Today’s post is from Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium:

I’m writing to ask you to help get a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest, WatchKnow, off the ground. …

Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll give the winner(s) within each topic small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol.

The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education. I’m the project’s Executive Director, and we’re now in the process of looking for and hiring a technical contractor who will actually build the system (see Craigslist).

Read more here
For future updates, please add yourself to the project announcement list, watchknow-l.

Because it’s non-profit and open content, we of course don’t expect to make money from this project; it’s charitable. Thankfully, our start-up capital is more than adequate for purposes of the beta-test project.

But we will need the help of volunteers to make this work. Educators, ed tech specialists–especially educators who make, use, review, and otherwise care about educational uses of online video–are needed to participate in a Video Review Panel, which will choose topics and rate videos. On the current plan, panel ratings will compose half of the score for any individual video. We could also use your endorsement and support for the idea! See: WatchKnow Participation.

If you’ve complained about the paucity of high-quality educational content online, here’s a chance to do something about it.

Posted Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:01:50 and filed under Projects, Education, Web 2.0, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.