Getting the Word Out

With the headcount here at Revoluminary growing exponentially (with the addition of yours truly), we're excited to aggressively push to get the word out about our site. While students may be out for the summer, we'll be pushing hard to improve the site and provide more features for our users.

For example, the good folks at www.DarnGoodReviews.com just wrote an awesome review of Revoluminary. Check us out:



Traveling abroad this summer? Take a language class! In preparation for my trip to Jordan, I personally took "Arabic Lessons 01", a class from Antoinette and Paul over in Egypt. They taught me some reading basics and a few phrases to get around. Paul also made good use of our Course Files feature and had a PowerPoint presentation ready to go through. We went through fairly quickly, and he had a second one ready (so I got two lessons for the price of one!).

Look forward to exciting things coming out of Revoluminary this summer. While students may be out of school, we'll be pushing hard to improve the site and include more features. Next month, we'll be rolling out a few FREE resources for our students to improve their experience outside of our interactive classroom.

Max

What we stand for

Fellow Revoluminaries,

As we prepare to launch our community, we wanted to take a few minutes to share the values that we believe are fundamental to what being a Revoluminary is all about.

We enthusiastically welcome your comments and thoughts on these. After all, you are Revoluminary, and we want to make sure that we build the best site community for all of us.

Our Principles:

• We believe ideas can inspire and change the world
• We believe everyone should be free to choose what, when and how they learn
• We believe knowledge is meant to be shared
• We believe people are essentially good
• We believe honest, open exchange brings out the best in people and in communities
• We believe in respecting everyone as a unique individual with valuable thoughts, ideas, beliefs and inspirations
• We believe we have a lot to learn and we are excited to get started!

A new way of knowing

18 months ago at 2am I finally gave up trying to find an Italian tutor. I wanted to learn the language, largely to impress a certain girl who spoke Italian. But I was only available late at night, and even then my schedule was sporadic. It seemed Italian was out, and I would have to rely on my charm. Italian would have been better...

That night sparked a year and a half long quest to understand why we learn the way we do (or don't). Why do the academies have a monopoly on knowledge? What happened to the lifelong student, the amateur scholar, and societies dedicated to shared interests, vigorous debate, and continuous discovery? Are people less excited about learning, or is it simply that we're less excited about the way we're taught? And most importantly, why can't technology help me find someone online that can teach Italian at midnight, or offer up some helpful tips for relating to a certain pretty Italian speaking girl? And for that matter, why can't I study art history? or cooking? or marathon training (a personal goal of mine)? People do these things all the time...surely somebody must be willing to teach them to the rest of us!

This month we're getting ready to launch a web site called Revoluminary (www.revoluminary.com) that I hope will address these questions and radically change the way that we share knowledge.

Revoluminary provides an easy and effective platform for people to explore, create, teach, and learn according to their own interests and abilities, while participating in a broader global community of friends and fellow enthusiasts. I hope it becomes a global knowledge potluck, where we can come together and learn from each other.

Many of you have already signed up to participate in our beta testing. If you haven't, I'd love to have you join us. We're running out of spaces, but as of this writing there were a little over 220 invitations to the beta left. In the meantime, watch this space, and please, share your thoughts. After all, we're building the site for you, the passionate learners and teachers of the world.

You may not have realized it, but YOU are Revoluminary!