What is the Star Academy?

A. Summary:

The Star Academy is an educational tool of the Star Cafe. One of the main sections in the Star Academy consists of Star Points, which are short, descriptive posts with information on a single subject. The Star Academy will help you learn how to use all the other collaborative tools provided by Star Café, and will help to educate groups on technology, procedures and job-related tasks.

B. Key Points:

· The purpose of the Star Academy is education

· One main section in the Star Academy is made up of Star Points

· Other sections of the Star Academy are Star Documents and Star Classrooms

· Star Academy has information on how to use the other tools in the Star Cafe

· Star Academy also will help educate users on job-related tasks

· The information in Star Academy is organized in categories and topics according to the application

· Link to What is a Star Point?

· For corrections, updates, or clarifications on this Star Point, please email bgoodman@afsc.org

C. Details:

Star Academy is the place to go for answers. A major part of the Star Academy contains Star Points with information on a wide variety of subjects. These topics can range from a walkthrough of how to filter your Email to basic steps to take when attending a rally. AFSC users can add their own knowledge to Star Academy through the Internet, so it will dynamically expand to cover a great number of subjects.

The structure of the Star Academy containing Star Points is hierarchical, with categories containing topics, and topics containing documents called Star Points. For example, the Technology category will contain topics such as MS Outlook, which in turn will contain Star Point documents on Outlook Web Access and others explaining the Email system.

Star Academy's knowledge is contained in a multitude of Star Points. Each Star Point has information about a single subject. Star Points can be a definition, a step-by-step procedure, an explanation of how something works, or other pertinent information. Larger white papers, manuals, or specially formatted documents will be found in another section of the Star Academy -- Star Documents. A third Star Academy section, Star Classrooms, will have discussions, on-line classrooms and other forms of interchanges.

One focus of Star Academy is to teach users who are unfamiliar with the Star Cafe's collaborative tools how to use Star Cafe in a useful and productive manner. You will find Star Points on the Star Cafe tools in the Star Café Category of the Star Academy Lobby.

In addition to the information presently in the Star Academy, the list of topics will continually grow. Users may submit their own Star Points to add to the knowledge base of the Star Academy, and users can respond to and ask questions about current Star Points by replying to the Star Point author’s email address, which will always be the last line in the Key Points section. This creates a continuing collaborative process of clarification and education -- the goal of Star Academy.