His first book Three Cups of Tea tells the story of how he ended up in Korphe and kept his promise to help build them a school. His second book Stones to Schools continues the story of how one school lead to another and then another. Mortenson’s success in reaching out to the most needy in the most remote places on earth has got the attention of the US military and his book Three Cups of Tea is now required reading by officers in Afghanistan. When Mortenson was trying to raise money to build his first school in Korphe he was lucky to attract a 1/2 dozen people at a REI store, now thousands of people wait in line to see him and he raises hundred of thousands of dollars a day.

One of the stories he tells in Stones to Schools is about his “dirty dozen”, the team of local men he has put together to help him build the schools. Some of the men are uneducated, one an ex-Taliban, a few were smugglers. They come from many different ethnic and religious groups and at one time would have been trying to kill each other. But, what seems to pull them together is their loyalty to Mortenson and his dream of educating girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As I am reading this I think about our members of Congress. They all speak the same language and the religious differences have not caused any wars in the last 100 years. So why can’t they focus on passing laws that make health care available and affordable in the US?

The Taliban is trying to stop the building of schools for girls in Afghanistan. They are burning schools, killing teaches and throwing acid in the face of school girls. The religious fundamentalist in Afghanistan only see their interpretation of the Koran as the correct one and will kill anyone who does not believe their truth is the only truth. This monolithic thinking also happens in America, my version of economics, culture, environment, politics, etc is the one true version.  They reject the idea that maybe there are other versions that could also be true and as a democratic state it is our duty to find a way to merge the different versions. By at least recognizing there are many different points of view and the political process is not about winning and loosing, a way can be found to meet the needs of most of the people most of the time.

I also decided that developing this grant is a process which can be developed into a presentation at edtec conferences. Other educators would be interested in how the grant was developed and implemented. So to keep a record of the process I am going to blog about it.

Our school has a new curriculum director and she was hired just before school started. She is over seeing this grant and another as well as all the other responsibilities she has. So, it has not be easy to have a long conversation with her about all the questions I have about how developing this online curriculum will work. She has already hired a person who will help me (if I get the position) develop the Moodle end of this. He is not an educator and has no experience with Moodle. His experience is in databases and assessment design. He will help develop the assessment part of each course.

The grant group has started a Google Wave as a way to communicate about issues, meetings, and ideas. So far the group has found Wave very useful and will use it in the training process.

This blog will also be a way for me to work out ideas and questions I have.

When the exective director of the school system I work in called together a group of teachers and supervisors to write a vision statement it was more about what we now do than a vision of where we want to be. The school system serves special ed students so developing 21 century work place skills was not something we thought about. Once the process was complete we all went back to doing our jobs pretty much the way we always have, not giving much thought to the process we went through. I can not tell you what our vision statement is.

The staff at the school are generally dedicated teachers who work with some very difficult students in isolated classrooms and it would be helpful if at least once a year we reviewed the vision statement that brought us together for a couple of weeks.

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Originally uploaded by manz1964

We made the big decision to get another dog 1 1/2 years after Hannah died. After a couple of months of looking and talking about it we contacted Adoptalab.org and within a few hours we were signed up and decided to take Hera aka Pudge who we will call Willa. She is a yellow 4 year old lab and we could not have picked a better dog.