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.
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.
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!
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.
Lidie Olesen, one of our contributors over at EDUKWEST and librarian made me aware of International Literacy Day on September 8th and thus for the last couple of days I have been thinking in a broader way about how my own reading habits have changed with technology taking an ever important role in my professional as well as everyday life, and I also asked a few students of mine.
Here are the results which are of course not representative.
In France, but I believe this is true for the rest of the world, summer is this special period in the year when everything seems to reduce pace, school holidays are long and many people go on holidays or simply take some time off and change their normal rhythm.
For me, this is the time when I can write all the posts that linger in my mind but I usually don’t have the time to write between September and June. So bear with me if this post appears to be more a column than a tough report on the situation of education 2.0.
As summertime is also the period when you let loose a bit and at least for me it is true that I’m a little less in that corset of planning what to concentrate on next in order to achieve this and that in x-time.
The scenery is described and I would like to tell you about two of my recent travels over, things I found and conversations I had.
Not a long time ago, I did a KWestions series on the opportunities lying in translation on the Internet. I had the chance to interview edupreneurs from various backgrounds in order to portray the different angles one might have regarding translations online as a market.
There was Paul Sulzberger with his more than 30 years of experience in the field of translation and who now wants to establish a platform for translators on the Internet and thus to allow them and potential customers to offer and buy services.
Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of hosting TWiST Paris, our meetup that enables French start-up companies to pitch a local audience in English and then get the opportunity to present their business to US entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis live via Skype.
During a short break, actually right before our live call with the States I had the chance for a quick chat with an attendee. He asked me why language exchange platforms apparently don’t seem to take off. As I feel that my answer fell short and has probably left him with many open questions, this blog might be a good place to give him and some other readers asking yourselves the same set of questions an answer.
Honestly, I was distracted due to TWiST and how to “trick” Jason Calacanis to allow all six companies to present. So, apologies for that.
On my way back to Brittany the next day, I had some time to think about the question and if I’m not completely mistaken, the person who asked me was Will Hatfield who founded AngloBuddy.fr.
Picture: flickr user bengrey
The thing I love most about being a blogger is the direct engagement with my readers. Getting feedback and thoughts on posts directly is always enlightening and brings up different angles of a story or delivers the basis for an analysis like this one here.
This post is based on a comment in the Edupreneurs Club on Facebook (if you are an edupreneur and did not join our secret circle, what are you waiting for?). Based on my piece about the ShowMe App for iPad Glenn Weidner pointed out that Salman Khan is using a less costly setup to create his famous lessons and that the price tag for an iPad might be too high for most teachers who are looking to contemplate technology in the classroom.
Finally, I’m not the only woman on the team anymore as we welcome Lidie Oleson, our new writer for EDUKWEST.
Lidie first got in touch with me via LinkedIn and made a proposal you (at least I) don’t get every day. She offered to introduce me to the Danish and Bulgarian educational systems. I thought, this is really niche but besides, I was also intrigued.
I’m happy to announce that our small team of writers at EDUKWEST has grown once more and I have the pleasure to introduce you to Benjamin Stewart who I’m sure is known already in a big part of the online learning world, especially when it come to EFL.
To those among you who are not yet familiar with what he’s doing, here are a few points worth to mention about Benjamin.
Time to officially introduce you to a new face on EDUKWEST. Fellow Berlin expat André Klein wrote his insightful inaugural post yesterday. And he’s everything but a newbie to online education.
André is among other the author of two books on social media and online teaching and own the popular teaching website “Learn Out Live”.
For some time now I have been thinking about how to shape the image of both KirstenWinkler.com and EDUKWEST and as you learned I came to the conclusion that with KirstenWinkler.com, I want to return to what it had been in the first place: my personal blog where I put some thoughts out on the various fields I’m interested in.
This means that the news coverage and analysis part of KirstenWinkler.com moves over to EDUKWEST turning the blog from a solely video interview focused site to a vertical news site for education 2.0 with news articles, opinion pieces, video interviews and product tests.
About a year ago we were witness of a short but heavy battle about the fact that Facebook does not allow you to download your user data or delete your account permanently. This battle took place on TechCrunch and several episodes of This Week in Startups and was the peek of an ongoing discussion on whether one can trust Facebook with personal data or not.
In the end Facebook enabled the download of your personal data and since then the tech world has moved on to other topics like the Twitter Dick-bar and Groupon being a ponzy-scheme.
But with “Big Data” becoming one of the major buzzwords recently, I would like to re-initiate this discussion for education 2.0 as I believe that data, especially the data related to learning, is the most valuable asset of each startup in this space.
Sometimes I make a real finding on YouTube. Of course, Google knows me well and when I listen to some music or watch a webcast over there, I mostly get Inigral’s Schools App or Learnable as advertisement. This time was different however.
So, when I was listening to Mozart’s Requiem what I like when I do some writing, I saw an ad for eTeacherBiblical. My first reaction to be honest was a mix between scepticism, fascination and also awkwardness.
As it’s the beginning of June and thus half the year went by already (as always I feel that January was just a short moment ago) but there is another six months to go before we’ll wrap-up 2011, I thought that today I’d give you some updates and reflections on my work and tell you about the progress of some of the projects.
In my own perception I felt, it would be relatively easy to get an overview on what I’m doing but thanks to the constant exchange with you guys in the comments on kirstenwinkler.com via email or also Skype I learned that there has sometimes been confusion and that is my job to give this whole thing a bit more of a structure, so that you’ll be able to follow the parts of my work you’re particularly interested in more easily.
Curation in any sense is one of the hottest topics on the Internet at the moment. Reaching from curating information that flows in our social stream over news to any other piece of information in our digital life. And we all know that our digital life is already pretty much just our life.
One thing I am thinking about for quite a while now is the curation of learning tools, services and applications. Every day the number of those is growing and who else than the teacher / tutor could give distinct advice to learners on which of those would fit their needs best.
One of the reasons I love about blogging are the thoughtful comments people leave. This is one of them I got on one of my recent Big Think articles and I think someone out there should build a startup around it.
You know, if we would just put a tidbit of education in the signature of each or our emails/spams, that would have to raise the level of common knowledge in the world. – Moon Stroller
I really dig this idea.
