New options for education startups

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It’s really cool to see startup funding options start to coalesce in the education and learning space. There’s always been various research grant funding available for interesting work, but when it comes to pushing that work out into the commercial sphere the options were a bit more limited. The SBIR program was one opportunity, but didn’t have a really strong connection to the education market per se, and presumes a much longer timeframe (compared to many software ventures) for development and getting to market.

Two relative new organizations are trying to change the landscape by building and leveraging community in the education and learning space. First, there’s Startl, which has been hosting multi-day Design Boost boot camps in San Francisco to help startups collaboratively push their designs forward, and three-month immersion programs in New York that culminates in a pitch day to prospective investors.

Startl’s position in the learning technologies market is connective: to form a “network of networks” that responds quickly to the most promising technological, pedagogical, and market opportunities. This model makes business sense, since starting a big new enterprise in the current climate seems impractical, as well as common sense: it unites the leading minds, institutions, and corporations in the learning arena in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Second, just this week we learned of the launch of Imagine K12, which is built on the successful YCombinator model, but focused expressly on education startups.

Our program is set up to take you and your idea from early stage to the point of being a company investable by seed investors (“angels”) or traditional venture capitalists. The three month program is immersive and intense. You are required to be in the SF Bay area during that time. The environment will be conducive to getting an initial prototype up and running and to honing a business plan and pitch. We will give you advice and get your product in the hands of real users for rapid feedback and iteration. During the program, you will also be introduced to educational experts, angel investors, venture capitalists and Silicon Valley luminaries that will inspire you, force you to crystalize your ideas and challenge you to create a more compelling product and company.

Both programs provide some funding (living expenses, basically) for the immersion programs in exchange for a small (~6%) equity stake. Based on YCombinator outcomes, that’s a worthwhile tradeoff. We’re really excited to see what kinds of startups come out of these efforts.

Inquirium launches mobile conference app platform

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Inquirium has entered the world of mobile apps with our new conferences app platform.  Building on the success of our ICLS 2010 conference app, we are now creating custom apps for conferences of all types (currently booking for 2011 conferences).

The app provides attendees with all the information of the conference program in a convenient, portable format, and offers a host of features that enhance the conference experience in new ways. Our platform also provides conference organizers with backend data management and ways to showcase conference sponsors and exhibitors. The app will be available on iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android. You can install our free, fully functional iPhone demo from the iTunes app store today! We’re adding new features all the time, so keep checking our conferences app website for more updates.

ICLS 2010 iPhone App Released

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We just released our first iPhone App: A conference guide to the upcoming International Conference of the Learning Sciences in Chicago.

It’s available directly from the App store. Just search on ‘icls’.

You can also visit our ICLS App web page.

It has all the features you’d expect from a conference app:

  • program guide
  • maps
  • a way to favorite sessions
  • search

And a few nifty features:

  • Off-line browsing — Set your conference schedule on the airplane! No network necessary.
  • Abstracts — Even if you’re not going to the conference, you might find it interesting to browse the app to see what’s being presented. Where available, we have included abstracts.
  • Social Media — Easy links to Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Use #icls to add your update to the stream!

We developed it in close coordination with the conference organizers, so it’s about as up to date and accurate as you can possibly get. (The program is actually still being updated as I type, so we hope to get in one round of updates before the conference.)

If all goes well, we’ll set our sights on AERA 2011!

Inquirium joins 5-year project to develop tools supporting teenage literacy

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We at Inquirium are thrilled to be involved in a just-awarded $19 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The core of this 5-year project is to find ways to help students ages 11-18 develop better literacy skills by supporting claims with evidence — also known as evidence-based reasoning.

The grant is motivated by the ever-increasing need for young readers to be able to integrate, analyze, and interpret information from multiple sources and disciplines (think: research via the web).

The official grant title is Reading for Understanding Across Grades 6-12: Evidence-Based Argumentation for Disciplinary Learning. It involves basic research, the design of new educational resources, and evaluation. Inquirium’s role is to create software tools that support and motivate students during evidence-based argumentation tasks.

We join a talented multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, Northern Illinois University and WestEd, as well as practitioners from Chicago Public Schools and the San Francisco Unified and Oakland Unified School Districts, among others. Can’t wait to get started!

UPDATE 1: The Department of Ed officially announced the awards here.

UPDATE 2: Northwestern University’s School of Ed posted this nice press release mentioning our role.


Current events and Inquirium projects

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What I like most about my job are the opportunities we get to create learning environments that are relevant.  So I’m always pleased when I hear a news story on a topic related to one of our projects.  This morning, while driving the kids to school, I had the opportunity to hear two such stories on NPR.
The first story was about a program to address bullying in a Maryland school. The program targets “the circle of bulying,” helping kids understand that bullying can involve a host of roles: passive supporters, followers, the bully, the victim, and possible defenders. This was one of the primary aims of the “Take a Stand”:”http://www.inquirium.net/portfolio/takeastand/” interactive exhibit we created for the Illinois Holocaust and Education Center. This physically immersive game-like social simulation gives kids the opportunity to choose whether they want to be bystanders, supporters, followers or defenders. While bullying was just one of the “universal lessons” of the holocaust we targetted, it certainly is the one that resonates most with the largely middle school audience.
The second story was about a fossilized pinky found in Siberia that points to a previously unknown human ancestor– a hominid that’s neither Homo Sapiens nor Neanderthal. The story documented the new questions raised by this find, as scientists grapple to reshuffle their understanding of human ancestry.  This was the goal of “Bones of Contention”:”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/interactives/bones-of-contention/” an online interactive activity for high schoolers we recently created for WGBH/NOVA. Like the story, the activity encourages students to explore the callenges scientist face when classifying hominid fossils by investigating a database full of unlableled hominid fossils, thus taking part in the ongoing scientific process of discovering human origins.

What I like most about my job are the opportunities we get to create learning environments that are relevant.  So I’m always pleased when I come across a news story on a topic related to one of our projects.  This morning, while driving the kids to school, I had the opportunity to hear two such stories on NPR.

The first story was about a program to address bullying in a Maryland school. The program targets “the circle of bulying,” helping kids understand that bullying can involve a host of roles: passive supporters, followers, the bully, the victim, and possible defenders. This was one of the primary aims of the “Take a Stand” interactive exhibit we created for the Illinois Holocaust and Education Center. This physically immersive game-like social simulation gives kids the opportunity to choose whether they want to be bystanders, supporters, followers or defenders. While bullying was just one of the “universal lessons” of the holocaust we targetted, it certainly is the one that resonates most with the exhibit’s largely middle school audience.

The second story was about a fossilized pinky found in Siberia that points to a previously unknown human ancestor– a hominid that’s neither Homo Sapiens nor Neanderthal. The story documented the new questions raised by this find, as scientists grapple to reshuffle their understanding of human ancestry.  This was the goal of “Bones of Contention” an online interactive activity for high schoolers we recently created for WGBH/NOVA. Like the story, the activity and web-based software we created encourages students to explore the callenges scientist face when classifying hominid fossils. By investigating a database full of unlableled hominid fossils, students take part in the ongoing scientific process of discovering human origins.

I also frequently come across news related to the work we did a few years back for the My World GIS project, using current geospatial data on the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet in a classroom climate change activity (scroll midway down the page) that studies the risks posed by decreasing salinity levels in the North Atlantic on the climate of Europe. Let’s hope the news on that one changes for the better!

Redefining learning sciences

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Learning sciences as a field has traditionally been fairly small, while placing its practitioners at the intersection of many other fields (psychology, education, AI, design, etc.). That’s often raised the question of what LS really is, since some many practitioners work within a different subset of related fields.

Two efforts to clarify LS, one virtual and one physical, seem well-timed. One is Iris’ call to ISLS members to take part in refining Wikipedia’s learning sciences page. The other is an ICLS pre-conference workshop focused on growing the learning sciences.

As the field of Learning Sciences matures and newly formed graduate programs self-identify as LS, several questions take on importance: Does LS have a common core? Should it? What are the ramifications for LS graduate programs? Participants will review common and varied approaches to LS graduate education from existing programs and explore the tensions within interdisciplinary education and trade-offs between adherence to a common core (maintaining an LS “brand”) or a broadly inclusive model (“big tent”).

An editing pass on the wikipedia page might be a nice after-hours project for a few collaborators at ICLS.

ICLS Workshop: It’s about time

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There’s an interesting ICLS preconference workshop that will explore the challenges of making sense of multiple time-based data streams.

It’s about time: Purpose, methods and challenges of temporal analyses of multiple data streams
Recent studies of learning have involved concurrent collection of multiple types of data such as computer activity logs and online discussion, or have applied multi-dimensional coding, resulting in related data streams, which highlight the dynamic nature of learning and require analyses from a temporal perspective. This workshop will explore issues emerging from integrating data streams by identifying a set of analytic difficulties researchers face and illustrating the application of specific methods that address these challenges.

There’s a fairly obvious connection here to InqScribe; we’ve had some feature requests that touch on ways to make sense of multiple videos of the same event. The theme also touches on some work we’ve done with Nichole Pinkard trying to figure out how students in 1:1 computing environments use their laptops. I’ll be curious to see what comes out of this.

Workshop happens on June 28 in Chicago. Deadline for applications is March 15th 2010. Get cracking!

Inquirium’s Evolution: Two new WGBH/NOVA interactives

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WGBH/NOVA approached us to build two web interactives on the topic of evolution to go with their new PBS television shows. They were specifically looking for data-driven investigations. “Great!” we thought. We’ve done web interactives! We’ve done evolution! And no one does data-driven investigations like we do! Where’s the catch?

Oh, you want it done in 3 months?

Both of them?

After a very frantic 3 months, we are happy to announce the launch of Inquirium’s latest creations, a pair of web-based investigation tools for teaching high school students about evolution.

On the surface, these interactives look like just another database and animated diagram. But we’ve designed the interactives around an activity context which draws students into data-driven investigations.

  • “Bones of Contention“ has students playing the role of a physical anthropologist trying to identify and classify “mystery” fossils using a database of most of the significant hominid fossil finds.
  • “Regulating Genes“ introduces students to the evolutionary processes at work during development (and technically, at conception) by having them explore how mutations in both coding and non-coding areas of genes lead to different morphological features in a fictional creature.

Cramming what could easily have been two year-long research and development projects into a single 3-month timeframe was an interesting challenge. We sharpened our teeth building similar software for longer term grant-funded projects, which afforded more opportunity for background research, formative evaluation, and design iteration. For this project, we had to adapt our design process to fit a new sort of timeline, forcing us to commit to certain design decisions very early in the process and leaving very little wiggle room to explore emergent ideas. There’s nothing like a short timeframe to make us reflect on our design process and pare down our cycles only to the bare essentials.

While the interactives are simple by necessity and by design (both are scoped to work within 1-2 class periods), they draw upon models of inquiry and investigation that, unfortunately, still do not see much light beyond the realm of academic research and school reform projects. Kudos to NOVA for bringing this approach to a wider audience.

Both tools were created to accompany NOVA episodes commemorating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species. One episode, “Becoming Human,” explores human origins, and the other one, “What Darwin Never Knew,” explores the emerging science of evo-devo.

We conceived, designed, and produced both tools. We also created a complete set of classroom materials that include background essays, student worksheets, and teacher guides.

hginit: a Mercurial tutorial

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Joel Sposky has a nice tutorial out for Mercurial (hg). I’ve mentioned that we’re moving away from Subversion (svn), and one of the things about this tutorial that I like is that Joel specifically addresses how being an experienced svn user can make it harder to understand how to best use hg. Situating this within some common coding work models helps illustrate how to use hg well, and where hg offers improvements over svn (and the default use models svn promotes). This is a great introduction to hg, whether you have svn experience or not.

Joel also suggests an alternative repository scheme to the more complex git model I described last month. That’s one of those issues that are often not mentioned in introductory tutorials, but since you establish a repository structure early, it’s actually quite important to get it right the first time.

The other thing about this tutorial that I liked was the way that Joel is monetizing his own mistakes. He kicks off the tutorial like this:

When the programmers at my company decided to switch from Subversion to Mercurial, boy was I confused. First, I came up with all kinds of stupid reasons why we shouldn’t switch.

And all the kool kids think: that Spolsky guy. Of course he wouldn’t get hg. What would you expect from a Microsoft stooge?

But look at what he’s got us reading. He’s leveraged his experience learning hg not just into an entertaining tutorial, but into something that’s valuable to his business. This is not a typical half-assed web tutorial. It has its own domain. He’s getting folks excited about using hg and switching away from svn. And what’s that funny looking bird in the corner? Oh, Fog Creek happens to be launching a commercial version control system based on hg? Gee, you don’t say…

Branching model for distributed version control

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We’re in the process of transitioning from Subversion to Mercurial, and one of the challenges is defining a coordinated framework for managing development work. Subversion essentially came with an ‘official’ branches/tags/trunk model, as well as a central repository location, but the distributed landscape seems more wide open. (Granted, that’s part of the appeal.) The Git model described here is a nice step forward, and seems to apply to Mercurial as well as Git.