The Edstartup Space

There have been so many great posts during the second week of Edstartup 101, that I'm not sure I have anything original to add.  Below is my visual for how I roughly sorted the startups we were asked to look at for the class:



easel.ly

The most exciting startups for me are mostly ones that didn't make it on the list.  The startups that are creating open ended tools like Easel.ly (above) or that are looking at education from a very different perspective are the ones that I like learning about.  I'm concerned about startups like Knewton that seem to be trying to remove human beings from being a part of the learning experience with the student.  And I'm disappointed by startups like ClassDojo that are based almost entirely on poor pedagogy (anyone there read Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn?).

I don't have a clear idea for a startup.  I've thought about a few iPad apps that I think would make the classroom a better place.  Those aren't big ideas like Knewton or Dreambox, more like Goalbook in scope.  What I'd really like to do is start a zero tuition private school that leveraged all these new ideas and created something very different than a public K-12 school of today.  However, what I see in the startup examples is that the most successful may also be what is most familiar.  Even when the ideas are new they still work within the comfortable boundaries of what we expect from education.

The problem with different/disruptive ideas in education is that the experiment always takes many years to evaluate.  And then we have to decide how to evaluate it-- happier people, more productive people, more money, more success (and by what measure?).  When it comes to disruptive innovations in education, no one except those who have been utterly failed by the current system wants to be experimented on.  I think the disruptive innovations are going to happen on the edges of education among homeschoolers and among students with very different learning needs.