Project Einstein

Project Einstein is a "digital penpal" participatory education program linking Burmese and American high school students. Newly arrived Burmese youth will work alongside their American classmates to exchange images of their lives with one another and with Burmese youth in refugee camps in Thailand and India, connecting communities that are otherwise inaccessible to free communication and information with home-country immigrant and refugee communities in the United States.

How might communities use it?
Teachers can share curriculum materials across distances; the platform also allows for groups of people to share and discuss multimedia material.

At what stage of development is it?
We're currently developing the website, working with outside developers to fix bugs in Open Atrium code; deploy (mid-October 2009) in two separate high schools in Indianapolis and two refugee youth communities in Thailand and India.