Author Archives: Kirsten Winkler

About Kirsten Winkler

Kirsten Winkler is Education 2.0 Blogger at KirstenWinkler.com, Interviewer at EDUKWEST.com, Consultant at WinklerMedia.com. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook or Google+

I have won the EdTech Digest Leadership Award in the Category Edtech Blogger

I am excited to announce that I have won the Edtech Leadership Award in the category Edtech Blogger at the third EdTech Digest Awards Recognition Program. The EdTech Leadership Awards recognize outstanding forward-thinking contributions to learning and technology.

This year EdTech Digest’s panel of industry influencers and veterans evaluated more than 200 finalists from over 40 categories. Past winners of the EdTech Digest Awards Program have included, among others: Pearson, Epson and McGraw-Hill, as well as emerging solutions providers Panarea Digital, StudySync and StudyBlue.

Other winners of this year’s Awards include Learnist as Best New Product or Service, Edmodo as Best Product or Service, Learnsprout as Emerging Technology Solution, Always Prepped as LMS, StudyBlue as Mobile App Solution, Schoology as Social Networking Solution, Straighterline as Product Trendsetter as well as individuals like Heather Hills from Pathbrite, John Baker from Desire2Learn, Bill Goodwyn from Discovery Education and Farbood Nivi from Learnist.

You can take a look at all the finalists and winners on EdTech Digest.

First and foremost, thank you to all of my readers for your support over the years and then of course to the jury for naming me Best Edtech Blogger. This award reassures me, once again, that there is a place for long-form quality content in our fast-paced industry.

Building Startups the David Heinemeier Hansson Way

Probably one of the best interviews Jason Calacanis has done on This Week in Startups thus far was the one with David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and founding partner at 37Signals three years ago. He and Jason got into a pretty heated debate about how to build a startup and capitalism in general. Should you put all in, get big investments if you can and swing for the fences like Jason does or should you create a startup in your spare time with no risk involved other than spending your free time on it?

It is a great discussion about two valid models and for whom they work but I have to say that David’s approach seems the more realistic one for most entrepreneurs who want to create a company. Now you might say that with this approach you won’t create the next Facebook or Google but keep in mind that 37Signals is a hugely profitable company and profitable from day one. As they are still privately held David won’t share numbers, but with millions of paying users spending $10 or more per month you can do the math yourself.

As the interview became such an icon in the startup space Jason and David met for “round 2″ this week and spent another hour and a half talking about heavily wounded companies like Facebook, Groupon and Salesforce, accounting shenanigans and more.

The two interviews combined are nearly 3 hours but I think those are well spent. Before you hit play: you should know that David swears like a Viking The interview parts start at 15 minutes in the first and 7 minutes in the second episode.

How our Obsession with the Now might lead to a Present Shock

In a time that seems to demand from us to be always on, always connected and always in the loop we face totally new problems when it comes to stress and mental health.

I wrote about my own struggle to be sucked into now in the past. My means were for instance resisting to using a smartphone up to the point that probably not so few people thought it was a rather strange reasoning but were simply too polite to comment on it. I also have dedicated timeslots when I’m not online, don’t answer email and so on. Lastly, it has definitely played a bigger role in the decision to stop the news coverage on EDUKWEST.

That said watching the interview and learning about Rushkoff’s book Present Shock is somewhat a relief and confirmation of

a) that some of these obsessions I noticed about myself exist at a larger scale but you can take steps to act against agrevating your condition and

b) it seems to be the state of “normal” in the digital age we now all live in, but nevertheless is a reassuring confirmation that I am not alone.

Information diet and mental bandwidth will certainly be topics I am going to write about more in the coming months.

You should also read Paul Miller’s accompanying post over at The Verge.

The Future of Original Web Video Content

This is a great interview for everyone to watch who is (or want to get) involved in creating original web video content which can be anything from interviews to lessons.

The talk is especially valuable because both, the interviewee and the interviewer are involved in the space and have a ton of experience in the market. Jason Calacanis, the host of the show, has worked in the media space for decade, founding a magazine about technology, a blog network that got acquired by AOL, a human powered search engine that aimed to compete with Google etc.

Jim Louderback is the CEO of Revision3, one of the most successful brands in original web videos which just recently got acquired by Discovery. During the interview Jason and Jim talk about everything related to promoting content, how the new YouTube changes help content creators, how to monetize content and much more.

Content Lessons from Drinking Tea

Something weird has happened to me. Along the lines of never say never I am slowly but surely turning from a hard core coffee drinker into a tea aficionado. In fact, tea already cut down my coffee consumption per day by at least 50%. And that in less than a month!

How could this possibly happen? It is all about quality, like many (most) things in life and I think we can learn some lessons for content creation here.

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Code Rush – How to fight Monopolies with Open Source

It is easy to forget (or not even know at all) that large parts of the software we use today are based on open source projects. Code Rush is a documentary about the start of Mozilla which eventually led to the release of the Firefox browser in 2004.

It is a fascinating story about the early days of the Internet getting into the mainstream, a time when browsers did not come for free and the struggle between the market leader Netscape and Microsoft which planned to take down the competition through offering its Internet Explorer bundled with its operating system for free.

This fight led to the anti-trust law suit against Microsoft of which it still struggles to recover and the death of Netscape as a leading force in the Internet space. Nevertheless, it was also the birth of one of the most popular browsers today and the Mozilla Foundation which since then has done many other things for the Internet like for instance Open Badges in the education space.

It is also a fascinating view into the world of programmers (talking about how coding changes your life) and the probably soon to be extinct cliché of the Coke drinking, doughnut and pizza eating geek.

Telling People How to be Creative is Easy. It’s only Being it that’s Difficult.

I don’t remember how I came across this great lecture on how to be creative by John Cleese but I think it is a must watch for everyone that needs to be creative – which is essentially all of us.

If you are a blogger, journalist, teacher, video maker or any other kind of content creator you know that being creative on command often results in the exact opposite. Even I struggle from time to time with motivation or finding myself in a writer’s block.

In his lecture Cleese gives some great advice on how to train yourself to be creative, find room to get ideas and how to play with them.

The Evolution of Data Storage

Over the past couple of weeks I became addicted to the shows of tested.com, especially the episodes in which Adam Savage of the MythBusters shows the guys around his cave and storage where they geek out about model building for films and the ones in which Adam builds amazing stuff from scratch.

In this episode however you will learn about Bits and Bytes and the evolution of data storage – how physically big they used to be and how huge a computer needed to be today if you would use the old IBM parts. Spoiler: humongous!

Jerry Maguire Blogging Lesson: Show me the Money

Yesterday I watched one of my favorite movies again after a long time: Jerry Maguire. The hilarious “Show me the money” scene is as good as ever.

So when an Edupreneurs Club member shared an article on Facebook about Make Money Blogging (free backlink juice) today, I thought it might be a good idea to explain the difference between blogging and online marketing.

Because that is what most of these blogs are all about, online marketing – crafting copy to sell (virtual) goods. Blogging is a totally different animal but often gets confused with the latter.

So let’s start with a definition (my definition) of blogging.

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What is Your Favorite Child? My 2013 BLOGGIES Quandary

Tough question to answer, right? I believe, most parents wouldn’t even dare to think about it. And somehow I got into a similar catch-22. As we are still in the awards season I learned that not one, not two but three of my blogs ended up being finalist at the 2013 BLOGGIES. And all in the same category, namely Best Education Weblog!

So what to do?

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More Signs for Paid YouTube Channel Subscriptions Appear

There have been rumors about paid channel subscriptions on YouTube for a couple of months, but now there is evidence for that in the code of the YouTube Android app. Which is by the way a good example of why it could be interesting to learn how to code. The journalism of the future might very well be about finding evidence hidden in code.

YouTube also confirmed to CNet that they were looking into new ways for content creators to monetize on their videos besides ad revenue and rentals and that paid subscriptions would be probably part of this strategy.

Of course, YouTube says that they are not prepared to announce anything in the near future but that should not hold you back to come up with a YouTube strategy if you haven’t one, already.
So let me sum this up again: why do I think that YouTube is one of the must be places for edupreneurs?

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Spoiler: Just Knowing how to Code won’t get Kids anywhere

Today a video of Code.org is making the rounds on social media and various tech blogs. You see a lot of high profile tech and pop culture leaders talking about their experiences of learning how to code and how it changed their careers.

The conclusion of the video is that we need to teach coding in schools and everything is going to be peachy for our kids in the future. They will work for awesome companies like Facebook, Valve, Dropbox etc have amazing offices, get free and healthy lunches and extra possibilities to spend their free time. Heck, even their clothes will be washed for them!

Though I agree that we need to teach more coding in schools, I think the message of this video (and others that went down the same road) is misleading. I am probably going to write a longer post about that on Big Think, but here are some initial thoughts.

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What Salman Khan and Jamie Oliver have in Common

Yesterday, I had a brief however interesting exchange with Benjamin Riley on Twitter about one of my latest posts “In the search of 100.000 Salman Khans”.

How about 1000 teachers collaborating? See @learnzillion RT @kirstenwinkler In Search of 100,000 Salman Khans ow.ly/hUM9r

— Benjamin Riley (@benjaminjriley) February 22, 2013

Benjamin asked what about 1000 teachers collaborating on video lessons like the folks at Learnzillion. Though I think they are doing a great job, it is simply not the same. We are talking about Jamie Oliver vs. FoodTube. Let me explain.

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Everybody Calm Down – I am still doing Interviews

Soon after my announcement that I joined OpenLanguage as content lead I received lots of emails and comments that anticipated I would not do video interviews from now on. Actually, the opposite is the case.

Yes, my new role at OpenLanguage cuts out a nice chunk out of my daily schedule, but I would never quit something I have built over several years “just because” I have a new commitment. I had similar commitments in the past, yet I have always continued with my own projects – nothing new here.

That said and as people often ask me how I can possibly keep up with all the different things I am doing I wanted to share two key principles of my work ethics with you today.

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EDUKWEST and Fair Languages are nominated at the Edublog Awards 2012

I have some exciting news to share. This year two of my blogs are nominated at the Edublog Awards!

EDUKWEST in the category Edtech Blog and my latest blogging endeavor Fair Languages has got a nomination as New Blog. As every year I need your help which essentially means your vote.

Go to edublogawards.com/vote-here and choose the category Edtech Blog to vote for EDUKWEST and New Blog for Fair Languages. You can vote once per day through Sunday, December 9th.

Thank you very much for your support over all these years!

Meet me at Online Educa Berlin 2012

Taking into consideration that I didn’t plan to attend Online Educa in Berlin this year, it is really funny that now I am not only covering the event for EDUKWEST and Today’s Campus but also ended up as a panelist and learnshop host.

In case you don’t know, Online Educa is one of the biggest conferences in the online education space and takes place in my beloved hometown of Berlin. There are a ton of sessions, keynotes, panels and learnshops going on, and I am really looking forward to mix and mingle with all the education folks from around the world. There is also an exhibition floor where edtech companies, service providers and institutions will be presenting their products and solutions, and I am going to try to cover as much as possible of that part, as well.

You will be able to follow my coverage on EDUKWEST as I will try out a new mobile podcasting tool called Audioboo which I am going to use to give you a quick overview of the sessions I am planning to attend. On top of that there will be recorded video interviews in the weeks to come after the Online Educa, both on EDUKWEST and Today’s Campus.

The two sessions I will take part in are as follows:

The Question Time session follows the popular BBC 4 format with the same name and will be live streamed via the Internet on Thursday. You can submit your questions to the panel either via email or Twitter using the hashtag #OEB12QT.

My learnshop will be about crowdfunding and how teacherpreneurs might benefit from it. As it’s meant to be an interactive / hands-on session I am planning to answer as many questions from the participants as possible besides giving them an overview of the different crowdfunding platforms, basics on how to setup a successful campaign, challenges and risks for both sides involved etc. If you have a specific question you would like me to answer, please submit it to the comments below or send me a Tweet @KirstenWinkler.

Picture by Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de (Eigenes Werk), via Wikimedia Commons

Adsense and Edupreneurs – Pros and Cons

Fellow edupreneur Sylvia Guinan asked if using Adsense to monetize personal blogs or websites in education actually makes sense. As the answer is a bit more complex I decided to put my answer in a blog post.

There are basically two schools of monetizing educational content. One says that you should rather focus on selling your own stuff on your website(s) blog instead of giving up valuable screen real estate to other vendors. This is also tied to the notion that you should try to keep each visitor on your site as long as possible instead of giving him/her a quick possibility to exit and likely having them buy stuff at a competitors site.

That said, most edupreneurs don’t have much to sell but their online or offline lessons. I know few who go through the trouble of creating downloadable or even physical content that visitors might want to purchase.

Hence, the second school of thought says any money is good money. If you are not going to convince the visitor to buy a lesson with you, you might as well profit and earn some cents through a click on a banner ad.

To me, both options are valid, and as I am in the position of maintaining several blogs and websites I basically use different approaches at the same time.

Different blog, different audience, different approach

Long time readers of KW will remember that even this blog used to have Adsense on it until I decided against it. You can read my post about it in the archives. On the other hand, my Deutsch Happen project is heavily monetized by Google Adsense, so is my latest blog Fair Languages. EDUKWEST has advertisements on it but no Adsense. So let’s break it down for the individual cases.

KW is my personal blog and I don’t feel that ads match this approach. In this case I could also wear branded clothing like sports professionals and insert advertisements in my daily conversations, just like Wayne and Garth.

It just does not feel right thus I decided against it. These days, I don’t even promote my own services heavily on this blog which may change again but I have not made up my mind about it yet.

Deutsch Happen started in 2008 as a side project of my online teaching. On the one hand, I wanted to build my personal brand as German teacher, on the other hand, I used the videos as additional resource for my students in between live lessons. Similar to Salman Khan I saw a rising interest in my videos, so I thought monetizing them might be a nice additional source of revenue. As we all know, Sal never monetized his videos but he also had some cash in the bank from his Wall Street days.
Deutsch Happen monetizes its content in two ways, Adsense on the website and Adsense displayed in the video lessons. The revenue isn’t great but also somewhat an excuse for me to keep on going with the project. Video production is time and cost intensive and doing it completely for free does not fit my hefty schedule anymore.

Fair Languages is a resource site for language learners. Hence, leading our readers to new and interesting language learning products is part of the experience. This can be done via links in reviews or, of course, advertisement on the blog. One way is to generate money is to sell ad spaces to interested companies in the language learning space. Moreover, we display Adsense in the spaces that are not booked.

EDUKWEST is a premium brand as it is very production heavy. It implies that I only accept premium advertisers that match the brand and who are willing to pay a premium price to reach the EDUKWEST audience. Which brings us to the pros and cons of Adsense.

Pros and Cons of Adsense

The pro is of course that it is pretty much “set it and forget it” or “passive income” as they used to call it back in the days. As soon as you are accepted to the Adsense program it is pretty easy to embed the code and get things rolling.

The con is that you don’t have much influence about what people will see in the ad space(s) on your site. It might be related but it could also be Asian dating sites, how to lose belly fat or cheap pharmaceuticals. There are possibilities to go under the hood of Adsense and block certain sites but I think that this is work that does not pay off.

Sylvia also asked if ads interfere with the site and its content. Again, it depends. If you take a look at Fair Languages I think we found a nice way to integrate the ads. As the site is pretty heavy on photos, the ads fit in nicely without disturbing the user’s experience on the site. I suppose, most people don’t even (actively) see them.

Deutsch Happen is much more “in your face” but the site also dates back four years now and does not run on WordPress. Redesigning the site would not make much sense and also potentially screw up our search ranking, so we leave it as it is.

Is it worth the effort?

The above brings us to the biggest problem of Adsense in education. Quite frankly, it does not pay much. Adsense is based on the content it is embedded into and advertising rates in education are pretty low. If you have a blog about insurances you can make up to $50 a click, in education you are lucky to get $1 once in a while. Most clicks are worth between $0.01 and $0.05.

If you take the old rule of thumb that among 100 visitors one of them will click on an ad you can easily predict what your blog or website might generate based on your monthly visitors. I hope you are tracking it! Also keep in mind that Google pays out your earnings based on a €75 / $100 threshold per month. As a result it might take you some months until you get something in your bank account.

Bottom line: I think it is worth to experiment with Adsense. You can’t really break anything and it will get you a better feeling of what your brand is worth. Another positive side effect is that marketers who see that you are monetizing your blog with Adsense may contact you and offer some direct advertising as well. I usually got offers for $80 to $100 for a text link on my blog.

Playing in Someone Else’s Sandbox Rules May Change

One of the major topics among edupreneurs, online marketers, blogger and others relying on Facebook traffic is the recent change in what fans actually see popping up in their news stream. I wanted to title this post “Waahaa – Cry Babies want their Facebook traffic back!” but that would have been a bit unfair . Nevertheless, I think the issue has been blown way out of proportion.

Let’s start with the basics. When a platform is new the first priority is to get as many users as possible. Therefore the rules are pretty much beneficial for the users. It makes you use the product and hopefully get you to the point where you can’t live without it. A bit like selling crack-cocaine.

Facebook has given page owners a free ride for many years, driving the traffic away from Facebook to their own sites. Now ask yourself, is that something you would do with your blog or platform? Your goal is to keep your users on your site, not leading them away from it to other sites, right? So why on earth should Facebook do it without any benefit?

On top of that Facebook is now a publicly traded company, e.g. they have an earnings call with Wall Street analysts every couple of months. People invest in Facebook on the terms that the social network grows its revenue. Hence, it makes even less sense for them to give you free traffic.

Let’s say you are one of the people who have spent time and effort on building your brand outside of Facebook over the years you were most likely not shocked at all or even surprised as it (or something similar) happened before and will happen again. The thing is, you are constantly playing in someone else’s sandbox and surprise: it’s not you who makes the rules. Here are two examples.

Google

If you spent time on trying to get your page ranking on Google for related search terms you might have been hit by the infamous Panda update back in early 2011. It was so bad that it took out two big players in the education space, my favorite platform TeachStreet and the just newly refocused Mahalo. And even today algorithm changes affect startups. Just read the latest New York Times article on the matter.

YouTube

Like Google, YouTube is experimenting a lot with new ways to display and surface “relevant” content on the platform. I have been hit by the changes at least three times with my Deutsch Happen channel over the past years and even big YouTube stars like Mystery Guitar Man saw huge drops in audience and hence revenue.

But you know that all of the platforms offer you to get traffic in return. Google has Adwords, YouTube lets you promote videos and Facebook now lets you promote posts. Hence, if you really, really want (need) the traffic, there is an option for you.

As a long time reader of this blog you will know that I have always advocated that edupreneurs need to learn about the processes behind the scenes of technology they use. If you have at least a bit of an idea on how funding or even an IPO affects the destiny of a startup you cannot be surprised by such changes.

In August 2010 Andrew Lewis coined a phrase that is still true today:

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Have you ever sat down and truly asked yourself if you were willing to pay for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other free service you are using on a regular basis? If the answer is “No, I won’t pay” then you have to ask yourself whether the startup actually built something meaningful at all. Which leads to the next question that when you don’t see any real value in the service, why should others?

A handful of edupreneurs like André Klein, Koichi and myself have always preached that you need to invest into your own website (sandbox) as it is the only place you are truly in charge of. All the rest is nice as long as it works and if it stops working you simply move on. The goal is that you need to get your audience to come to your site on their own because they want to, not because they might see a Twitter, YouTube or Facebook update pop up in their cluttered stream.

If you want to have something that catches their attention, get them to sign up for a newsletter. This way you are directly in their inbox as long as they choose to be on the list. You want direct contact, not filtered through a middleman.

Facing the Realities

On the other hand, the new Facebook algorithm might also have some positive side effects as it clears up the news stream from all the noise.

As a side note, when I take a look at both the reach and engagement graphs of my established pages Kirsten Winkler, EDUKWEST, Deutsch Happen and Deutsch Sprechen I have not noticed any significant drop in either graph on any of the four pages mentioned. The only drops I see are the ones I am familiar with, e.g. not updating the page or usually on weak days like Saturday.

All in all the number of likes your page got never reflected the actual number of engaged fans, anyway. The same is true for Twitter followers and YouTube subscribers. It’s a vanity number, nothing more. The new actual number of people “seeing” your Facebook page update also reflects how many people really visit your page or group in the first place. Taking the Edupreneurs Club as an example we have 200+ members but each posts gets seen by 7 to a maximum of 35 members. And that’s about the engagement I noticed over the months. There are about 10 active members and some lurkers. The rest joined but never came back.

This means, if people choose to visit your page anyway on a daily or weekly basis by clicking on the link on the left side, then all is well. If they just liked your page and never returned, anyway then you didn’t lose anything at all. You just get a realistic number of how many people actually care about your stuff. And yes, sometimes reality hits you hard, bro.

Picture by waterbridge via Morguefile