Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Angana's thoughts on the DML showcase in Washington DC

Hello Wave Team:
Just a quick note to let you know that we are back from the US, and currently in Mumbai preparing for a presentation here on June 5th.
Here are a few highlights from our days in Washington DC:
We stayed in the hotel room all of the first day creating a power point presentation. When we reached the venue the next morning and asked the organizers their plan, they very sweetly said, “Will you go first?” So we did and that was great, as before we knew it we were done!
We spoke about how our project was innovative, described its design of the program, and shared some moments from the training. We introduced them to the diversity of the group, showing some of your pictures and telling them about your backgrounds. We talked about the themes of the videos showing images and guided them through the website. There was so much to say that of course we went over time and had to rush to the end for which we had prepared quotes from what some of you have said about empowerment in your profile videos.
For the rest of the conference we learnt about other winning projects and came out feeling that ours was one of the most interesting and unusual. In fact the funders have described WAVE as a project that has met their gold standard!
This year the DML Competition is partnering with Obama’s initiative in innovations in learning. We had Obama’s Chief Technology Officer a very charismatic Aneesh Chopra come and speak to us about White House policies and initiatives and the importance of our projects in view of these. So it was wonderful to get the big picture and know that our project has landed us pretty much in the forefront of innovation in learning in the Digital Age also envisioned by the Obama Administration.

Angana.

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