But for the developing world, it’s an enormous challenge to get glasses to everyone who needs them. In Rwanda, for example, there’s a single ophthalmologist for every million people.

But sometimes big needs can lead to big innovations.

Adlens variable focus eyewear, which won an Edison Award for Social Impact earlier this month, is a good example of design thinking that makes a global problem surmountable.

By giving people the ability to adjust the prescription of their glasses in seconds, Adlens is dramatically increasing access to vision correction for millions of people across the globe.

But like any good tool, variable eyewear only works as well as it’s used.

In Rwanda, that means basic training for using Adlens glasses, public education on the necessity of vision correction, and increasing average disposable income all have to come first.

To do this work, Adlens has partnered with the Rwandan Ministry of Health and launched a non-profit wing called Vision for a Nation that’s devoted to social good and providing vision correction for the Rwandan people.

This also frees Adlens to focus on marketing their product and building a sustainable company that, in the the words of Richard Branson, screws business as usual by making a ton of money and committing to social good at the same time.

Dr Graeme MacKenzie is an optometrist and Director of Industry Affairs at Adlens who was part of the research group that developed variable focus eyewear at Oxford.

Dr MacKenzie puts the challenge of getting this kind of technological breakthrough into the hands of the people who need it most this way:

The first step toward providing vision correction to people in the developing world isn’t just getting them eyewear—it’s educating them that they need glasses in the first place!”

And since education costs, paying customers are a must-have for Adlens from the very beginning.

After conducting market research, Adlens settled on Japan as an initial target market, where their technology-influenced style and charitable business model connected with consumers.

But marketing glasses with perfectly round lenses was still proving challenging and required even more design thinking. (Though variable focus eyewear can be manufactured using more modern lens styles, round lenses are the least expensive and so most scalable.)

If only there were some legendary figure associated with round glasses who advocated for peace and understanding.

With Yoko Ono’s blessing, the John Lennon Collection is the first designer brand of variable focus eyewear.

But for Adlens, continued success means facilitating cooperation across governments, continents, and cultures. 

Rwanda is one of the developing countries that’s closest to meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which are focused on combating extreme poverty and the spread of AIDS. Rwanda also has one of the most progressive education systems in the region, respects a woman’s right to own land, and is striving for financial independence by 2020.

So by working with the Rwandan Ministry of Health to effectively raise awareness around the need for vision correction, Adlens hopes to give its commitment to social good the kind of staying power that’s only possible with substantial government buy-in.

Imagine—all across the world, people trying on their first pair of glasses, and within seconds they can see!

The optical industry has been alternatively excited and mistrustful of this disruptive technology. But as more people around the world are introduced to the life changing power of vision correction, global interest in optical innovation will only grow.

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When selling to schools, remember that you’re trying to break into systems that are non-evolving, which is part of the reason they’re failing so miserably.”

Last week’s Educelerate (the Chicago based national edtech meetup) featured a panel stacked with public sector educators unafraid to spell out 1) the difficulties associated with selling tech solutions to schools, 2) the underlying problems with public education those difficulties highlight, and 3) how entrepreneurs can increase their chances of getting game changing tech tools into students’ hands.

Organized by Educelerate founder Christopher Nyren and hosted at Catapult Chicago, this past week’s lineup included:

• Ron Huberman - former CEO/Superintendent of CPS, President of CTA, Chief of Staff to Mayor Daley, & current education entrepreneur and investment fund operating executive
• Sharnell Jackson - former Chief of eLearning at CPS & current President of Illinois Virtual Charter School @ Fox River
• Henry Thiele Ed.D. – Chief Technology Officer for Maine Township High School
• Phil Lacey, Ed.D. – Director of Technology  for Niles Township High School
• John Mellios - Director of Technology at CPS

All the panel members were united in their conviction that individualized instruction is the most important thing missing from most classrooms, and one of the easiest to solve using technology. But the endless challenges that come with selling to schools made me thankful MentorMob is infiltrating classrooms from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Good teachers armed with good technology can make this happen.

In a classroom full of 30 students, there’s going to be a wide range of aptitudes, learning styles, and interests. And every time a teacher spends extra time to help the struggling students, the other kids are slowly dying of boredom.

But the technology that allows each student to learn at his or her own pace is expensive, and school districts are hesitant to spend the additional time and effort it takes to purchase, implement, and train their teachers on a new tech tool—especially if their last attempt was fraught with technical difficulties.

Other hurdles are deeper and trickier. Any tech tool worth a damn is going to be transformational. But in selling a school on a new learning platform’s effectiveness, start-ups must still convince administrators that blended, collaborative learning is essential for equipping young people with the 21st skills we desperately need them to have. 

Our world has changed dramatically. So why haven’t our classrooms?

It can take upwards of 19 months for a school to work through its procurement cycle, so don’t count on a quick turn-around time. This is especially important for young companies, since a thousand startups live and die or pivot dramatically within the span of 19 months. Plus, a company’s district champion might change jobs twice in 2 years. And since school budgets run from July 1st to June 30th and 90% of budgets are already committed by July 15th, don’t expect big end of year contracts.

Age-old sales rules still apply. It’s all about relationships. Don’t expect to make a sale based on merit alone—particularly with so many buyers coming from education and being relatively unschooled in IT. And in many counties, school board members are elected officials. That’s politics on top of government bureaucracy on top of a killer budget crunch. No silver bullet will slay that beast. The best you can do is be thoughtful, tactical, confident, and talented.

There’s at least one clear cut tactic that will increase your chances of making a sale: get a seasoned government procurement person on your team who understands the structure of schools. Because once you’re in, you’re in. And with CPS alone spending upwards of $6 billion a year, the end market is massive.

But of course—make sure your product really works before kicking down any doors or you’ll never get in anywhere else!

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, & Pinterest can be driving forces for sharing good. They have also connected MentorMob with like minded people around the world we never would have met otherwise, and enabled us to take part in global campaigns that are making a real difference.

Just last week, Twitter users across the globe and companies committed to doing #GOOD like Virgin Unite sent their love and raised money for those devastated by the tragedies in Boston and Texas.

After all, doing good business isn’t just about making a profit—it’s about making the world a better place. Or as Richard Branson put it in the new edition of Screw Business as Usual:

Do good, have fun, and the money will come.”

Earlier this month, Virgin Unite launched a competition to find out what businesses their Twitter community thought were being a force for good in the world and screwing business as usual. Only 10 winners were picked, and we’re delighted MentorMob and our friends at Give Forward were one of them!

• @karmenmandic who nominated Kiva
• @ajmereltd  who nominated Tango Tab
• –> @MentorMob who nominated Give Forward <–
• @TLJansson who nominated Grameen Bank
• @MstrssBttrfly  who nominated Patagonia
• @ninagrenningloh who nominated Sole Rebels
• @vidales7 who nominated Participant
• @PositiveWork who nominated ZamBikes
• @WorthyBabble who nominated TOMS
• @mike_earthshine who nominated Triodos Bank

This just goes to show how much potential there is in conscious capitalism and social media—and that there’s real power in a tweet!

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Just last week, MentorMob community member Allie Holland and students from the Plymouth school district set a little class time aside to participate in the campaign. The results will warm your heart and motivate others to #dogood!

Below you’ll also hear about the students’ experience from Allie in her own words.

I Empower Belief, Smiles :), Exploration, & Patience.

I Empower Bravery, Confidence, Kindness, & To Never Lose Hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“All year long, I’ve been doing my best to show students how social media can be used for so much more than random updates about who you like this week. When I heard about the #iempower project, I was so excited to get the chance to ‘prove’ what I was preaching!

The craziest part was that the eighth grade Social Studies classes were just finishing up a unit on slavery and human trafficking! The teachers were really excited about letting the students do this and allowed me to take 15 minutes of class time to explain the project and take some pictures.

It was so inspiring to see many of the students post pictures on their personal social media accounts. Students keep coming up to me and saying how they are going to have their friends and family take pictures, too! One student even had her after school group take pictures. I love when students get excited about something that goes beyond the classroom!” – Allie Holland, eLearning Coach (5th-8th)

It’s easier now than ever to make connections with others across countries and even continents. In fact, it’s argued that becoming a Digitial Citizen is one of the most important skills today’s students will learn.

Mrs. Holland and her inspiring students are just one example of how transparent classroom walls promote exploration and open opportunities to support others. Imagine the possibilities if we band together and fight for a cause!

What do YOU empower?

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Real innovation typically happens at the edge of systems rather than at their center.”

So as Mayor Emanuel’s office launches the Summer of Learning, I’m tremendously optimistic that all the different Hive partners—from The Field Museum to YOUMedia Chicago to online learning platforms like MentorMob—will have a real influence on formal education policy.

Because guess what? The whole world is a classroom, and open badges are allowing informal learning institutions to encourage and reward kids for all the hands on, interest driven learning they already do!

And our job as Chicago Hive members is to work together and design experiences that are so appealing kids can’t help but fill their brains up with knowledge this summer.

That’s gonna take a lot of work in a very short time, but we can do it. Here are some ways Hive members can accelerate the process:

• Match up organizations whose strongest resources line up nicely with another member’s biggest challenges.
• Share all our best successes and worst failures with previous public education initiatives.
• Explicitly promote each others’ programming to our own constituents through multiple channels including the #hivebuzz hashtag.
• Make use of informal learning networks that already exist in Chicago.
• Use technology to ensure the learning kids do with Hive is social, accessible, and interactive.

Big things have small beginnings.

Thankfully, the Hive Chicago isn’t up against a broken formal education system all by its lonesome. Mozilla is throwing its weight behind the Summer of Learning (and Hive Chicago’s role facilitating badge-able learning opportunities) as part of its ongoing efforts to preserve the web as a precious public resource and transform web consumers into web makers.

Plus there are already thriving Hive networks in New York and Pittsburgh, and more are on the way!

It’s going to be a wild ride, but Hive Chicago is going to get kids badging this summer, and reframe the conversation about education in Chicago and beyond in the process.

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And you can be a part of this movement in two huge ways!

1.  Print out this template, take a picture of yourself and what you empower, and share it with friends, family, and all your social media channels:

Just click it to print it!

2.  Buy a Bracelet! - 100% of the proceeds from these hand made bracelets go toward school supplies and uniforms for girls in Uganda.  We are thrilled to facilitate this endeavor and look forward to reporting back with how many backpacks and uniforms we helped provide together!

^Click for jewelry details & ordering info.^

We’ll be sharing your stories, pictures, and encouragement on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The MentorMob team is taking action right along with you. Can’t wait to see what you got! :)

Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative is at heart about getting educators and technologists to design a trustworthy method of recognizing every kind of learning that’s so compelling kids can’t help developing new skills and policy makers can’t help but take notice.

And because badges are a populist, bottom-up method of achieving meaningful education reform (as opposed to attacking issues like standardized testing at the policy level), the people who have been working so hard on alternative credentialing are a real ragtag bunch of hackers, designers, and guerrilla marketers. 

Professor Dan Hickey leads a workshop as part of the Badge Design Principles Research Project

They may not have institutional support or a built-in audience of millions, but the folks investing their time and money (okay, the MacArthur Foundation‘s money) believe to the marrow of their bones that badges are the first step toward righting some serious wrongs. The weird thing is, powerful players in education are beginning to agree, and that means badges are going mainstream.

People working on badges love working together.

“What kind of work are you doing with badges?” That’s the only line you’ll ever need to get a good conversation going with somebody developing an open badges project.

So while the residents of Chicago drank more green beer than there was green water in the river, I trolled the hallways, lecture halls, and coffee bars at the three day 2013 DML Conference inside the downtown Chicago Sheridan Hotel. And I talked shop with everyone who didn’t actively run the opposite direction. Here are some of the projects I learned about that make me so excited I could spontaneously combust.

• MentorMob & Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana are teaching girls how to build Android Apps, then giving them the chance to show off their new skills by adding digital badges to a digital sash. It’s a project I’m tickled to be a part of.

Vicki, Charles, Kristin, & Carlye of Team My Girl Scout Sash is an App

• The HIVE Learning Network is connecting all the learning institutions within cities (museums, libraries, universities, and more) and facilitating hands-on, interest-driven educational projects like Chicago’s Summer of Learning.
• The indefatigable Todd Edebohls and his team at Inside Jobs are helping high school students select learning and career pathways that correspond to their interests. Imagine! Kids preparing for a career they’ll be good at and like doing!
• NASA wants to get you hooked on space games. And they will.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is going to be serving even more young veterans returning from war zones this year. And potential employers have GOT to be educated on how military training translates to civilian skills. (Because they do!)
• Youtopia is making it easy and fun to get rewarded for giving back—and to show off how much better you are than your coworkers.

An icky and awesome Chicago tradition: we dye the river green

• Sweet Water Organics is teaching kids about everything from sustainability to biology—all while they’re up and about and moving around. (Which is how kids learn best, wouldn’t you say?)
• Design for America at Northwestern University is exposing the Human Centered Design process to college students, which is how things that are easy and fun for humans to use get built.
• BuzzMath is the new Math Blasters. Its design is so friendly it makes this English Literature Major want to give numbers another chance.
• Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Student Network not only boasts an intricate leveling badge system—Ross Higashi and Sam Abramovich have already published research on it. Talk about being ahead of the power curve.
• Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair is motivating a new generation of kids to become the problem solving scientists we need.

And this is only a small sampling of the amazing work that’s going on right now in education disruption and open badges!

2013 is going to be a good year for life long learners everywhere.

Everyone starts out as a novice, but the goal should be expertise. It just says good things about you. No one thinks, “Mediocrity, now, that’s where it’s at!”

I could go into the details of what abilities I’ve acquired as painter and give you a quick how-to from the world of water colors and oils, but I’ll spare you. What I’d rather do is explain what I’ve come to understand about creativity and the learning process through my experience as a painter. So without further ado, here are a few things I’ve taken from my experiences as a life-long learner:

1. Go Slow

Be careful about diving headfirst into something you know very little about. A lack of knowledge shouldn’t deter you, but it should at least make you cautious. I hate to say it, but creativity is expensive and if you’re not careful, you’re just going to be frustrated at yourself later when you’ve bought all the paraphernalia that goes with your new hobby only to have it collect dust on your kitchen table. You’ll get calls from both “Hoarders” and Dave Ramsey and they won’t be just to chat. Instead, rent an instrument, try charcoals, practice with play-dough, and then see where it goes. Sometimes something sounds good only because it’s new; once that wears off comes the true test as to whether this is your thing.

2. Emulation is not Bad

I have this thing where I want to create something truly original and I get frustrated when I start to see signs of other artists’ styles pop up in my work. It makes me feel sub-par, especially when I think of creative minds I respect like Sufjan Stevens who are so unique they can’t be defined by genre. To me, it means it’s possible and I’m not doing it.

As I’ve grown as an artist, though, I’ve realized that to be without influence is virtually unattainable. As you begin learning a new skill, this is where you start. You have no precedent to help you achieve mastery, so you glean ideas from those who have, all the while developing your own style. The key is choosing who you will allow to impact your creative process. This will give you huge insights into your character that you might not have discovered otherwise, especially if you are more open minded about what you consider noteworthy and avoid what’s popular.

3. Enjoy It

For me, when I paint, it is q verbally quiet, spiritually cacophonous experience. I’m pretty good at it now and that does add to the enjoyment of it, but even when I was a newbie, I was still thrilled at the thought of having time to spend at the easel. That’s kind of the point—your creative efforts should be something you love for the experience in and of itself. If the only pleasure you get is the end result, you are missing the best part of the process. Mastery and expertise will come in its due time if this is the attitude you take to your work.

The point I’m trying to get across is that learning is incredible and it’s something that shouldn’t end in a classroom. Maybe we would be less stressed, over-worked, under-socialized or whatever else modern sociologists claim our problem is if we would just give that thing we always thought we’d be good at the ‘ol college try. It could be great, or it could really suck; but how would you know if it never became more than an idea? We have precious few excuses to not try any more with the resources we have access to.

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I’ve always thought App Boot Camp was an ambitious project.

Last year, when MentorMob, Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, and Motorola Mobility Foundation joined forces as winners in the Digital Media & Learning Competition, I thought to myself—giving girls the chance to discover an interest in app development is a great idea, but it’s going to be a challenge.

Because programming is hard! Not only does it take a lot of time to learn how to be a developer—it takes a lot of time to develop even once you ARE a developer.

But with the combination of MentorMob‘s online content delivery system (complete with built-in user behavior analytics, assessments, and social features), Girl Scouts GCNWI’s time tested learning curriculum, and Motorola Mobility Foundation’s software expertise, girls have been empowered to build Android applications that allow them to play games, learn logic in the process, and display digital badges advertising their new skills on a digital sash.

How badges look displayed in the Mozilla Badge Backpack

Using MIT’s App Inventor—a program that breaks distinct lines of code into building blocks users assemble together to determine how an app looks and what it does—girls are able to build something impressive that they can show off to friends and family, and which (hopefully!) hooks them on STEM learning for life.

And once their app is complete, girls can choose to push their new digital badge to the Mozilla Open Badge Backpack, which makes it possible to show off their accomplishment anywhere online.

You can register for App Boot Camp and learn more about the program on the Girl Scouts GCNWI website.

Here’s what: partnering with an organization that’s helping provide education to those in disadvantaged areas that would not receive a good education otherwise.

I have always believed that education is a right not a privilege. And in support of that belief, MentorMob has teamed up with Kwagala Project, which is dedicated to rescuing, restoring, and empowering women & children who have been victimized by trafficking, violence, or poverty.

In addition to providing counseling and trauma therapy, we help survivors cross the bridge into self-sufficiency through education and practical aftercare programs such as skills training, entrepreneurship, and job placement.  Each area of study is designed to equip graduates with the tools and informed choices needed to build their newly empowered futures.

MentorMob and Kwagala are asking you to #BeAwesome and take action by learning more about the project!  We would also love you to share this opportunity with the #EdChat community on Twitter and give a Ugandan girl the school supplies she needs by purchasing bracelets for the MentorMob campaign that were hand made by women who are retaking control of their lives. (After clicking the link, just scroll down to see the bracelets.) 

Entrepreneurs Empowering Education

Staying true to their educational awesomeness and readiness to change the world, MentorMob is donating 100% of the proceeds from these bracelets to purchase school supplies and uniforms for girls in Uganda.  We are thrilled to facilitate this endeavor and look forward to reporting the number of backpacks and uniforms you helped provide!  Way to #BEAWESOME!