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

From a little spark may burst a flame

Launching a website is a fairly stressful process. It represents the culmination of months of work, of vision, of hope, of work, and of planning. As you near the end you see results of the efforts of many. The vision of the founder who had the concept. The talent of the designer who came up with the colors, the logo, the layout. The skill of the developers who built the technology to enable something radically new and different and who had the patience to constantly chase down bugs on the site. The friends who support the site and the team with constant affirmation.
And then there is our loyal user base who visit the site, offer courses, provide ideas and tell their friends and bring on students to the site.

Launching a new venture is an exhausting, humbling, terrifying, and exhilarating moment.

This week I met new members to our community from around the world. I traded emails from an English instructor who lives in Cairo, a PhD student in India, a French teacher in Frejus, and many others. They are all passionate about helping others to learn. And that's pretty exciting.

I've spent the week juggling the business, but in my spare time I've had some time to start reading Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything". It's a fantastic book that traces the history behind the scientific discoveries that have shaped the modern world.

As I read through the pages, one thing becomes clear: Great ideas start small. They start as a gathering of a few people inspired by an idea and committed to making that idea a reality. It is in that spirit that I thought I'd share with all of you a snapshot of the Revoluminary traffic. I hope that we continue to grow and spread our enthusiasm for sharing knowledge.

Thanks to all who have joined and are offering to share what they know with the world. You are Revoluminary, and that's really something tremendous. So to my fellow Revoluminaries, don't stop! Tell your friends, reach out to your communities. Together we will change the world.

More Sneak Previews...Classroom and My Revoluminary

All,

Two of the features that we’re really excited about at Revoluminary are our proprietary classroom and the account manager. These two tools are intended to make teaching and learning online easier and more effective for our community members.

The Revoluminary classroom includes interactive voice, video, instant messaging, whiteboarding, and file exchange. Best of all, you can use the classroom through any standard browser (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE), with no peering. And because you have a dedicated connection, the call won’t be dropped.

My Revoluminary

The My Revoluminary page is your personal portal to everything going on Revoluminary. This is the place to go to update your profile, add or edit new classes, checkout your schedule, check your messages, or change your user account settings.

We think it's pretty cool and will help you manage your classes easier.

Sneak preview

Fellow Revoluminaries,

We're a week or so away from launching and I wanted to give you a sneak preview of the home page. We've just finished the initial user testing of the site, and we're pretty excited about the response to our style. As for me, I recently attended the new Italian cinema film festival here in San Francisco, and am pretty fired up to learn Italian (The woman came with me to the film festival...hey, I'm doing the best I can!).

So here's the site that you'll be seeing soon:

Revoluminary Home Page

Community Guidelines

Revoluminaries,

A few days ago we wrote about the principles that inspire us. Along with those principles, we have been doing a lot of thinking here about what guidelines we should try to maintain to ensure that everyone has a positive experience as part of the community.

We’ve started formulating our ideas, and I welcome your comments and feedback on how you would like the community to operate. After all, you are Revoluminary!

Community Guidelines

1. We encourage everyone to welcome new members the way you would like to be welcomed if you were new to the community, and to be as inclusive as possible.
2. We are inspired by ideas and we live by words. We actively encourage open and vigorous debate in the pursuit of understanding. However, we do not allow obscene, racist, sexually explicit or otherwise offensive content.
3. We believe in the power of learning to inspire people to achieve and to understand. However members of our community may not suggest or encourage violent, illegal, illicit or otherwise inappropriate activity.
4. We value intellectual property protections and ask that members have copyright ownership of all material shared on the Revoluminary platform.
5. We respect the privacy of our community members, and ask that members refrain from sharing phone numbers, addresses, Social Security numbers, or other private information.
6. Use good judgment, and have a wonderful time!

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!

Say you want a Revoluminary

It’s been a few weeks since we announced that we’d entered Alpha testing. Since that time we have been in the lab mixing chemicals, exploding monitors, and otherwise testing the alchemy behind the Revoluminary site.

While we’ve been working, we’ve received several questions about how the site will work, and I thought I’d go ahead and share some answers.

Q: Who can use Revoluminary?
A: Revoluminary is intended for everyone. For the launch we have invited a limited number of people to participate in the private beta (you can request an invitation here). Shortly after launch we will be extending those invitations.

Q: What subjects can I teach on Revoluminary?
A: At Revoluminary we encourage people to share their knowledge with the world. We already have instructors in over 14 languages, math, science, as well as in a lot of really fun things like high alpine mountaineering, marathon training, and cooking! However, in the interest of protecting our users, we do not allow obscene, racist, sexually explicit or otherwise offensive topics.

Q: Do I need Skype to use Revoluminary?
A: No. Revoluminary uses a proprietary browser based classroom that combines streaming video and voice, whiteboarding, instant messaging and powerpoint and word file exchange in one convenient place. The Revoluminary classroom works on Safari, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox platforms.

Q: So how does Revoluminary work?
A: Revoluminary provides a convenient and easy interface for people from around the world to meet and teach each other. As a member of the Revoluminary community, you can create a personal profile, list classes you are available to teach, manage your schedule, send messages to other members, and of course, teach or learn from anyone in the world through the Revoluminary classroom.

Q: How much does it cost?
A: You decide! Every instructor sets their own rate, and joining Revoluminary is free.

Q: When will you launch?
A: We plan on launching in a few weeks!

Q: Do you still need to learn Italian to impress a certain girl?
A: You have no idea! I think she’s starting to figure out that the only thing I really know how to say is “diami un bacio”...but she still occasionally says ‘si’

Hope these answered a few of the questions you all have sent our way. And watch this space, we’ll be posting a lot more information over the next couple weeks!