My second prediction for 2012 is about two of the oldest players in the language learning community space, Palabea and italki.
Both disappeared from the main screen about two years ago but none of them ever hit the dead pool though we have to say that Palabea has been very close to a cardiac arrest. But looking at some of the recent posts, I predict that both will attempt to make a comeback in the first half of 2012.
As I have been pretty busy with working on EDUKWEST up to now, I did not had the time to write down some predictions for 2012. But better late than never! Here is my first look into the future.
Salman Khan is going to make an offer to Henry Reich, the creator of Minute Physics to join the faculty of Khan Academy. Probably, this will happen in the first quarter of 2012, latest by June.
As the anniversary of this blog is getting closer, I started looking through the archives as I do every year. Sometimes, I am really surprised to find posts I can’t remember to have written and a lot of them bring back memories, of course. What a ride!
One of the first startups I wrote about back in January 2009 was Livemocha. Back then, the language learning community just cracked the 1 million user mark and started to offer its first premium content. It was a travel course in Italian priced at $9.95
It’s the last week of 2011 and therefore the last number of the week for this year as well! Although my new series is still at an early stage., I hope you’re enjoying the number I pick every week to write a short article around and thus to put it into perspective.
My number this week is 3952 which is the average number of text messages, SMS and MMS, the typical 13 to 17 year old teenage girl writes every month! In other words that sums up to 7 messages per waking our, making it the centerpiece of teenage mobile activity.
SO LO MO (social, local, mobile) was one of the buzzwords this year and even the topic of LeWeb in Paris.
Smartphone devices and tablets are evolving rapidly in shorter product cycles and the digerati are always after the next big app. For some weeks it was Oink, Kevin Rose’s first product out of Milk, now it is Path, the limited social network that only lets you connect with a small number of close friends and family.
Since I watched a talk with Clay Shirky about how technology changes society at the moment when it becomes technically “boring”, e.g. the most part has access to it and knows how to use it, I have been thinking if we are actually moving too fast and hence only the ones who can keep up with the latest gadget trends benefit from them.
Sunday is always a great day for me as it’s probably the day when I have the most time to consume media and educate myself reading all the relevant blogs I love but also write one or the other piece myself.
Today, I thought it would be fun to start a new weekly series in which I share an interesting number in online education each Sunday. Based on that definition, I call it my number of the week.
For this week, Dec 12 to 18, my number is 11,143,333 and although it comes from an education startup, it reached me in the most classic way – per snail mail.
In case I did not thank you personally for your birthday wishes on Facebook, Twitter and Skype – Thank you so much for your support! Because of you, may you be a friend, fan, supporter or sponsor I am able to do what I do here, on EDUKWEST, Deutsch Happen, Big Think and everywhere else.
I truly appreciate it.
Free to be whatever I want. Whatever you do, whatever you say, I know it’s alright.
Kirsten xxx
Yesterday morning I learned that Facebook has apparently acquired Gowalla, one of the location based social networks that compete with Foursquare. While the writing that the startup lost the battle against Foursquare has been on the wall for a while there, some hope remained that Gowalla might have been able to turn its network into a digital travel guide.
Now, you might ask what this has to do with education. Well, first of all I wrote a post on Disrupt Education titled “Don’t Check-In for Yourself – Check-In for your Grand Children” in which I explained why I think those location based services have indeed a role in an educational context. But what if the service did not last that long?
Today I would like to focus on the risk of having all your eggs in one basket or all your photos = memories on one service.
Audrey Watters wrote an analysis of the current state of business models in education titled “What’s the Future of the Ed-Tech Business (Model)?” on Hack Education that meshes well with my Sunday post on Big Think about Khan Academy and the potential shift towards free education.
Audrey bases her post on the example of Rosetta Stone as she had the possibility to talk to CEO Tom Adams (former class mate of hers) during the Startup Weekend EDU in Washington. The language learning market is of course a very tricky and crowded one compared to rising verticals like math education.
What tickled my fancy are the open questions Audrey leaves us with like the following at the end of her post:
Sell to schools? Sell to teachers? Sell to students? And in any of those education markets, how do you compete with “free” — even when what’s offered that way is actually of inferior quality? Will learners demand high quality ed-tech? Will they (be able to) pay for it?
So, here are my thoughts on future business models in education.
Fellow edupreneur André Klein of LearnOutLive wrote another interesting post on his blog with the title “5 Reasons Why I Give Away Books For Free” in which he explains his reasoning why he is giving some of his ebooks away for free.
As he states at the beginning of his post, André is arguing from a more philanthropic and altruistic angle and not so much from a business point of view. So to complete this argumentation, I thought I should share my take on the idea of giving stuff away for free, may it be ebooks or other content or written or video, from a more economic point of view.
So here are five more reasons for edupreneurs why to give away books for free.
No, I haven’t lost my marbles! But at least now I got your attention, I think.
As you know, I have pursued a side project in German language learning since April 2008 called Deutsch Happen. On the basis of a more or less regular schedule I have produced different kinds of video lessons to test out teaching ideas and to support learners of German as a foreign language who might have no access to paid solutions.
For the past couple of months I have been experimenting with some strategies on how to grow my audience on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and the results are good enough to take this to the next step: I am building a MVP.
If you are following this blog on a regular basis or worked with me on a social media project for your company in the past, you know that one of the corner stones in my strategy has been to use social media quite freely so that it fit with your habits and workflow.
This worked pretty well throughout 2009 and 2010 when social networks were still a thing of the pundits and digerati. In 2011 we saw a tipping point and more “regular” users joined the services which eventually led to much more content flying around, making it more difficult for professional users to get their message through.
I already wrote about the “decline” of Twitter last week, and I will give you a short update on my new strategy and its outcome today.
But, as you can already tell from the title of this post, the message I want to get through is pretty clear: everyone, may it be a startup, established brand or individual user needs a strategy for social media. It’s getting far too serious to just use it for fun.
The week started with some thoughts on the iPad and its growing importance in teaching special needs students.
As the Online Education market is constantly growing, it attracted the first fraud rings.
Education Elements raised $2.1 million for blended learning solutions.
Stickery raised $325k for math education apps
Udemy raised $3 million from Groupon co-founders for international growth and marketing.
busuu launched a Spanish Business course.
Rosetta Stone is searching a new CEO.
Boogie Board Rip, a robust note taking tablet.
Stanford Student creates Braille Writer app for visual impaired learners.
After Hours #5 with Knewton, Skype, AnyMeeting, AcademicPub, YouTube, BenchPrep, 99designs, Online Education, OpenClass, Steve Wozniak, Siri & more.
Big Think: Text Messages – The Least Common Denominator in the Classroom
Over the past couple of weeks I have become increasingly frustrated with Twitter. I have the feeling that I get less value out of it than maybe 6 months ago. Clearly Twitter lost some of its appeal when Google+ launched.
Now, before I get deeper into that, let me explain the three main (and up to now only) ways I used Twitter for.
Number one has been to get first hand information, insights and personal tidbits from interesting people I followed. It rounded the profile of blogger, podcaster and CEOs I was reading / watching / interviewing. Number two was to get breaking news of the industry. And number three was to share my posts or interesting links.
Two of those reasons are completely broken, only one still works rather well.
Continue reading
We have the first LAUNCH Pad Tablet Conference coming up on Oct. 21 at Microsoft in Mountain View, California. As the name suggests, the conference will focus on how tablets have changed the way we use technology and engage.
The potential of iPad and other tablet devices is immense, throughout the conference you’ll learn how they’re being used and what’s being developed for them.
EDUKWEST has the privilege to give 5 free tickets to our readers (each is at a value of $1000 for non-developers). As EDUKWEST is a media company for education, we are, of course, interested in hearing what you develop/would develop for an educational use of iPad/tablet devices, where you see its greatest potential and how you see today’s students want to learn with tablets.
Everybody, developers, teachers, schools administrators, principals, startup people, is more than welcome to join the competition. To enter the contest you need to
edukwest.com/launch-pad-tablet-conference-october-21st-5-free-tickets-for-our-readers
Good Luck!
Yesterday, I came across a new feature of Disqus, the comment system I have been using on all my blogs since early 2009. At a first glance, I barely noticed the red notification message that now shows up on each Disqus enabled comment section.
I noticed it because Big Think, the blog network which I contribute to with Disrupt Education just switched their comments to Disqus. Sunday, I wrote a blog post about Siri, the new voice enabled assistant on the iPhone 4S and its implications on learning and education.
In a guest post Christopher Grant whom you might remember from several interviews (Sclipo, emagister and review:ed) he lays down why user experience is becoming increasingly important in education.
Abril Educacao continued its shopping tour and acquired the Brazilian publisher Maxiprint.
The second guest post of the week came from James Ashenhurst. He shared his thoughts on the future of textbooks, becoming a hybrid between book and application.
GlobalEnglish announced a complete relaunch of its brand along with the launch of three new, communication and collaboration centered products.
Chegg enters the daily deal space with the Chegg Deals platform. Another step towards the goal of becoming the place to go to for students.
The $35 USD tablet effectively became a $50 USD tablet but it is reality as promised. The first 10,000 Aakash devices are going to be shipped to schools.
As a defensive answer to Amazon’s new Kindle line up, German booksellers offer their own e-readers at competitive pricing.
LearnBoost launched the Spanish version of its LMS. The translation has been crowdsourced by the users and more major languages will follow in the weeks ahead.
PointScribe tries to raise money via Kickstarter to port its technology that enables children to learn handwriting and cursive on their own to the iPad.
On Sunday I reflected on the iPad and its importance when teaching special needs students.
In EDUKWEST #74 I had the pleasure to talk with Osman Rashid, Co-Founder and CEO of Kno. As you know, I have been rather critical about Kno from the start and therefore it was really interesting to talk to Osman and get his point of view.
In EDUKWEST #75 I talked with Tim Brady, founding partner at imagine K12. Tim was Yahoo’s third employee right after the two founders and has a tremendous knowledge and track record in the Internet industry. We talked about the incubator and the first class that graduated recently.
Sunday’s Big Think post was about Steve Job’s last “One more thing” and how Siri will replace learning.
And last but not least, After Hours brought you all the interesting news that we could not cover on EDUKWEST.
YouTube launched a dedicated channel for teachers. Here educators can find and share videos with best practice tips, classroom activities and so on.
sofatutor, a Berlin-based startup in the online video tutoring space relaunched its website and opened its own production studio.
The science and researcher platform Mendeley in partnership with PLoS invited developers to create apps that make science more open.
The domain Languages.com is up for sale. Perfect fit for language or translation business?
Rosetta Stone launches new Experience Kiosks in malls across the US. Visitors can actively interact with students and Studio Coaches.
“This is not a dream, this is reality” India’s $35 USD tablet will ship on October 5th.
My thoughts on the results of the babbel survey about learning types and having a plan for learning a language.
Teacher resource site BetterLesson raised $1.6 million. A growing market?
ShowMe added some new features to its platform, making it easier to browse the video lessons.
Project WissensWerte is civic education for the YouTube generation and something I’m planning on writing more about in the coming weeks.
Thanks to Google you can read the famous Dead Sea Scrolls online.
Popplet is a new and easy to use brainstorming and mindmapping platform.
Teagueduino lets you build small, computer controlled machines and teaches you essentials in coding.
Wacom introduced three new Bamboo tablets which are great for interactive whiteboards.
The dream of every IT admin who needs to prepare multiple iPads in school or in a company: Griffin MultiDock.
Thoughts on the launch of the Kindle Fire and its potential in the classroom.
Why digital media is competing with the information learned in school and how this can be used to flip the classroom.
Value your Education – my interview with Lexiophiles about what makes a good teacher and the future of education.
Last but not least, my 10 minute video recap of all the stories that did not make it on EDUKWEST in form of a blog post.
I remember a time when my classmates and I were taught handwriting in school and had to practise pages and pages (at least in my memory but as a child everything appears to be a lot) of how to write the individual letters of the German alphabet correctly. We even got marks on how beautiful our handwriting was back in elementary school.
These days are definitely over! The reality in schools is that already today devices play a bigger part in modern classrooms. A good thing you might say as nobody should be judged for bad handwriting? Let’s see, as there are also benefits to still writing cursive.
I have also realized about myself that the more I’m using technology and devices the worse my handwriting gets. I’m not able to write as quickly as I was used to, and I also think it’s not as beautiful as it once was. I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m at risk of unlearning it but my handwriting has become untrained, increasingly now as the majority of my work day takes place in front of one or the other device and includes pen and paper less and lesser.
The open source learning management system (LMS) Moodle launched a mobile app that enables teachers to interact with their students via iPhone.
Google+ Hangouts got some really powerful features like recording, Google Docs and screensharing and something similar to a basic interactive whiteboard.
Microsoft and Comcast both announced new programs to support under-served students of low-income families with cheap broadband Internet access, discounted hardware and software as well as free digital literacy training.
Amazon lets you now use your Kindle to borrow digital books in over 11,000 US libraries. All you need is, of course, a Kindle and a valid library card.
Grockit changed its business to a “one-for-one” model. This means that for every paid subscription to the service one student in need will receive free access to the service. The social learning network also launched a Facebook integration of the f8 conference.
Only 3 days after Google released the API for Google+ Hangouts, a German startup called Conceptboard launched a very sophisticated whiteboard as free integration.
A report by Reuters underlined that the ESL and online education space is booming in Japan. The reason is increased fear for jobs amongst the white collar workers who are widely known for their poor English skills.
This week’s EDUKWEST interviews included an update with Nathan Parcells of InternMatch about the recent funding round and the new features, my interview with Derek Muller of Veritasium in which we focused on how to shoot educational videos for YouTube and an “on tour” interview with Armin Hopp and James Shepard of digital publishing / speexx about the company’s recent relaunch and the new product features.
My monthly guest post on ESL Library was about the Implications of English becoming a basic skill into today’s society. What is next for the ESL space?
The Sunday post on Big Think / Disrupt Education was a reflection on what I learned from talking to Derek Muller and what needs to be done to make science videos more effective and engaging. Only Getting the Right Answers is Wrong
Last but not least you can watch a rundown of all the stories in education that did not make it on the EDUKWEST blog in the second episode of After Hours.
My closing statement for this week’s MRU is that we’re looking for additions to the EDUKWEST Newsteam. If you’re interested in becoming a writer you can send me your application via LinkedIn or Twitter.
Those of you who find value in our articles, who want to support EDUKWEST and make it sustainable are more than welcome to make a donation if your monetary situation allows it, of course.
