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!
4IP is a really interesting new initiative from Channel 4 that is setting out to look at how Channel 4 can fulfill its public service broadcasting requirements in a digital age where television is not necessarily the be all and end all.
It is of particular interest to a start-up like us here at Jiva as it is particularly looking to work with people with interesting digital projects and particularly those that are looking to provide some public benefit – which with our focus on education and our development of a new very cool top-secret service sums us up nicely (IMHO!).
All told the initiative has a budget of £50million (not all of it Channel 4 money – much of it is from partnerships with Regional Development Agencies etc) and will launch officially in October and I think it will immediately become a hugely important player in the digital social entrepreneur space currently best represented by Social Innovation Camp.
Channel 4 are also the major investor in School of Everything and while that predates 4IP I think it shows 4s commitment to this space and the sort of thing they are likely to be interested in; new solutions for old problems.
Tom Loosemore, most recently based at Ofcom but probably still best known for his work at the BBC leading much of the innovative work on the BBC website, is leading the project and Ewan McIntosh, a prominent edublogger and conference speaker on social web and education, is the first digital commissioner to be announced. Ewan gives an interesting interview on this weeks Guardian Tech Weekly podcast about 4IP and the sort of thing they will be looking for.
My only slight early gripe is that the South West, West and Wales seem a little poorly served by the geographical locations of the commissioners but hopefully that is something that can easily be overcome.
Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody is required reading here at Jiva and even if your humble blogger does have some issues with how well it works as a book I do fully subscribe to the concepts and ideas that Professor Shirky writes about.
So I was very interested to come across a couple of videos where Shirky is interviewed about how these ideas can work with education. With much of my work here at Jiva focused on Beanbag Learning at the moment this is a topic close to my heart.
You can find the videos here on Will Richardsons’ blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/clay-shirky-interview/ – the interviewer was Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach a prominent edublogger in the States. The content is obviously a very US take but no less interesting for that.
One of the final parts of the Q and A is especially interesting for our work at Beanbag and I’ll quote it here:
Q: What would happen if there was no public education? Would society still value taking responsibility for individual learning?
A: Home schooling is growing for every economic class except the very well-off. Create some social model for learning, organized online? Coordination of problems; find others struggling with the same issues. When you are diagnosed with a disease, you go online to read about it and find a group. Similar approach to education could work. Go online to find others who have kids who are having problems with a particular issue.
I’m currently reading Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky, which is a cracking good read. There is one passage early in the book which really resonates with what we are trying to do with Beanbag.
From Sharing to Cooperation to Collective Action
For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state , directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is.
The Web is enabling people with shared interests and common goals to come together to tackle old problems in new ways and to challenge the status quo. It allows large numbers of people with wildly varying levels of time, energy and commitment to all contribute meaningfully to a collaborative effort without the overhead traditionally associated with building an organisation. A group can be much more fluid and correspondingly more efficient at realising its goals.