Everyday Trooper

How do you change the lives of children for the better? My wife helps children everyday. She is a counselor at an elementary school in Clover, SC. She models positive and productive behavior for them. Listens to them. Validates them. Educates them. Helps them. Helps their families, and when necessary has to report issues and confront serious and harmful behavior. I’m proud of her. She changes the lives of children everyday.

Big Thinking to What Effect?

I am, myself, less of a steady trooper than my wife. I am a “big thinker” so to speak. So, how do I add value to children’s lives? How do I not simply get lost in my own enamor of my own big ideas, but actually make a positive difference in the lives of children?

Well… I have the honor and privilege to serve as the lead on some amazing projects in Education in the State of South Carolina. The projects of which I speak are Internet Marketing Projects that we will conduct at The Hive in Old Town Rock Hill, SC. We will be working in open source and public technologies, using collaborative and innovative methodologies, and driven by non-partisan and authentic ideologies. That’s a lot of “gies” I know.

The SCASA Project

One of the projects is for the South Carolina Association of School Administrators. The K12 Superintendents of the state came together to put forward a vision for education in the state. One of our major problems in education is legislators and everybody else who says THEY know what needs to happen in education because “back in my day ___” fill in the blank. But the thing is, it ain’t back in your day. The world is changing. What does education need to look like to build the future 10, 20, 50 years from now, not ago. What are the values that we hold dear that should remain steady, and what are the changing realities and technologies and applications that we need to be on top of to prepare our children for a future that does not yet exist?

So, the Superintendents came together and took hold of their role as the leaders of education in the state, and they put forward a vision for education. A guiding document kind of like the constitution. Then, they brought it to me and said, “What do we do with this?”

In response, we built OurEducationVision.com, which is a living, breathing interactive way for the public to engage with and participate in this vision as it is put forward by the leaders of education in our state.

The Hive as Innovation

Now, we enter the Hive semester where we will have around 20 students/interns working on 6 projects for non-profit and public organizations. The Hive is innovation in collaborative higher education. And the Hive is powerful economic development.

We are conducting place-making economic development in the revitalizing Old Town Rock Hill by having these students gather and collaborate there, and we are conducting all ships rise economic development by working with non-profits, and we are conducting workforce training economic development by training these students to do what we do… create our own jobs by executing creative, technical Internet communications and marketing work.

Classroom Without Walls

The other K12 Education project that we will be conducting this semester at the Hive is the Classroom Without Walls online documentary. We will be making an online documentary of the experience of an experimental 5th grade class in the Rock Hill School District that is cracking open the assumptions of education. These students are mobile and have iPads and high expectations – non-traditional settings, methods, and opportunities. More to come on this project…