Investing in Education
The folks over at EduFire wrote an interesting post yesterday that pointed me to the Union Square Ventures blog for an especially enlightening insight into the sort of areas they, as early stage venture capitalists, are interested in getting in to.
Union Square have invested in an impressive portfolio of web companies in recent years and count Twitter as one of their investments (this was bound to impress me as I love Twitter despite all its teething problems!) and they have quite clearly set their stall out to look into how education can be transformed by web technologies in a way that so many other things have been.
I particularly enjoyed the following;
“With access to course materials, ability to watch lectures and even tutor at a distance, we believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.”
Not surprisingly this chimed with us here at Jiva Towers as we have an avowed interest in using the (social) web to enhance education - and while we fall more into the use technology to enhance the current system camp rather than the throw it away and start again team we firmly believe that there are alot of opportunities in this space and it is gratifying to see that we are not alone in thinking that.
Over at the EduFire blog again they talk about Teacherpreneurs and I love this idea of a combination of education and entrepreneurism - something rarely seen but increasingly sought after!