- Today we are talking with Joel the executive director of the connections project.

Hello,
Joel!
- Hi, David!
- So, tell us. What is the connections project?
- We’ve got repository of open access educational information which is formed in kind of
majuls. Majuls are smaller units and when in there offers or teachers come in and put in
together into what we call …coutures. The other part of your project is the platform site.
This is the delivery mechanism by which the repository information or all the information
stores in our stores facilities are distributed to the consumer. All the information in our
repository and our platform is open to the public. Anybody who has access to the Internet
can access all our information. The material is licensed and what they call a creative
common license. You can use it to do anything you want including making profit for
yourself. However, we do require that you attribute the material to its original author.
- So sounds like you’ve got a re-resource for various parts of the world. They have some
teachers, they have some equipment but they can’t fully finally content.
- Yeah, they would have describe who are they economically, educationally deprived, who
can’t afford to produce their own materials can come to connections and download
everything for free. We also have the other in the spectrum which is the highest academic
persuade of connections founder is Rich Beronack, originally arrived university professor in
digital figure processing. He and his colleagues have formed a user group on our side who
switched the envelope of digital figure process. The way that works is traditionally, if you
want to put out information to your colleagues, you publish a book or a journal article,
you’re looking at the best journal article for six months (more than likely it’s a year or two; a
book is definitely two years) and by the time the book comes out everything you put’ve put
in the book is out of date and it feels like digital figure process advances so fast. And so,
rather which the side that he needed some way to move the discipline along faster, and so he
put together this connections in kind of platform and software, and set up this repository for
materials and education.
- I understand a normalisation how teachers without borders is taking interest first. Give it a
brief description of what teachers without borders is.
- Teachers without borders is a global organisation that helps teachers around the world
better their teaching skills. They help them to improve the way they path information along
to students, they are deployed in, I think, 119-120 countries right now. Traditionally in this
country we think of educators as being people well-schooled, they’ve been to a list of under
granger program. Most of them have been to a masters program. That’s not necessarily the
case around the world. And we forget about being living here in the United States. The
teachers in Africa, maybe somebody who has been to elementary school and maybe
secondary school, and some of more modern areas, that’s as good as the gifts. And so, when
you come in into the classroom, those teachers have no idea of what to do, they don’t have a
structured curriculum, they don’t have to do any of the normal things that we assume that
when we drop our kids off at school in the morning as just I did with mine, the teachers
know what they’re doing. When you leave and teachers without borders is an organisation
that kind of comes along and help, teachers in remote parts of the world are kind of given the
better understanding of how to teach. One of the things that they were looking for was an
end of global deployment of educational content. They have people on the ground that are
distribution system and at the end of the wire. So they get to the end of the internet, it’s
gonna stop. They start there and so it’s a natural partnership where they would be able to get
the materials on our site and distribute it globally. It’s a really nice distributional platform for
their materials.
- Anything else about how connections will provide teachers without borders with something
that perhaps they can’t get anywhere else?
- We have a print engine. As courses are put together you can either keep on together online
which has no printing mechanism or you can print it on your own printer. Or you can print to
a print partner non-demand publisher and sell him value. You can receive it anywhere in the
world in the normal shipping course.
- I understand, you have some manic tone evidence of how a home school is taking
advantage of connections.
- We do. We’ve had home schoolers. Particularly in the area of music, which is not
necessarily the most popular area of content on web. At least, for a certain age group. And
we’ve got an early nice high schools, middle schools, late elementary schools, kind of
curriculum for schoolers on the web. The home schoolers are founded to be very very useful,
and it’s one of the normal popular model. This particular set of materials also gets significant
global use. There are people in Mongolia who’ve discovered the connection site and have
downloaded the material for their kids and they are now learning music theory in Mongolia.
They are also home schools because there is no school, they are no mattered for people so
it’s an interesting use for our side.
- And the benefits of connections to the Vietnam area?
.
- Vietnam has swift the ploid the connections as it’s digital education platform throughout
the country. And this was done through the project, through the Vietnam education
foundation that is again interested in setting the educational opportunities for the
Vietnamese. This is a fantastic project and they are begging not only to use the materials and
connections as there are and translated, they are also beginning to develop their own material
that is again one of the purposes of our exciting parts of connections is the instant feedback
from the user, and so the user, if they don’t like what’s they are majol they can take that
medial development their own majol. And it becomes enhanced. Let’s say the Vietnamese
decided to take a particular part of mathematics engineering or history. They say this is our
version of how it works. The old version remains the same. This is the main difference
between us and Wikipedia, the old version will remain the same. And Vietnam will have
their version of post as well. And the next user (let’s say china) comes along and says well
we like the Vietnam version better. The Ukrainians come along and say no we like the
original version better. So different people can pick different parts of the curriculum and use
it for their own purposes.
- What challenges you met and how do you expect to meet address stops?
- We have got a couple of challenges and IT challenge is continuing. As part of that, the
development of content that actually uses the power of platform is one of our biggest
challenges at the moment. The excel is a powerful tool. With the excel you can write a
particular state of code that will define an oxygen molecule and you can tag an oxygen
molecule and tell us how it is going to behave as an oxygen molecule. Whether we count
something else, for example, the Hydrogene molecule which is written in the same way and
so you put the hydrogenes and the Oxygens together, they will behave appropriately because
they know what they are supposed to do because you’ve added everything that mattered into
their code. And so when you put the two oxygen molecules and two hydrogene molecules
together, you cannot know what will be at the end better than water. When you describe that
you can apply to some chemistry or physics, you have an incredibly powerful learning tool
because then you can get the keys to the experiments on your own. And it doesn’t matter
how and what the kids do as long as you have the tag in the probio for the use it’s amazing.
We’re continuing to do experiments growth throughout the projects in all areas that gets five
more thousands unique visitors pro month. It’s a little bit higher for the ninth months during
the academic year in the Western Hemisphere. It’s a little bit lower than in the summer. The
growth at some point will become extensional when we start to see the power of use, when
we start to see the content in the site reach critical math.
- And finally, what do you mull over working on for the future connections?
- Short term we’re working on projecting the endorsement system. What that is is that offers
will be able to come into the organisations, will be able to come into the site and say: “I’ve
vetted this material, and it’s a good material, I will my feel of improval”. And now we’re
open and anybody can change the information they want to. Not like the Wikipedia, the
original information stay present in the system and you’ve essentially create the secondary or
spin off kind of majul. But the endorsement with the tag which majul you want and you will
be able to maintain the quality of information. And you won’t have to keep going back in th
change because the endorsement will stay with whatever the version you endorsed. And so,
that’s a pretty significant advancement for us. Long term we’re looking to grow the content,
increase the number of majuls in the system. That increases the growth, useful increase in
growth.
- Thank you for staying today with us, Joel. If you would like to learn more about the
connections project, serve to