Kickstarter

You've already contributed to the Smarthistory Kickstarter drive (and we hope you know how enormously appreciative we are). You've spent time on the Smarthistory.org site, reading, watching, exploring. You are our ideal viewer—thoughtful, curious, and committed. Now we want to ask one more thing of you. Tell us about your Smarthistory experience. We want to learn what you found on the site that made you a supporter. Has it changed the way you think about art in some way? Has it helped enrich your experience? Did it prompt a conversation? Please tell us what Smarthistory means to you in the comments area below. We are so interested, please take a moment and let us learn from you.

The project website for this important initiative just went live and we are very excited that Smarthistory was cited in the post which stated,

"We hope to see more innovation like smarthistory.org, a free and open, conversation-based multimedia art history web-book. Smarthistory.org aggregates our cultural treasures—digitally—but also encourages the learner to engage and analyze in real time, engaging students in a whole new way."

For the complete post, go to: Broadband.gov

Today marks the mid-point of our crowdsourcing experiment in fundraising here on Kickstarter and we thought that was a good opportunity for an update.

We are hearing from new teachers nearly every week who are adopting Smarthistory.org and in the past 31 days (January 13 to February 12), the site was visited 81,684 times by people in 154 countries. The map below shows the percentage of new visitors around the world during the past month (darker = a higher percentage). Free and open education works thanks to you.

As of a few minutes ago, 197 amazing supporters have pledged to Smarthistory and with 22 days to go, we only need to raise an additional $1,028 to make our goal. As you know, Kickstarter is an all or nothing platform so this project is driving us a little crazy, and we look forward to breathing again when we cross the goal threshold.

Google Analytics map showing the percentage of new visitors to Smarthistory.org 1/13/11-2/12/11

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation...

Visit: https://www.kickstarter.com/creativecommons

Rob Reynolds focused Smarthistory.org in his terrific blog, Xplana, this morning. He wrote...

"Yesterday, I wrote about the shift to digital-first in content and how that is promoting a variety of open textbook and open content initiatives in Higher Education. I want to follow-up on those thoughts with a dedicated plug for one of those initiatives, smARThistory..."

To read the complete article:
http://blog.xplana.com/2011/02/an-noteworthy-textbook-alternative-smarthistory/