You and your students can win $350 for the best Parapoulpe

The Avalokistevara foundation is announcing a $350 prize for the best ‘Parapoulpe’, and YOU are eligible. Entries must be received by October 20.

Parapoulpe is a word derived from the Sanskrit ‘para’ meaning great or higher, and the French word ‘poulpe’ meaning octopus. Thus it means ‘great octopus’. It’s a new term for a list of references to many old and new styles of knowledge gathering concerning a given subject. It’s akin to a ‘syllabus’, though a Parapoulpe includes Web 2.0 things like wikis, podcasts, videos, webcams, audio files, blog entries, and social network sites, as well as older things like books (remember them?)

(There are several suites of software programs which do something like this, but they are commercial products. A Parapoulpe is just a page with words on it, that can be emailed or blogged or put in a wiki.)

Parapoulpes are most suited to subjects which affect humans directly in several ways and through several senses. Thus 'Calculus' wouldn't be as good a topic as 'Italian Food'.
They work best with a medium-sized subject, like ‘Beethoven’, or ‘Solar
Energy’, or ‘Tahiti’.
Thus, ‘North America’ would be too big a subject, whereas ‘Reproductive Habits of Mediterranean Fruit Flies” would be too small.

So, if your Parapoulpe were about Tahiti, you’d reference books about Tahiti, recent articles, blogs from real Tahitians as well as tourists, MP3 files of Tahitian music, links to Tahitian recipes, MySpace sites of Tahitians (after getting their permission, of course), links to sites showing Tahitian art, Tahitian videos, wikis, podcasts, Tahitian radio and TV stations (preferably those which stream on the net so that any student could access them).

The idea is that in just a few hours, someone could achieve a 3-dimensional, multi-sensory ‘taste’ of Tahiti, as if they’d actually lived there for a month, instead of just having read a book about it.

For the purposes of this contest, each entry should be one page or less. The prize money can be divided up between teacher and student, or between several students.

You can send your one page entry to this forum, or to me at rajitashinde@hotmail.com, or to AvalokistevaraFoundation@gmail.com
Fonts, colors, typefaces and such don't matter; we mainly want to see that your list brings your subject alive to the mind, senses, and feelings of the experiencer, using the best of old and new media.

R.S.