I’m pleased to share this guest post from Frank Odasz, a presenter from the Broadband Conference last month…
The First Ojibwe Digital Generation: Reframing the Rural Broadband Vision Based on Native Values
Presenting real choices for a global voice, and broad impacts, helping others, globally.
The Seventh Generation Prophesy says the seventh generation since the cultural disruption of North America by the Europeans will lead a new era of cultural sovereignty.
During a unique Native Youth Digital Storytelling workshop held as part of the Nov 18-20 Border to Border Broadband Conference: Better Together, 25 Native youth aged 10-17 years learned how broadband and specific creativity apps can give them the ability to leverage the impacts of their Native Values with a global voice, creating video tutorials to empower an unlimited number of peers as stewards of the Earth, Sky, and our one human family. This opportunity was made possible by a grant from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community.
The First Ojibwe Digital Generation now has the tools and skills to teach the roughly one million Native youth nationally, as well as potentially the 4 billion young, and poor, learners who will be coming online by 2020, if they so choose to use their new global voices.
How Native Values relate to their choice as to whether to act, and innovate, or not, begins with their opportunity to first share their new skills locally, to express, celebrate, and preserve their culture, first locally, and then, ideally, globally.
Act Locally, Think Globally.
President Obama has created a new National Native Youth Network, and via the Broadband Opportunity Council Report has tasked 30 executive branch agencies with promoting broadband to “unleash the creativity of all Americans.” America’s global competitiveness depends on our ability to effectively collaborate with all good folks, globally. There is new recognition that mass innovation is a new resource, and that “The Top Down federal agencies have much to learn about partnering meaningfully with the Bottom-Up grassroots innovators.”
The real power of broadband lies in what you know to do with it, with three best practices as;
- Using the power to become a self-directed learner; purposefully
- Using the power to self-publish globally to Create and Share; meaningfully
- Using the power for group collaboration to bring people together to make good things happen
The Blandin Conference theme was “We’re better together.”
A new day of rural, and indigenous, sustainability, and cultural sovereignty, is upon us.
Workshop Presenter:
Frank Odasz, President of Lone Eagle Consulting:
Find the workshop description, followed by the youth’s digital Ebooks, websites, and their first exposure to virtual reality, along with all resources necessary for others to duplicate this workshop at;
http://lone-eagles.com/storytelling.htm
Bio and 3 key articles on teaching the innovation mindset;
Blandin on Broadband 