Be sure to listen/view the keynote prepared by David Warlick for the K-12 Online Conference, if you haven't already. I'm getting a kick out of watching David in his "hair down" T-shirt approach to a keynote. I loved his intro about time, when he's preparing it is different from when we're listening...anytime, anywhere, shifting time and place.

but the best part of this conference will be the time that you are reflecting on what you see, hear, and read, and then writing in your blogs and populating wikis, and then reading other people's reflections, and reacting. This conference is not as much about teaching and learning as it is about building new knowledge.

One of the neat things about blogging, about teaching each other that David refers to, is what blog entries are juxtaposed with each other. While I was watching David's keynote, I was scrolling my Bloglines account and ran across this entry from Andy Carvin, where he writes about Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. This is a guy I'd heard about on National Public Radio (NPR) but never followed up on.

...Yunus created the Village (Grameen in Bangla) Bank. Rather than lending money to typical bank borrowers, Yunus decided that his loans would go to the poorest of the poor - farmers, village women, even beggars. The bank developed a system of offering microloans - loans often less than $100, the kind of amount that any other bank would never have bothered to award to its customers. In Bangladesh, though, a loan of $50 or $75 to a rural villager can mean the difference between abject poverty and ipermanently mproving the quality of life for their family. Microloans allow them to establish a kiosk selling dry goods, buy new farming implements, even pay for health insurance. They take the burden off extremely low-income households and give them a fighting chance to achieve prosperity.

Andy goes on to make this point...

...that the people of Bangladesh can rightfully claim that they as individuals have won a share of the Peace Prize. Approximately 94% of the bank is owned by its 6.6 million borrowers - the farmers, the women entrepreneurs, the beggars -

What a neat connection. If we imagine 21st Century learning as a bank, we can imagine that we have all won a share of the some "prize" that we've all received as a benefit of...we're all recipients of "microloans" or microcredit, that each of us builds on, where the snowball, as Doc Searls shared, is running downhill. Call it "blogcredit."

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net