The Rinn law library is losing the services of the very able computer technical assistant and Depaul student, Neil Dahlke. But our loss will be a gain both for Neil and for the very recently launched internet startup called. MentorMob He will be joining a current staff of a dozen and will be working on the look and feel and accessibility of the startup's website.
Founded in 2010, MentorMob was launched as a startup two months ago. Using the wikipedia social sourcing model, MentorMob seeks to organize and curate the great wealth of learning and how-to content available on the open internet.Some of the curation will be directed at breaking down instruction into a step-by-step sequence that can be tailored to users with different learning styles. Shane Greenstein, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, finds that MentorMob recognizes “different roles for the same contributor, in some contexts as a mentor and in another as learner."
"MentorMob’s learning modules are called Learning Playlists that users can view at their own pace without registering for an account. Any registered user can create new playlists or add to, comment on, or re-order the steps in existing Playlists. Presently, content in each Playlist comes from the web in the form of articles, videos, slides and other media forms. "These Playlists are created by you !
MentorMob has been Beta tested by faculty at Columbia College in Chicago for a course and student organizations. Beyond users on the internet the MentorMob developers hope that their platform can provide "collaborative learning (for students) and creating lesson plans (for teachers)". They are also currently partnered with organizations, like Wilton Brands, a billion dollar arts & crafts company, who use MentorMob’s platform to organize their training content (videos, text, etc).
MentorMob has been working off of bootstrap funding and is is seeking additional funding. The plan is to support the site with targeted advertising and in the future to get customers to use MentorMob for corporate training programs and universities. Getting there is going to require a lot of marketing at this stage. Neil our former techie will have his work cut out for him.
However, as, Vince Leung, MentorMob co-founder, says "But if MentorMob can grab the attention of the curating masses and find loyal users like Wikipedia diehards, we think they have a very promising business model."
Best of luck to Neil and to MentorMob !
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Sources :
"We Want To Be The Pandora Of Learning"
Startup MentorMob Co-Founder Talks About Its Place in Education
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