a bus and started talking education and change.

I had no idea, before I met Yasser, that there was an International Electronic Sports Federation based out of Saudi Arabia.

But it is with education that Yasser and I share similar ideas.

What Yasser is talking about is re-thinking the education paradigm around learning relationships and teachers rather than institutions.

Not a new idea but an idea that has fallen by the wayside since the industrial revolution.

I was fortunate to be able to talk to Yasser about all of this on Nightline.

And then there is Yasser’s attempt to go to Singularity University, he needs your help to get there.

Yasser also wants to put on another hat and advance desalination using solar energy!

I keep asking myself what if we hadn’t been sitting beside each other on a bus and started talking?

It truly is amazing what people around us are thinking and doing, too bad we don’t take the time to get to know the people we bump into.

Think the opposite of tabloid to the micro-point journalism.

I am talking about the long, full of detail, investigative story that we seldom get to read today in our commercial driven media.

Well sure if we are reading a news magazine we find some of these but even there the long story has become a rare breed.

Well  the old journalist can breath a sigh of relief, for now, there is a new kid on the block the micro-publishing effort called Byliner.

As Bloomberg Business Week says,

Byliner is one of the most recent entrants into the micro-publishing field, offering a selection of longer works by well-known nonfiction authors such as Krakauer, who wrote a long, magazine-style article about the alleged irregularities involving a charitable effort by fellow mountain climber Greg Mortenson. The piece was available as a free download for the first 72 hours—and saw more than 50,000 copies downloaded—and then was expected to become a paid download. Byliner said it’s planning to publish original works soon by authors William Vollmann and Anthony Swofford as well.

Byliner is offering an alternative press at an affordable rate, $2.99 for a Kindle or iPad download.

Byliner has only been soft launched, maybe they were testing the water, but there is no question there is an appetite for this brand of journalism.

50,000 downloads of the 1st story is pretty good.

Why not read Byline?

As Byline says itself, “Great writers. Great stories. Readable in a single sitting.”

Fingers crossed!

You might be saying, “what another film festival?”

But this is film festival with a twist.

ZUMEFF started last year as a student graduation project.

What usually happens to student graduation projects after the students graduate, nothing.

But this project took on a life of its own and was adopted by a class at ZU and they put on the festival again.

Have a listen to what it is all about.

I think this is really cool. Students not some big corporate entity with a professional organizing team and deep pockets putting on a film festival but a school and a group of 15 students!

And the whole thing was pulled together is a a micro window of just over 10 weeks!

So, what is the lesson here?

1. want something done well give it to a group of busy women
2. Zayed University is the leading University in the UAE for creative talent and community engagement
3. students can do the amazing things if we create the opportunity

WOW is all I have to say!

I like to think that some headway has been made, I am not sure.

What I do know is that there are all sorts of professors doing their own little bit to push the idea of information or maybe media literacy.

We need to do more.

I am never for importing ideas lock stock and barrel but when it comes to information literacy maybe we need a push?

Check this out.

Digital Literacy Skills Critical to Youth Civic Engagement

Ottawa – Media Awareness Network (MNet), Canada’s leading media literacy and digital literacy organization, today launched From Consumer to Citizen: Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement, a discussion paper outlining the important role digital literacy plays in ensuring youth become competent and engaged civic and political actors.

“In today’s digital world, civic and political bodies are racing to establish a presence online and a great many political actions now occur in virtual spaces,” said Jane Tallim, Co-Executive Director of MNet. “In our report we encourage educators to examine digital literacy skills development as a means for children and youth to positively and actively engage in civic and political life.”

The brief focuses on the impact media, particularly interactive technology, has on children and youth’s involvement in civics and politics. It looks at the current state of youth and civic engagement and includes a list of recommendations to help educators foster and support youth civic engagement in a digital world.

“Long term political attitudes which affect adult civic behaviour (in both voting and other forms of engagement) are shaped from a young age, so youth apathy must be addressed years before the age of 18. In our schools, however, civics programs are not keeping pace with the rapidly expanding online opportunities for civic engagement that are available to young people,” said Ms. Tallim.

Among the many recommendations, MNet invites educators to consider the potential downsides of limiting access at school to certain online environments such as social networking sites, asking educators to see these sites as effective tools to circulate petitions, display affiliations, join causes, and invite others to get involved.

For a comprehensive list of MNet’s recommendations and a complete copy of From Consumer to Citizen: Digital Media and Youth Civic Engagement visit the MNet Web site.

In the UAE political engagement is still being born, this is the right time to look at these ideas!

Maybe we need to borrow big time from what is being done by world leaders in information literacy education?

Maybe the Gulf Media Literacy Initiative needs to publish its manifesto and start doing and not just talking!

Dr. Badran Badran and Dr. James Piecowye are behind the Gulf Media Literacy Initiative.

How do I let students know I am in the office even if I am not sitting in my office?

I could use an email, twitter, facebook but then I am faced with the problem a student is not tuned into the tech messaging network.

For under $5 I have come up with a great solution.

I have taken a welcome mat and placed it outside my door when I am in the office!

Simple, efficient and effective.

Sometimes old-school just works.

Too often when we think of innovation we are thinking technology or complication or huge investments of capital.

Innovation does not have to be expensive or complicated at all.

Just as I believe we are all creative I am also a believer in the idea that we are all innovative if we are in the right environment.

Soon to be are the three words you need to hang on.

At this moment the space I have moved my classes to is a big echoing box with a few desks for good measure.

Funny about the desks in my class, I only asked for chairs and the facilities crew brought desks for good measure.

The 1st thing my students said, “this room is different”.

The 2nd thing my students said, ” where is the projector”.

The 3rd thing my students said, “I don’t like the desks”.

I am teaching a media history, media ethics and public presentation course in this space.

What we do have is a great wifi connection and a lot of walls to stick paper on in this space.

I have never been one to go on about the space I teach in with my philosophy having been that it is the content and presentation that matter the most, I was wrong.

I think content, space and presentation all share an equal part in the mix of creating the best possible education experience.

Remember education is all about experience.

I am not sure how the space issue escaped me as I have been talking about moving classes all over the place for a long long time and event have put the idea of the coffee shop class out there.

But this room gets me well out of my comfort zone and presents a whole new canvas upon which to place my education/experience tools.

Take a look at this room day 1 and imagine what it might look like in 20 weeks if the construction process doesn’t start first!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why are our primary school classrooms so inviting and warm and the University classrooms or lecture halls so sterile?

Space Matters! Yet at some point we think the content or thought process is more important, it isn’t, when it is just another equal part of the equation.

We spend our days sitting in relatively well furnished buildings dispensing the building blocks of information to the generation that is going to fix the mess we have made.

But as a rule we academics do very little when it comes to actually practicing what we teach!

Do we get beyond a dusty journal when it comes to sharing what we are doing with the greater community?

Do we take our ideas to the street or only to obscure conferences?

Do we even practice what it is we are teaching?

The sad and sorry truth is not usually.

Sure there are exceptions to the rule and so far an between that you can probably name the culprits who are breaking the pattern on one hand.

That is the sad thing about the evolution of modern academia, we are not asked to actually get out there and do.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP!

I live by that mantra.

I teach communication by day at Zayed University and by night I am a broadcast journalist on Dubai Eye 103.8FM.

My hope is that my students see, well hear, me not only teaching ideas but putting them into practice.

This year I was offered a rare opportunity to put my classroom exercises to the ultimate test, I also teach public speaking and presentation courses, to present at TEDxDubai.

Giorgio Ungania and Natascia Radice, the curators of TEDxDubai, presented me with the ultimate challenge do what I do in the classroom to a critical public audience and in only 18 minutes.

Put up or shut up in the real.

I agonized over my presentation.

Hours were invested in formatting the story and practicing the pitch, because my talk was a pitch to think about ideas.

And I will confess here and now I was more nervous than I have ever been, mostly because several of my students volunteered at TEDxDubai and made a point of telling me that it was their turn to grade me!

Well, I am here to report that the talk happened.

The story worked and I think people took home a nugget or 2.

You be the judge.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One thing is for sure what I did was exactly what I teach my students and a shining example of putting up and eventually leaving the stage!