This page provides a bit more introduction to Open Portal Networks for folks filling out the “Networking for educational innovation” questionnaire.

While most websites are designed to keep your eyeballs glued to the page you are visiting, that is not our objective for Open Portal Network. This site is more of a transfer station than a destination. We want you to stop here just long enough to discover other individuals and organizations you resonate with. What are they doing to create learning infrastructure and curricula relevant to today’s learners? Who can help you accomplish your mission? What new ideas and processes can you adopt? Which organizations are ripe for collaboration and joint projects with you? Is there an event you would like to attend or a resource you can use? Where in the world is someone else working toward the same goals, using the same tools, or espousing the same values as you are?

The purpose of the questionnaire is to help others find you. It is a continuous “work in progress” so if you fill out the “other” options this month, the items and questions may be a little different next month. The responses made on the questionnaire drive its evolution. Open Portal Network is a process you participate in, not an organization you join. It has plenty of room for those whose focus and values mirror yours very closely and for those who only overlap with you a little. As with many educational endeavors, much of its strength lies in its ability to accommodate and celebrate difference rather than promoting sameness.

Open Portal Network flourishes and gains usefulness only with the participation of its users. Filling in and submitting this introductory form is only one of your opportunities. Almost every page has (or will have soon) a comment or feedback section that invites you to contribute to the evolution of that page. Your contributions will be screened to filter out destructive, repetitive, or off-topic contributions. Aside from those, the site monitors will do their best to post all ideas and points of view. So submit a blog to the Voices section, add another concept or value, with your explanation of what it means, to those pages. Bring an issue that’s important to you to the attention of everyone. Invite us to an event your group is hosting. Alert us to a curriculum or resource you have developed and we could adopt.

And keep in mind that high-impact social change isn’t what makes the headlines for a few weeks or is supported only by large organizations. Serious change is practiced in small groups of 5 to 25 people. It is driven by ideas from one or a few people that propagate slowly around the world. Your idea is important. Your effort is worthwhile. Your network may be small and local but it can reach across the globe when we connect to each other.

Back to the Networking for educational innovation” questionnaire.

Link to Open Portal Network front page