Christian Briggs, (GeekDad contributor) Kevin Makice, and several others are working on a project called Choir: The Million Skills Project, and they need your support! The Million Skills Project is designed to teach you digital fluency: small, practical skills that you can use every day. The idea is that the team will “sift” the knowledge of various mentors who have expertise in specific areas, and turn those into simple bite-sized lessons to “lift” your own abilities. They’re hoping to build a community of 10,000 learners and arm each of them with 100 valuable skills.
The team has already used the Choir platform with some organizations for basic digital skills, but it is hoping to expand on those for broader applications. Choir provides sort of a social component as well—as you learn skills, you can earn badges and encourage other community members to improve their own.
Our very own Ken Denmead is one of the first six mentors that they’ve already signed up—you can read a little more about him in this Kickstarter update. I’ve also agreed to be a potential mentor myself—backers will get to vote on an additional 14 mentors if the campaign is successful. Or back at the $50 to nominate somebody as a mentor!
You can sign up for the Million Skills Project for as little as $5, but there are also reward levels for small, mid-sized, or large organizations that bring the price down to $2 per login, so if you’ve got a small business or organization that wants a cool training tool it might be worth checking out those options.
For more information (including profiles of all the mentors), visit the Kickstarter Page!
This looks like a great project. It would be great to see some librarians make the mentor list. A lot of these skills are things we train people on every day.
@Brian, we have pre-nominated one librarian, Kevin MacDowell, a.k.a. “Kid Kazooey, the Singin’ & Swingin’ Librarian” in our latest update. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kmakice/choir-the-million-skills-project/posts/688567
You are absolutely right, though! Librarians are right in the middle of the digital fluency challenge. Hopefully some folks who back the project at the $5 level will nominate a few more librarians to be mentors.