The BDW news blog

Excited to have Sparkfun Electronics here, teaching an intro to Arduino class at BDW.

Richard Jones — aka The Talented Mr. Jones — works as a web developer by day, is lead engineer at Callisto.fm, and brings 10 years of experience to the BDW studio.

For those interested in Startup, this video gives a good sense of the BDW approach to teaching entrepreneurship.

Hear perspectives from:

• Robert Reich — Serial Entrepreneur, BDW Board Member and Startup Instructor
• Brad Bernthal — CU Law Professor, Director for Entrepreneurship Initiative at Silicon Flatirons, and Startup Mentor
• Jill Vanmatre — Associate Director of ATLAS, and Silicon Flatirons Board Member
• Pedro Sorrentino — Founder Resolva.me, BDW Graduate, and Business Development and SendGrid.

The application for BDW’s fifth class, starting in the fall of 2012 is now open on our website.

The BDW Graduate Certificate Program develops design thinkers who are collaborative, entrepreneurial, and will shape the future through innovative integration of technology into everyday life.

Applications will be accepted in three waves, with application deadlines on the first of the month and notification of acceptance by the fifteenth of the same month. Dates are as follows:

• Wave 1 Application Deadline: February 1, 2012
• Wave 1 Acceptance Notification: February 15, 2012

• Wave 2 Application Deadline: March 1, 2012
• Wave 2 Acceptance Notification: March 15, 2012

• Wave 3 Application Deadline: April 1, 2012
• Wave 3 Acceptance Notification: April 15, 2012

The program will begin on August 27, 2012 and run through December of 2013

Feel free to contact bdw.info@colorado.edu with any application questions or inquiries.

Graduates Describe the BDW Experience from Boulder Digital Works on Vimeo.

Excited to announce a BDW course that will be open to the public in the Spring of 2012, StartUp: Learning Entrepreneurism. This is the first BDW course inviting community members to join our graduate students and engage in our graduate curriculum. 

StartUp is immersive and transformational––both theoretical and practical. It begins with the premise that entrepreneurism, rather than being the result of genius and magic, can be learned; Startup then proves this premise through the actual conception, build, and launch of an original product or service by student teams within a single semester. Led by serial entrepreneur Robert Reich with a supporting team from a variety of sectors from the contemporary entrepreneurial world, this course puts students inside the mind of the entrepreneur and immerses them in the daily leadership and innovation challenges of the startup environment. While its primary focus is the startup and what it demands, this course is also a clinic in thinking, decision making and mental agility that will benefit any area of business––not just startups. 

Download more detailed information on the course and the application to enroll here.

Atlas Institute gave us a surface table last week. Can’t wait to see what we can do with it.

We wanna take the time to highlight some of the amazing talent we work with at BDW. Jay Ferracane (Founder and Creative Director at angrybovine.com), who teaches Brand / Identity, brings an acute design sensibility and 16+ years of branding experience to the schoolhouse.

BDW student project featured on Mashable

“Occupationalist, built by Boulder Digital Works, is trying to make it easier to find and share news and media about what’s happening in the movement both for those involved and those on the digital sidelines.”

Here’s a nice look at the open learning environment here at BDW, which is modeled significantly on the work of Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (http://www.newcultureoflearning.com). It’s understood that the students share the responsibility for their own education, and they are encouraged to take an active role in shaping their experience here. Outside of the course work at BDW, which is rigorous, Fridays are open and have informally become show and tell. This might range from BDW organized “field trips,” students rallying around a project or teaching a session of their own, or bringing in a guest speaker to drop some knowledge and inspiration on the class.

Last Friday BDW student Matt O’Donnell brought in Joshua Onysko, CEO of Pangea Organics, to share his unique and inspiring story with the students. Check out Matt’s take on the BDW learning dynamic in the video below.

BDW’s newest class and Alex Bogusky’s FearLess Revolution recently (very recently) came together to contribute cohesion and clarity to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The goal was to design and build a realtime information source for Occupy Wall Street that aggregates and organizes new, significant and popular stories, videos, images, community generated content and ground-floor reporting related to the movement.

The result is Occupationalist.org, a dashboard of consumer sentiment around the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The idea for the site was borne out of Bogusky’s own interest in Occupy Wall Street and his difficulty in finding an unbiased, aggregated media sources. He noticed that, as the movement started growing, media coverage was not growing at the same rate.

Bogusky’s Fearless Cottage approached BDW to devise a solution. The BDW students worked tirelessly and persistently on the project and devised Occupationalist.org as a way to show the power of the movement. The site woks to highlight the movement’s collective voice, convey that it is happening every minute of the day in every corner of the world.

As the newest class of BDW students began their coursework in late August of this year, this project was their first large collective endeavor. This timing allowed for an almost guerrilla approach to the Occupationalist task – accepting the opportunity and learning, adapting, and improvising as the project progressed. The Occupationalist allowed the students to work in teams, establish how best to structure and streamline those teams, assign roles, broaden their range, refine their skills, and push themselves into new territory. An awesome end result and a definite success on the learning front.