Disrupt Education

This week I came across an interesting study by Latitude Research via the MindShift Blog. In collaboration with LEGO® Learning Institute and Project Synthesis, Latitude asked children from across the world to write stories, imagining that a robot companion would be part of their everyday life, at ... Read More

Rumors and, according to 9to5Google, even evidence is surfacing that Google is testing out a new physical product on its campus, Google Glasses.  9to5Google already wrote about this project back in December 2011 and now claims that their tipster has seen a prototype looking like Oakley Thumps ... Read More

According to an article in today’s Irish Examiner, Martin Callinan the Garda Commissioner of Ireland aims to wipe out online bullying with a new safety campaign.  A survey conducted by the National Parents Council Primary and the National Centre for Technology in Education found that 55% of all ... Read More

Many, including myself, wondered if today’s Apple announcement would be the kiss of death for digital textbook startups like Kno, Inkling and Chegg. Now, it seems as if Apple as well as the three big publishers Pearson, MacGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt did not plan to attack the college ... Read More

Two days ago Babbel, one of the language learning communities I had previously covered here on Disrupt Education, turned 4. I remember that I found the project on Facebook, connected with one of the co-founders and got an invite to the closed beta. Back then I was still teaching languages “offline” ... Read More

Crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have become a huge phenomenon in the tech & geek space in 2011. The idea behind those platforms is pretty simple. People who want to raise money for a project, product or cause set up a campaign and the community decides if they want to back ... Read More

Before every Apple event the rumor mill is turning and usually it’s all about the next iPhone, iPod, iPad - hence the next device that will just work, boom.  But this time it’s different as the rumors prior to the Apple event that’s planned to take place at the end of January in New York are ... Read More

2012 started with off with a $5 million funding round for Coursekit, a New York based startup founded by Joe Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre. The three University of Pennsylvania students were not happy with the LMS technology (Learning Management System) and hence decided to build their own.  ... Read More

2012 started with off with a $5 million funding round for Coursekit, a New York based startup founded by Joe Cohen, Dan Getelman, and Jim Grandpre. The three University of Pennsylvania students were not happy with the LMS technology (Learning Management System) and hence decided to build their own.  ... Read More

As we are rapidly getting closer to the end of 2011 which has been quite an exciting year for the education startup scene, I want to take a quick look at the current state of affairs in the vertical that caters to teachers. Not long ago there was no real vertical for this group in education though ... Read More

One of the fastest growing verticals amongst edtech startups these days is definitely the social layer added on top of existing educational content.  One of the first startups in that space was OpenStudy. The startup teamed up with MIT OpenCourseWare back in September 2010 to enable students who ... Read More

$6 million to fund an institution that would be capable to educate an infinite amount of students throughout the world sounds ambitious if not crazy.  Nevertheless Shai Reshef, founder and president of the University of the People says that those $6 million would be sufficient to enable the non ... Read More

A lot has been and will be written about Salman Khan. Though he already arrived in the spotlight of mainstream media, he is clearly just at the beginning of his mission. And with fresh money in the war chest, Khan and his team are now planning the next attack on the education system.  Besides ... Read More

Reading the daily news (probably on a PC or tablet device) one might have the notion that ebooks were on a killing spree, destroying every part of the old media system on their way, the latest victim: school lockers.  In general, the switch to digital content has quite some advantages to it. A huge ... Read More

In today’s article I would like to share a video of my old friend Jon Bischke who recently gave a talk on TEDxManhattanBeach about his thoughts on combining the Learning Graph with the Reputation Graph. Jon is a serial entrepreneur in education and was in the founding teams of five companies ... Read More