Category Archives: In the Spotlight

Brick, Mortar, the Cloud and Drones – the Future of the Classroom

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What if you could actively participate in a class that takes place on a campus on the other side of the world, not only watching a live stream but actually interacting with the teacher and writing your solution on the whiteboard?

What if you could be physically present on a campus on the other side of the world and talking to your professor before walking into the next class while sitting at home on your computer?

Futuristic you say? Wrong. Take a look at the two videos below and see what is already possible today.

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Poll: On which Platforms / Services do you have a Teacher Account?

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The idea for this quick poll comes from Darien Brown of YongoPal.

Based on the vivid discussion on Vikrama Dhiman’s post on the seven reasons why online education might never take off, Darien suggested that I should poll the teachers amongst my readers on which platforms / services they have set up a teacher account.

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Predictions of Bill Gates: Information at Your Fingertips 2005

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“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world” – Bill Gates

If I take a look at today’s tweets of people involved in online education, this sentence has been retweeted by basically everyone.

In case you are not familiar with Bill Gates and his “predictions” you should take a look at the video below. It’s one of his famous keynote speeches, in this case “Information at your Fingertips 2005″.

I bet a guy in a black turtle neck took some notes back then – in 1994.

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Three Years of Resistance – Why I will finally buy an iPhone

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Finally. After over three years of resistance I will buy my first iPhone when it will hit the market in France. This time Steve Jobs got me on the right nerve, FaceTime.

Of course there are other nice features like the new display, the smaller size etc that turns the iPhone 4 into a decent replacement for my Asus EEE netbook which I now use when I am not at home but I truly think that FaceTime could be a massive game changer.

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Shocking: YongoPal plans to make Money

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With an unfair move towards its competitors YongoPal won the big price of $25k in the Business Plan competition. Their plan for YongoPal is making money from the beginning by charging its customers. Can you believe that? Charging your customers for a service?

All joking aside, YongoPal the start up from Seattle that connects Korean students with native speakers in the US won the UW Business plan competition although they were the black horse in the race according to Christopher Griffin, one of the judges.

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Myngle is bigger than Apple and Facebook – according to Shop Commission

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That is if you take into account that both Apple and Facebook are taking “only” a 30% cut for products sold on their platforms and Myngle is taking 40% for content sold by teachers on the Myngle Shop.

Normal reactions on taking 30% are moaning that it is quite a hefty chunk but saying on the other hand “Hey, it’s Apple and Facebook. They have a huge market share and offer me access to a huge potential client base so I will bite the bullet.”

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Content is King and always will be. The Web is just Distribution.

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This is a quote from Lauren Feldman an artist who is famous for his videos with puppets of tech and web 2.0 celebrities like Steve Balmer, Loic Lemur and Michael Arrington.

Lauren recently decided to switch his blog and hence most of his content to a subscription model charging his subscribers $5 USD (a fancy coffee) per month. So basically you can say that Lauren pulled the Murdoch and apparently after some long discussions with people who cannot afford this price people start to sign up.

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Pacman or why Google rules the Internet – and Apple never will

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Today Google had another surprise for its users. When you open the www.google.com page you will see the Google logo in form of the good old Pacman game, celebrating its 30th birthday.

But that’s not all, it is not only a Doodle which Google has for various events, it’s the Pacman game and you can play it. If you click insert coin you can even play it with two people.

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WiZiQ about to lauch new version of the Virtual Classroom

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There were already rumors about an update / new version of the WiZiQ classroom for a while and yesterday the teachers of the platform received an email announcing the launch in “less than a month from now”.

In this email you get an overview about the new features and a link that leads you to a demo of the new classroom.

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Myngle now ahead by a beak?

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Yesterday, I received one of the new and regularly coming News Bulletins from the Myngle education team. Normally you can get the news by reading the email for gist but this one caught my attention as it presents some substantial additions to the platform.

In fact the coming changes could give Myngle a lead over its competitors.

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Mingleverse launches Facebook Application

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Mingleverse, the mix between Skype, a webmeeting and Second Life just launched a Facebook application. As you might remember, I was quite surprised by the audio quality even at the beginning back in November 2009.

Since then Mingleverse have steadily worked on new features and the quality of their product and now they are taking on the social network number one and as Mashable reported yesterday Facebook is responsible for 41 percent of all social media traffic. So, that’s likely to be a move that’ll pay off for Mingleverse in the future.

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No Free Lunch Part 2: No more Free Listings on TeachStreet

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After nearly two years in business TeachStreet is making a drastic change to its platform. In an email from Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet to all teachers on the platform he announced that there will be no free listings for teachers anymore. Teachers with a Basic account will have to pay $3 USD for 30 days/10 student leads.

Although this might be a shocker as the general mindset is still set on freemium on the internet today, I applaud this move. The TeachStreet blog explains the reasons very detailed and understandable but let me coin in my two cents on this.

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Review of the TechCrunch Paris event #tcparis

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As some of you might have noticed from my Twitter stream last Wednesday, I attended the TechCrunch Paris event hosted by Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe.

What can I say? Nothing, because the event left me speechless. I lost my voice although I did not even take the tour through Paris with the gang after the event.

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Supercool School will launch at DEMO – wants to become the Ning of Education

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Today Supercool School will officially launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event in Palm Springs. DEMO is one of the most renown event in the tech sector and Supercool School is one of only 65 companies that will pitch during the event.

Many companies that are cornerstones of the tech industry today launched at DEMO such as Palm, Adobe Acrobat, WebEx, TiVo, LindenLab to mention a few.

In a short presentation on Venture Beat the founder of Supercool School shares some facts and figures how he sees the future of the platform.

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#ripoff-stone or Livemocha does a Twitter Experiment

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Livemocha is challenging Rosetta Stone in a fight for the crown of language learning. It already started with the comparison chart three reasons why Livemocha is better than Rosetta Stone, went on with the anouncement that Livemocha and Collins aim to be the Number One language learning provider of this decade.

And now Livemocha invented a new hashtag #ripoff-stone.

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Livemocha and Collins announce Partnership for Premium Courses

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Language learning community Livemocha, now over 5 million members strong, announced a new partnership with a publisher. This time it is Collins and together they will work on premium Spanish, French, German and Italian courses.

Now this means basically that the giant from the other side of the Atlantic throws an eye on the market of its smaller competitors Babbel and Busuu, namely Europe.

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TeachStreet launches Decision Engine for GMAT and GRE Test Takers

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Although I have not written about TeachStreet on this blog yet,  it is one of my favourite services since I have first heard of them in early 2009. The reason why I did not mention TeachStreet up to now was that they were only available in the US.

But that might change soon and hence you will read more about this company from Seattle from now on over here.

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Pearson offers English Learning on Nokia Mobile Phones in China

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Pearson is really on the go when it comes to new ways to deliver their material via the new distribution channels. They announced a partnership with Nokia to form a joint venture with Nokia’s mobile learning platform Mobiledu in China.

Mobiledu was launched in 2007 and offered already content of the BBC, the British Council, ETS and Wallstreet English which has been acquired by Pearson in April 2009.

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