Revoluminary Thoughts

Revoluminary awarded digital dog!

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:18:10 +0000

That’s right… check out E-Learning Queen’s Corgi awards for cool e-learning sites:

http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2008/06/e-learning-queens-corgi-big-bark-awards.html

Susan Smith Nash blogs about e-learning on this Corgi-filled site. Several other great resources have been profiled on her site including Elluminate and Instructional Spice. Glad to see the word getting out about Revoluminary, even while we’re here plugging away on new tools for our students.

Max

CoolSiteOfTheDay.com - Exciting Results!

admin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:48:21 +0000

Everyone -

Thanks for voting on CoolSiteOfTheDay.com yesterday! We got a ton of visits to the site yesterday and ended up with a rating of 6.493… here is how it compares some other sites you may have heard of back when they were first discovered:

WebMD: 7.245 (February 27, 2000)
Google Earth: 7.101 (June 29, 2005)
Skype: 6.736 (August 4, 2004)
Revoluminary: 6.493 (June 23, 2006)
StumbleUpon: 6.281 (August 9, 2002)
Kayak: 5.987 (December 14, 2004)
YouTube: 5.640 (December 26, 2005)
Guru.com: 5.410 (February 23, 2000)
Yahoo! Answers: 5.383 (December 12, 2006)
Neopets: 4.652 (January 8, 2007)
Netflix: 4.074 (February 18, 2003)
Match.com: 3.587 (February 14, 2005)

Those are some pretty exciting results. Thanks a lot, everyone, for your support!

Max

Revoluminary.com is the Cool Site of the Day!

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:23:41 +0000

As the word is spreading, more people are starting to hear about our site and our community. And they’re starting to tell other people, which is awesome.

Today we’re featured on Cool Site of the Day! So take a moment to check out their review and vote for Revoluminary!

- Pete

Great resource for students

admin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:00:32 +0000

Since we deal with a lot of students on Revoluminary, we often find some cool resources for students and share them with our users. This week, we ran into MovingOffCampus.com, a site that lets students find housing around universities. The site is expanding, and recently added a searchable directory of clubs, bars, restaurants, vendors and services. There is also a feature that lets students find other students around their campus to buy and sell things (a la craigslist). They also have on the ground representatives at various campuses to get the word out about their site. Sounds like a great resource, so check it out - www.MovingOffCampus.com.

Pow Wow in San Francisco

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:44:27 +0000

I made a trip to San Francisco and Pete and I had quite the pow wow.

The result: tons of exciting news from Revoluminary. If you received our newsletter, you’ve seen some of this:

Pricing changes: We removed our 20% fee, and made it a flat charge of $3/class. Simpler. Cheaper. Everyone wins.
Tweaking the homepage: New buttons, more web 2.0-ish look, clearer navigation. More improvements to come soon!
Translation to other languages: click on the flags () on the home page and translate to any language. While its not perfect, it helps our users abroad navigate the site and get into the classroom.
Feature on Chinese blogger site: http://enjoyweb20.cn/index.php/2008/06/revoluminary/. According to friends in China that helped us translate, its good stuff.
New social bookmarking feature: Check out the “Share” button on our homepage: . It lets you add Revoluminary to other sites like Digg and del.icio.us.

There’s more exciting stuff to come. For more exciting news, check back on our site on Monday… I promise something cool!

Max

Instructors Featured on Homepage

admin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:17:42 +0000

See something new? Our instructors are now featured on the homepage, making it easy for students to browse directly into the classroom. Whenever you open our homepage, you’ll now see 7 instructors from around the world getting some free publicity for their tutoring services. Check it out here:

More Blogger Mentions

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:05:18 +0000

We’re excited to see several more mentions of our site on a few popular blogs. Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has a blog that talks about new e-learning tools available on the internet. She was kind enough to give us quick plug here:

http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2008/06/revoluminary.html

Stephen Downes from Canada has a blog that talks about online learning and collaborative technologies. Though Stephen showed some concern about our terms of service, we feel that it is is only fair to protect our instructors from others copying their content on other sites. Our lawyers are taking a look at the language and hopefully will make it more clear that we are not restricting people from using the site in any way. Stephen’s blog can be found on:

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=44891

Thank you to all of the bloggers out there volunteering their time to take a look at our site! We hope to have some more interesting updates for you soon!

Max

Dorm Room Entrepreneurs

Max — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:49:00 +0000

I’d like to extend my thanks to Chris Pund over at DormRoomBiz.com for getting us some attention on his blog about student entrepreneurship. While a lot of students go through college worrying about classes and interviewing for jobs, a self-selecting minority doesn’t wait for graduation to earn some cash. The DormRoomBiz blog helps students find ways to earn money from their dorm rooms, be it via blogging, reselling on eBay, designing web pages or even mowing lawns!

Revoluminary presents an entirely new opportunity for students by allowing them to start their own tutoring businesses without ever leaving their dorm rooms. In fact, we are looking for exactly the type of entrepreneurially-minded students that Chris features on his blog. Anyone that speaks a second language, knows how to conduct interviews or has taken classes that others need help with can now earn money as an online tutor. Thanks again, Chris.

Check out the posting below:

(http://www.dorm-room-biz.com/2008/06/06/are-you-revoluminary/)

Max

A new look

Peter — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Things are progressing here at Revoluminary, and I thought I’d give a quick update. As several of you have noticed, we’ve spruced up the homepage recently! This is the first of a number of changes that will be unveiled over the summer as we continue to evolve Revoluminary and to improve the look, feel, and features available to our community.

I’d also like to welcome Max to the team. We’re excited to have him on board and cranking away. Max will be heading up our online marketing effort and comes to us with a very strong background in tech enabled education.

- Pete

Getting the Word Out

Max — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:44:00 +0000

With the headcount here at Revoluminary growing exponentially (with the addition of yours truly), we’re excited to aggressively push to get the word out about our site. While students may be out for the summer, we’ll be pushing hard to improve the site and provide more features for our users.

For example, the good folks at www.DarnGoodReviews.com just wrote an awesome review of Revoluminary. Check us out:

Traveling abroad this summer? Take a language class! In preparation for my trip to Jordan, I personally took “Arabic Lessons 01″, a class from Antoinette and Paul over in Egypt. They taught me some reading basics and a few phrases to get around. Paul also made good use of our Course Files feature and had a PowerPoint presentation ready to go through. We went through fairly quickly, and he had a second one ready (so I got two lessons for the price of one!).

Look forward to exciting things coming out of Revoluminary this summer. While students may be out of school, we’ll be pushing hard to improve the site and include more features. Next month, we’ll be rolling out a few FREE resources for our students to improve their experience outside of our interactive classroom.

Max