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.
It took me a little moment to evaluate how to write this article dealing with the experiences and impressions I took away from the 1st French YouTube workshop dedicated to their partners.
I firmly believe that video content is becoming more powerful in 2011 than it was in 2010 and prior already and undoubtedly YouTube is the biggest and most important video platform and community out on the Internet. Any company in online education to my mind needed to be present with their own YouTube channel and even for individual educators it might add good value to their social media presence besides the other big players Facebook and Twitter.
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Steve Kaufmann, a former Canadian diplomat, as well as founder and president of KP Wood Ltd, a company involved in the international trade of forest products. Steve is also the founder and CEO of LingQ.com an online language learning system. Steve speaks eleven languages, having recently learned Russian at LingQ. Steve maintains a blog on language learning, and wrote a book on language learning called The Linguist, personal guide to language learning.
Recently this blog published an article entitled :”How Online Language-Teaching Start-ups Lack Educational Expertise, and Why Language Learners and Teachers Should Worry”
Here is my response:
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Dr. Andreas Schroeter, co-founder of the bab.la language portal. Prior to starting bab.la in 2007 he worked for the media companies Bertelsmann and Axel Springer.
Let’s get straight to the point: Do you know what your customer / client / user / fan / friend / foe says about your company? The true answer is no. After all, how can you? Most users do not talk to you directly but about you with their friends, readers, listeners, watchers and so on. It’s nice to get an email directly from a user but also very unlikely. We at bab.la get a good handful per week, many of them being spam or just simple questions about one of our products. Real feedback and an understanding of what your user thinks is rarely done via email. But listening to your users is probably the best strategy to get valuable feedback you would otherwise pay for in focus groups or pay for by developing something no one wants.
First of all I would like to thank Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti of busuu as well as the team at IE Business School who took the time and made the effort to set up a survey and then shared its results with the public.
Data is still a scarce resource in education 2.0 and getting some from one of the most successful startups is really valuable. So, let’s take a closer look on the outcome.
Today Skype officially launched its Skype in the Classroom community. It’s a directory where teachers from around the world can connect with fellows based on mutual criteria such as class size, topic and location. The project has been in beta since December and already attracted more than 4000 teachers.
I think this is a great initiative, bringing teachers and their students together to learn from and with each other. Nevertheless I ask myself why something like this does not exist in the for profit space. I believe it could be beneficial for Skype and online teachers.
Lots of teaching platforms have experimented with the idea of “instant lessons”. A student comes on the platform and wants to take a lesson right away, clicks on the topic he/she wants to learn and picks a teacher or tutor who is online at this very moment.
I wrote about the difficulties on this blog once or twice, nevertheless it seems as if startup founders are quite fancy such a business model, just today I had a nice talk with a founder who thinks about making this part of his tuition service for Math.
Now, one startup even got some substantial funding by prolific investors. So am I wrong in being sceptical about such an idea?
Preparing myself for an upcoming interview with one of my all time favorite teacher rockstars Koichi I thought about the strange fact that the most talented educators I have come across in the past three years quit teaching live lessons.
This led me to the question if there is actually a way how platforms can retain talent on their service or whether teaching live lessons is just a step stone in one’s online teaching career.
Prior to my presentation at the Virtual Round Table Conference I announced that I was planning a Q&A session afterwards. As I am a talkative person (you did not notice that?) I decided to answer questions from the audience already during the presentation which led to a near precision landing after 60 minutes.
Nevertheless, I would like to dedicate this blog post to a question asked by Arkady Zilberman, founder of Language Bridge, which he send me via email prior to the conference and asked, if I could elaborate on that. So, here we go.
A few of years ago, it seemed like mobile applications, the expected “next big thing” at the time, would just never take off. Everyone was excited, people were creating apps and expecting huge adoption, telco companies were projecting an explosion of data usage on phones but none of this was really happening with the users. Why? well now, with hindsight, we know that the problem was the far-from-perfect user experience on mobile apps : they were slow, had unfriendly interfaces, and average phone screens were barely larger than stamps. Don’t get me wrong, these apps were not crappy, some of them were actually very good. But something about them limited the market to motivated users, or specific business applications. But the holy grail of exponential market adoption was out of their reach.
Then Apple launched the iPhone with amazing applications and great interface. Within a couple months mobile apps were everywhere.
In the 80s and early 90s we had a show on German television with the title “1000 Meisterwerke” – 1000 masterpieces. Every episode was about 10 minutes long and about a certain masterpiece in one of the big museums across the globe, may it be a painting or sculpture.
Back then the so called “Bildungsauftrag” – the educational mandate – that the state owned TV stations still have today was clearly noticeable. With the rise of ad financed private TV we unfortunately lost a lot of those formats.
I find this truly a fascinating story. It has everything, a “good looking” main character who is a real Baron from one of Germany’s oldest noble families but who is also tremendously popular amongst the people. Nothing could stop him from becoming our next chancellor, at least according to yellow press and satire. But those often have a good gut feeling and are, to an extend, spin-doctors as well.
Nothing but himself it seems, now as the story takes a tragic turn, our smart Baron looks more like a train wreck. All because of the rising copy and paste mentality in society and academia.
Some days ago my friend Vikrama Dhiman asked me via Twitter
I want to learn French. How many classes do you think one can pick it up in – writing plus speaking. Business Level.
The answer is, of course, more complex than 140 characters, so I gave it a thought as I actually get this question or variations of it at least once a week. Well, what I came up with is the Kirsten Winkler guide to learning a new language from scratch in 2011.
The life of creators who try to provide their readers with good and original content is getting harder every day. On the one hand you have content farms like Demand Media, eHow and others cranking out mediocre pieces at rates never seen before, on the other hand readers react more and more allergic to advertisements which have not been a great yet stable way to monetize a blog.
I already wrote a post on the possibility of turning a blog like this one into a freemium model, offering extra content via subscriptions. Though this has worked out pretty well for me personally, it may not be the ideal model for everyone. So, let’s talk about reading flatrates.
