Hey, I really want to talk to you about the event idea. Do you Skype?

Hi James,

My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham, MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. Since you are in the 'e-learning and online teaching' group, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2009, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win a competition for startup funding on ideablob.com. You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975 . We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com

The event function is activated, but I've chosen to use it to list CR 2.0 sponsored events. What were you wanting to use it for?

The difficulty with Ning's event calendar function is that it's not well suited, in my opinion, to being a calendar off all of the events that members of CR 2.0 might want to put there. I tried briefly to open it up to all members, and the result was not satisfying.

I'd suggest that you might want to start a wiki page for your group where you can list the events you want to trak, and then point to that page in the group description. Would that work?

The problem was that with 15,000 people, events that I needed to make sure were visible to the members were obviously going to get buried quickly. I'll look at the feature again when I get a chance and see if there's something I missed.