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.
Imagine that you were given a magic wand and ability to create an ideal application for learners of EFL and for teachers of EFL, what it would look like and which main features it would incorporate.
The direct answer to this question is quite simple: not even a magic wand could create such a product. And that is actually a good thing.
A trend that we often see, and not only in education 2.0, is the notion that adding more and more features and options to reach more and more people and markets, something like the hunt for the Holy Gail. Actually, this mindset will most often hurt the product. Over time it will get more and more complex and in the end no one who visits the site for the first time will be able to clearly see and understand what the product or service is all about.
Of course, it is far harder to focus on one or maybe two aspects because there are so many great opportunities out there but if you take a look at the most successful services on the market they usually do one or two things really, really well.
What we need to learn is to embrace the fact that everything on this planet has a certain natural audience. For some things this audience is bigger, for some it’s rather small. Take this blog as an example.
KirstenWinkler.com will probably never attract as many users as TechCrunch or Mashable because its audience is rather defined to education. But then again, I don’t cover K12, higher education, ESL / EFL and many other topics for various reasons that often which again limits my natural reach. I could try to change this by writing articles on topics that would possibly attract new readers but with me having no background on the subject. This would rather hurt the experience for all readers and therefore my reputation as people would not know what to expect.
The same is true for products and services. People are different and therefore learn in different ways. Sure, there are methods that will attract more students than others which does not mean that one is more valid than the other, of course. If you as a teacher or founder embrace this fact you will sleep better, trust me.
What the Internet enables us is to pick what we like and mix it up as much we like. There are people who only like plain vanilla, there are people who only like fruit sorbets and there are people who prefer a mix of both and even add other flavors. The real challenge is therefore not to imagine a one size fits all product but a way how we can combine different approaches in a meaningful way. I guess you see where I am going.
Once again, what we need is the Knowledge Graph, a centralized database that tracks everything we learn during our lifetime. This includes our entire school career plus the informal, life long learning. With the Knowledge Graph it won’t matter if you learn with a teacher / tutor, with flashcards, through a game on your iPhone or in a language learning community. All that data will be tracked and analysed, giving yourself, an HR manager but also college or university officials an overview on everything you have learned and everything you might want to learn.
