This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Global Virtual Classroom Award Winners Announced -- Some of you may be aware of the side project I’ve been involved in for a couple years – the Global Virtual Classroom program of the Give Something Back International foundation founded by my sister. The objective of the program is to give students from around the world an opportunity to hone important 21st century skills -- cross-cultural communication, collaboration at a distance, and computer skills.
This weekend (actually last night at about 2 AM), we finalized the judging for this year’s GVC contest -- the second since our relaunch in 2003. 57 schools from around the world worked in 22 teams (10 teams up to grade 7 and 12 teams from between grades 8 and 12) that built websites on topics of their choosing. We gave out three awards, plus special merit recognition, in each age group.
In particular, you might want to check out the interactive interface of the second place winner in the High School group, actually built by 8th graders in a middle school. Impressive. Also the flash whizzes from our first place high school group did a particularly nice job. I showed these around to our designers and developers, but had to thell them that their parents wouldn't let them relocate from Illinois or Israel for a summer internship.
My one hesitation about sharing this with you folks is the condition of the GVC website. It’s an old (circa 1999) design (tables within tables within tables within…aaarrgh, and little individual graphic-based button navigation…yuck) inherited from the original AT&T program upon which it is based, and moved to a Linux-based server (don’t ask) about 8 months ago, which broke all the neat forms I had figured out on the old temporary Windows server we used last year. (And now that I’ve been learning about SEO from my day job, I see a whole lot more shortcomings.)
I had planned to do a CSS-based redesign this year, but just haven’t found time and energy yet -- supporting and following up with the participating schools (plus the new server setup) has taken up most of the time I thought I’d have to do it. Plus, this last year, I’ve been a little busier from 9 to 5 than I was as an underutilized consultant.
Any ideas or pointers would be appreciated, as would some friendly linkage to promote the GVC program. We'd like to have over 100 schools involved in the 2005/06 program.
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