Where: Blackboard Collaborate (Elluminate)

http://learningtimesevents.org/webheads/

Recording:

• https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-10-28.0654.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr&sid=75
• http://tinyurl.com/2012oct28k12online1 

The presentation was joined by Peggy George (who made the mp3 recording for us), Michael Coghlan, Aiden Yeh, and John Hibbs

PLaN Party!! Vance has been an admirer of the annual K-12 Online Conference since its inception in 2006.  Its website is here: http://k12onlineconference.org/?page_id=1046.

The way this works is that starting now already, the mavens at K12 Online start releasing pre-recorded presentations for participants to download.  Here is the page where recordings released so far may be seen: http://k12onlineconference.org/?page_id=1091; Twitter updates: https://twitter.com/k12online

You can view or listen to the presentations in various ways.  The site is set up for easy download via iTunes.  However if you have issues with iTunes (mobile firmware out of date, want to get the audio onto non-Apple mp3 or mp4 device) then you can subscribe to the feed in a feed reader and download what you need manually if downloads do not proceed automatically.  Here is the feed link http://k12onlineconference.org/?feed=rss2 .

18 presentations will be live by the time we meet on Oct 28

 The ones hyperlinked below are online as of this entry Oct 25, 2012 …

1:00 PM Monday, October 15 GMT	Preconference Keynote	Kevin Honeycutt Launching Learning
1:00 PM Monday, October 22 GMT	Getting Started Keynote	Gail Desler & Natalie Bernasconi on digital citizenship Digital ID Project and http://digital-id.wikispaces.com/
	Getting Started	Karyn Keenan on kidblogs, voicethread, and audioboo A Digital Journey with Primary Students and No Budget! and https://sites.google.com/site/thetools4school4/k12online12
	Visioning New Curriculum Keynote	Karen Fasimpaur Visioning New Curriculum and on Teachers Teaching Teachers
	Visioning New Curriculum	Patrick Fogarty considers 1 to 1 computing “a movement whose proponents aim to make our classrooms resemble the workplace of today and tomorrow rather than the factories of the 19th century” Going One-to-One with PPT slides on Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/s/xx3ygwlqweaoy3k/K12%20Online%20Learning%20Conference%20Presentation.ppt
1:00 PM Tuesday, October 23 GMT	Getting Started	Paula L. Naugle and Jan Wells Leveraging Social Media to Flatten Your Classroom Walls have their PPT slides in Google Docs https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O3w48UFzkRWiSYAtkAhXnOikIwExMTsKrwly0A-S6qo/edit#slide=id.g20edcd9f_7_2
	Getting Started	Elaine Plybon – since “Teenagers spend 80% of their time on the internet involved in social networking websites … educators can utilize their understanding of these venues to create engaging lessons … and provide opportunities for discussions about the students’ own digital footprints” Leveraging the Power of Social Media in the Classroom Speaker’s presentation not yet posted on her blog: http://www.elaineplybon.net/
	Visioning New Curriculum	Jon Bergmann Implementing the Flipped Classroom Flipped classroom for administrators: http://flipped-learning.com/?p=937
	Visioning New Curriculum	Alan Hudson Virtual Worlds for Immersive, media rich educational shared environments Very interesting talk introducing 3-D Warehouse and New Synthetic Theatre builds in Second Life http://mralanhudson.wordpress.com/k12-2012-references/
1:00 PM Wednesday, October 24 GMT	Getting Started	Rodd Lucier takes us on a walk where he brings in voices of colleagues talking about tools they use to connect with one another: Twitter … (I’ll list them if I can find them) 7 Degrees of Connectedness has a graphic:
	Getting Started	Jeremy Friedberg talks about how an elearning platform “helps to stitch together the multiple, and often fragmented, parts of the teaching process” and how “Spongelab.com offers an example of an online teaching platform built for personalized education.” Beyond Elearning: Online Teaching Platforms and Spongelab: http://www.spongelab.com/globals/research.cfm
	Visioning New Curriculum	April Chamberlain, Shawn Nutting and Ammie Akin Creating Learning Experiences without the Textbook has links to Livescribe Pens, Smart Airliner, Educreation App, PowerPoint Saves as Video, QR stuff, I-nigma, Wix.com, Socrative, and Edmodo, etc.
	Visioning New Curriculum	Ian Sands explores “ways to incorporate technology into the full range of an art project … developing maps and templates, to critiquing online and digital grading … through the exploration of such nontraditional materials as post-it notes, glow sticks and mud.” How Technology Helped Me Paint With Mud and http://apexhsart.blogspot.com/
1:00 PM Thursday, October 25 GMT	Getting Started	Valerie Burton Show off your work online using Weebly.com
		Materials are not yet posted to http://msbisonline.weebly.com/2/post/2012/10/show-off-your-work-online-using-weeblycom.html
	Visioning New Curriculum	Bud Hunt Make/Hack/Play: Lenses for Learning
		“The Center for Make/Hack/Play grew out of a system asking itself questions about the purpose and role of schools as institutions of learning. In this presentation, Bud Hunt unpacks the terms that guide his inquiry about and work within school” http://blogs.stvrain.k12.co.us/makehackplay/
1:00 PM Friday, October 26 GMT	Getting Started	Shelly Sanchez Terrell The Magic of Mobile Learning
		Shelly presents her comprehensive resource, Mobile Learning: 50+ Resources & Tips http://teacherrebootcamp.com/free-ebooks/mobile-learning-50-resources-tips/
	Visioning New Curriculum	Jane Krauss helps us “look at the kinds of learning activity that lead to knowledge construction (predicting, comparing, making judgements and more) and take a tour of Wolfram Alpha. To wrap things up we’ll take a quick peek at ManyEyes and Tableau Public, two tools for creating visualizations or info graphics from data derived from Wolfram Alpha and other sources.” Make Meaning with Wolfram Alpha; http://www.wolframalpha.com/, http://www-958.ibm.com/, http://www.tableausoftware.com/public
	Visioning New Curriculum	David Simpson (not listed Oct 28) Digital Mash-ups: exercise books in the 21st Century

Kickoff

The conference conveners talked before going live with Paul Allison at Teachers Teaching Teachers.  To prepare for this event, listen to TTT#316 Preview K12 Online Conference w/ Peggy George, Kim Caise, Susan van Gelder, Karen Fasimpaur, Gail Desler, Valerie Burton 9/26, archived here

• http://www.teachersteachingteachers.org/ttt316-preview-k12-online-conference-w-peggy-george-kim-caise-susan-van-gelder-karen-fasimpaur-gail-desler-valerie-burton-926/
• http://edtechtalk.com/node/5136

Pre-Conference Keynote by guitarist songwriter teacher Kevin Honeycutt: Oct 15th

Launching Learning

Presenter: Kevin Honeycutt
Location: Inman, Kansas
Twitter: @kevinhoneycutt

iPod video  – mp3 audio

Presentation Description: In this PreConference Keynote for the 2012 K-12 Online Conference, educator Kevin Honeycutt challenges us to “remix learning” by combining our old models for school with today’s possibilities to make learning more interesting and engaging for students. We shouldn’t amputate kids’ digital limbs when they come to school! If Applebee’s can be lit theatrically to make your food more interesting, why can’t this be true in our schools? We need to hear more reasons why we CAN make learning more interesting, and invite the students to help us co-create our learning environments. How do we let students get excited about their learning and become archeologists of their own learning? Rather than focusing on what we CAN’T do, let’s focus on what we CAN do no matter what our budget is. The “killer app” for the 21st century is “to learn to love to learn.” Kevin challenges us to think new ideas, get rid of laminated lesson plans, and be an advocates for students as together we embrace project-based learning.

Referenced Links:

1. Kansas Cosmosophere and Space Center  (in Hutchinson, Kansas)
2. Shapeways
3. Kevin Honeycutt’s website

Copy/paste/posted from http://k12onlineconference.org/

Week 1 Presentations (Getting Started and Visioning New Curriculum): Oct 22 – 25
Week 2 Presentations (Kicking It Up a Notch and Student Voices): Oct 29 – Nov. 2

This event normally attracts remarkable and innovative presentations that not only explain as regards teaching, but also MODEL the very best in educational multimedia materials design. The first batch of presentations will be revealed the first week and on Sunday Oct 28, just prior to release of the second batch, we will meet and discuss the ones that are already online.

The link is to: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=1078

Announcements

• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/learning2gether-with-the-annual-k12-online-conference-part-1
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29716
• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/message/1746

Reactions to this post

Learning2gether Episode 123

RECORDING (55min): http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p5msnj7676g/ Location: Adobe Connect and Second Life http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/sl  Webheads HQ on EduNation which has recently been turned into an Irish Pub with stables, a horse, sheep and a dog named Mystic http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EduNation/69/171/23

Second Life is no longer in the news and many think that it has died out. Nothing is further from the truth, at least for us language educators, language schools and language learning communities. They are booming and many join virtual worlds to learn another language. Heike Philp will give a good overview of the various language learning sites in Second Life and outlines a unique way of teaching a language: emoting. Emoting is a fascinating way of expressing action in text chat (mostly in roleplaying sims) which is caused by the limitations of gestures and facial expressions of the avatars. Emoting is strictly only limited by imagination and can be very poetic, very descriptive and full of gems. Heike will invite Dr. Doris Molero or Edith Paillat aka Cyber Placebo to help us understand the enormous potential of language education in Second Life. And as a little suprise, she has an announcement in her sleeve, of an unusual language school she would like to start and for which she is inviting language teachers to apply.

View on screencast.com »

Participant response

Another surprise was in how Heike focused her talk. SL provides ways to emote in text chat; you write forward slash /me and then an action you would like to be perceived doing – for example, /me comments in the archive on Heike’s presentation.  However Heike suggested we dress this up – for example /me reflects pensively on the import of Heike’s presentation while having a goodnight tea in the warm glow of computer monitor.

Heike pointed out that such texts can form an interesting narrative if done properly in role play and saved after having been sustained over a prolonged discourse. She pointed out their rich language learning potential, and indeed some of us were at that moment at http://tappedin.org where we have for years carried on such chat.  TappedIn accomplishes much the same thing with the colon emoticon – for example VanceS :realizes that this is what we have been doing in TappedIn all along.  Tapped in may indeed be a better medium than SL for doing this if this is all you want to do; i.e. build a narrative in text where participants write out their actions in role play.  It can be done while in SL, but if you go online for the purpose of developing such a narrative, then TI would carry with it less overhead than SL, if that was the prime focus of your lesson.

Still I was struck at how good ideas tend to recycle.  This emoticon language was particularly a feature of MOOs, where participants could build rich perceptual descriptions of themselves, sometimes with the aid of scripts which might represent pets that needed to be fed, refrigerators that dispensed imaginary beverages, and so on.  This used to be one of the joys of MOOs, of which TI originally was one, and when TI revamped their site, they carried over traces of this in the colon emote feature, which Heike pointed out, also exists in SL. This insight was an interesting take-away from her talk. – Vance

Announcements:

• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/sla-in-virtualworlds
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29702
• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/message/1744

Learning2gether Episode 122

Vance Stevens gave an hour long mini-workshop entitled “Web 2.0 toolkit for teaching and learning academic presentation skills” as a part of the online series of professional development webinars organized by the EdTech Lounge, an initiative of the EdTech Innovation Centre, Higher Colleges of Technology UAE.

For HCT EdTech lounge events please visit

http://elearning.hct.ac.ae/edutech/edtech-lounge for venue details

The event was here: http://tinyurl.com/oct14vanceETL

The recording has been found; awaiting URL

try this: http://tinyurl.com/2012oct14vance-etl 

More details

• For a recording of a 20-minute presentation on this topic at the 2012 ELTAI conference in India, and a write-up at that point, visit:
  http://vanceposterous.wordpress.com/2012/07/14/a-small-research-project-on-student-attitudes/
• For a blog portal designed to introduce teachers to the concepts face-to-face:
  http://toolkit4earning.blogspot.com/
• An update published in TESL-EJ: Stevens, V. (2012). Web 2.0 Toolkit for Teaching and Learning EFL Presentation Skill. TESL-EJ, Volume 16, Number 2, pp. 1-11: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej62/int.pdf. Also available at:http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej62/ej62int/

Full abstract for the EdTech Lounge presentation:

The presenter recently developed an academic communication course for students at the UAE Naval College, where there are serious challenges in gaining and holding students’ attention and keeping them on task, compounded by the fact that each student has a laptop and is easily distracted. The solution was to utilize the laptops through designing a task-based course that introduced a series of Web 2.0 tools which the students would have to familiarize themselves with and then apply in some aspect of the communications skills they were learning. Participants in the session may have already encountered the tools used (e.g. Google Docs, Prezi, Survey Monkey, Jing, Blogger, Slideshare.net) so the presentation will emphasize how the tools were used to underpin a coherent course incorporating elements such as mindmapping, creating viable surveys,  harvesting and analyzing results, capturing screen shots, making effective presentations both in Prezi and PowerPoint, keeping a reflective blog, and documenting the semester’s accomplishments in simple ePortfolios. The presenter will briefly discuss results of action research on student attitudes to the course, using data from a survey created to model the technique to students, and from their reflective blog posts.

Shorter abstract

At the UAE Naval College, students each have laptops, which creates learning opportunities but presents challenges in keeping them on task. The presenter designed a task-based course introducing a series of Web 2.0 tools which the students used to develop the communications skills they were learning. These tools (Google Docs, Prezi, Survey Monkey, Jing, Blogger, Slideshare.net) underpinned a course incorporating mindmapping, creating viable surveys,  harvesting and analyzing results, capturing screen shots, making effective presentations both in Prezi and PowerPoint, keeping a reflective blog, and documenting the semester’s accomplishments in simple ePortfolios. Action research showed positive student attitudes to the course, using data from a survey (conducted as a model for students) and from their reflective blog posts.

Short short

The presenter will discuss design of a task-based course introducing a series of Web 2.0 tools used with students, including: Google Docs, Prezi, Survey Monkey, Jing, Blogger, Slideshare.net. Methods discussed will cover mindmapping, creating viable surveys,  harvesting and analyzing results, capturing screen shots, presentations, and ePortfolios.

More information can be found in all the right places 🙂

• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/HCT_Edtech
  All talks use this Twitter hashtag: #edtechlounge
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EduTechHCT
• Google+ : https://plus.google.com/104383626975973018697

Feedback

View on screencast.com »

By becoming content curators, teachers understand how to make sense out of the overload of information they are constantly exposed to. We will have an overview of user-friendly digital resources to help us find, organize and filter content for our professional development, as well as classroom use. 

Recording on Blackboard Collaborate (Elluminate)

• http://tinyurl.com/2012oct07carlaarena 
  • https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-10-07.0634.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr&sid=75
  • Carla’s whiteboard from presentation rendered into PDF, courtesy of Peggy George: http://ge.tt/6s5lm3P/v/1
• Carla’s slides from her workshop on curation
  http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com/w/page/55413564/The%20Art%20of%20Digital%20Curation

Shownotes (tools Carla showed us)

• Content curation by Robin Good
  • http://curation.masternewmedia.org/
  • http://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/content-curation-tools-the-newsmaster-toolkit-by-robin-good-2bbb4d3b0995449e9160de4455ad4f2b
  • http://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/content-curation-for-education-and-learning-robin-good-emerge2012-98ccaad217074a07b9bff8b76effab8e
• Curate with Flickr galleries: http://www.flickr.com/galleries/
• http://themeefy.com/ curates and produces attractive digital ezines
• http://cowbird.com/ is a curation tool and digital story platform
• http://mentormob.com
  • Carla’s profile: http://www.mentormob.com/people/profile/carla-arena-6359
  • One of Carla’s curations on http://www.mentormob.com/learn/i/tech-tools-2/101-web-20-tools-for-teachers-that-you-should-know-about
• Curate on mobile devices
  • http://trap.it/
  • http://flipboard.com/

Time: 13:00 gmt / 10:00 am Brasilia time(Check your local time here)

http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com 

http://brazilbridges.pbworks.com 

Announcements 

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29666
• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/learning2gether-with-carla-arena-on-digital-curation

Learning2gether Episode 120

View on screencast.com »

Date: September 28, 2012 to September 30, 2012

Time: From 1100 GMT on Sunday Sept 30, conference ending with a Party in Second Life at 20:00 GMT
Specific events and times listed in the program here: http://avalon-project.ning.com/page/program
Location: EduNation and AVALON Learning island
Organized By: Heike Philp aka Gwen Gwasi

More information: http://avalon-project.ning.com/events/6th-slanguages-annual-symposium

Statistics on the event

“Coach” Carole McCulloch will come online to chat about her latest projects.  engaging and inspiring learners and teachers online (a Moodle environment} revitalising our Learn Local network (a Ning environment) building an eportfolio approach into your teaching and learning online (a Mahara environment)

Recording

• https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-16.0432.M.DAA7079034FDF930CFC2B6E4E2D53E.vcr&sid=voffice  
• http://tinyurl.com/2012sep16coachcarole 

Venue: Carole’s Bb Collaborate / Elluminate http://tinyurl.com/3y5lnap

• https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/launch/meeting.jnlp?sid=voffice&password=M.7FF09B0FFFA4C84045CDD7A540287A
  

Announcements

• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/coach-carole-mccullogh
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29602

About Coach Carole

• Main Portal: http://www.coachcarole.net/
• Twitter:
  • @coachcarole2012 http://twitter.com/coachcarole2012 or
  • http://twitter.com/cmcculloch
• http://au.linkedin.com/in/coachcarole
• Blackboard Collaborate V Office: http://tinyurl.com/3y5lnap
• Blog: http://coachcarole.wordpress.com
• e-portfolio: https://sites.google.com/site/coachcaroleeportfolio/
• http://www.slideshare.net/cmcculloch/
  • http://www.slideshare.net/cmcculloch/e-trends-social-networking-tools-by-coach-carole

Christina’s follow up and reflection on today’s presentation: http://cristinaskybox.blogspot.com/2012/09/curation-why-because-and-then.html

About Ana Cristina Pratas Curation http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-delights http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-delights-for-learners http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-delights-digital-learning http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-delights-image-editing http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-delights-avatars http://www.scoop.it/t/voices-in-the-feminine

Blogs

• Dream Weaving Learning: 
  http://dreamweavelearn.wordpress.com/author/acsaffron/
• CristinaSkyBox: http://cristinaskybox.blogspot.com/2011/01/digital-fragments.html

Social

• http://www.facebook.com/anacristina.pratas
• http://ae.linkedin.com/pub/ana-cristina-pratas/38/464/791
• https://twitter.com/AnaCristinaPrts

Recording:

• https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-09.0712.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr&sid=75
• http://tinyurl.com/2012sep09pratas 

Where?

• Presentation in Bb Collaborate / Elluminate from 14:00 GMT http://learningtimesevents.org/webheads/

Announcements

• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/ana-cristina-pratas

Vance has created a course for a unique cohort of young students at the Naval College in UAE.  They all have laptops and their instructors at the college complain that their laptops are distracting in class, so the students’ attention and focus has to be earned and sustained in task-based activities. Therefore this course was designed to engage the students and leverage their ubiquitous access to computers into learning outcomes.

Vance has assembled survey and student blog data to verify student interest in the materials; but rather thanpresent on the topic (there is a recorded version online already) Vance would like for this to be a flippedpresentation where I briefly overview it and discuss with those present how they engage their students and make learning F.U.N.

The course would not have been possible without continuous access to and interaction with others in my CoP and extended PLN this past decade, which enabled me to experience engaged learning with peers in order to model it for my students.

Recording

• https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-02.0731.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr&sid=75
• http://tinyurl.com/2012sep02vance

Thanks to … 

• Bb Collaborate / Elluminate from 14:00 GMT http://learningtimesevents.org/webheads/

More information?

• http://vancestevens.posterous.com/a-small-research-project-on-student-attitudes
• Stevens, V. (2012). Web 2.0 Toolkit for Teaching and Learning EFL Presentation Skill. TESL-EJ, Volume 16, Number 2, pp. 1-11: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej62/int.pdf. Also available at: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej62/ej62int/

Announcements

• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/vance-stevens-prez
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29588
• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/message/1739
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/learningwithcomputers/message/6760
• https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!topic/teachandlearnonline/V6hn2ozZDIM

Dan Bassill does some remarkable work applying his past business experience to his present passion for improving the lives of disadvantaged kids in Chicago through his tutor mentor programs. The mechanisms he sets up for that are interesting, instructive, and relevant to communities of practice which rely on the cognitive surplus of like-minded volunteers.

Dan Bassill, leader of the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC in Chicago will lead a discussion seeking to learn ways educators and non profits are recruiting and utilizing volunteers as tutors and/or mentors in school and non-school programs throughout the world. Dan would like to draw information from participants. Here are some questions that will be asked:

* Where do your find volunteers?
* What are your expectations for your volunteers? Where do you share this information?
* Describe your volunteers. Are they business people, college students, community residents?
* How long do your volunteers stay involved with you? Less than a year? One or two years? More than two years?
* How do you tell your story to show volunteers how and why they should join you? If you use a web site, blog or video, please share links.
* How do  you screen volunteers? What is your interview process?
* Once you have volunteers how do you train and support them?

Dan has posted this set of questions on his blog at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2012/08/volunteer-recruitment-discussion-sunday.html

In addition, this is presentation shared volunteer-recruitment ideas that can be applied by any organization seeking to recruit tutors/mentors.http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/images/PDF/recruitmentwkshop2011.pdf

This discussion is also intended to be part of an on-going strategy helping raise visibility and recruit volunteers for the 2012-13 school year.  If you use volunteers and have a recruitment strategy post it on a blog or other forum in advance and then share what you’re doing during this forum. If you’d like to share facilitator role add your name and organization. Invite others who utilize or want to utilize volunteers to participate. Visit this link to see how Dan’s group has been helping mobilize volunteers for Chicago area tutor/mentor programs since 1995.http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/chicagoland-volunteer-recruitment 

Recording: in Blackboard Collaborate (Elluminate)

• https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-08-26.0700.M.7AE801FFB697DA460D4BF25AA8C21B.vcr&sid=75
• http://tinyurl.com/2012aug26bassill 

Announcements:

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evonline2002_webheads/message/29564
• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/multilit/message/1738
• http://taedtech.ning.com/events/dan-bassill-volunteers

Follow-up from Daniel

Thanks for the opportunity.  I don’t think many leaders, directors or volunteer tutor/mentor people are yet deeply involved in on-line network building or attempts at collaboration. I do a Google search every month or two looking for groups focused on collaboration, capacity building, collective effort, volunteer recruitment, etc. and don’t come up with much. Part of the challenge is that we’re dealing with an issue most people who are on-line don’t spend a lot of time thinking about (poor people) and the people who are leading tutor/mentor programs are swamped with the day-to-day work of running a program, finding volunteers and donors, etc. that they don’t have lots of time for on-line engagement.

I tried to communicate this idea in a blog I wrote recently. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2012/08/illustrators-needed-volunteer-talent.html

You might be interested in this article showing  different types of networks.http://scwf12.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/a-perspectve-on-connected-systemic-change-don-tapscott/

My focus on infrastructure and building communities of practice is now shared by many people in the field who are involved in the day-to-day struggles of connecting youth and volunteers in programs that are constantly competing with each other for operating resources.  Thus, my ability to cast a wider net via forums like Webheads is very appreciated.