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I'm not convinced there is much use for this. And there are two fundamental problems. The first problem is the institutional structure of the US education syst

I'm not convinced there is much use for this. And there are two fundamental problems. The first problem is the institutional structure of the US education system. In my experience, tech-savvy instructors rarely look for a generic CMS solution. And those without much tech experience resist change unless it is forced upon them because they are already good at what they do and change disrupts their ability to get their jobs done. Blackboard gets around this inertia by selling to university and school administrations, which then push the technology out throughout campuses. It is a top-down sales regime. The company has non-compete clauses so that instructors cannot adopt other systems even if they wanted to. Competing with Blackboard on their own terms would mean wining and dining a lot of administrators who are not going to be interested in beta-testing software. The second problem is more fundamental. A lot of the really interesting stuff happening in the education field is happening with interest based communities like Chinesepod or even open source software projects (for an education in programming...). There are two things that are common to both sorts of communities: #1 they are interest driven, #2 the materials produced are not attempts to solve specific institutional needs so much as address individual "learner" problems. A project like this should be very clear about whether it is serving institutional or learner needs. If you don't know exactly how to help students, what is the point of creating a system simply to automate stuff?

palish 20y ago
You bring up some great points, trevelyan. Let me address them. Blackboard is very much university-centric. They've won the war as far as universities are concerned. However, universities generally do the job of teaching very well. You also don't hear of fatal university shootings often (If ever? I haven't looked.) I'm in it to improve the lives and education of high school students. If I manage to better just one student's life, then I'll consider it mission accomplished. High schools are very much open game. They're open game because they can't typically afford the huge sums of money that universities can. I plan to dominate the low end by creating a product that's simple, efficient, and inexpensive; something that every teacher would want. I'm not competing with Blackboard. I'm sidestepping them. I agree that teachers have methods that they've employed for years to teach students. But part of that is exactly the problem. When something is done exactly the same for years on end, it gets stale. A teacher would have -fun- with my product, exploring other's ideas and communities. I plan to make them happy. They may be reluctant to use my product, but I plan to be with my two cofounders, on foot, visiting local high schools as soon as I have a feature set that's useful, and spending time with individual teachers to show them how they might benefit from it. Then it's up to the teachers whether or not they'll use Classbug, but if I've done my job well, they'll most certainly want to. Shawn

palish 20y ago

You bring up some great points, trevelyan. Let me address them. Blackboard is very much university-centric. They've won the war as far as universities are concerned. However, universities generally do the job of teaching very well. You also don't hear of fatal university shootings often (If ever? I haven't looked.) I'm in it to improve the lives and education of high school students. If I manage to better just one student's life, then I'll consider it mission accomplished. High schools are very much open game. They're open game because they can't typically afford the huge sums of money that universities can. I plan to dominate the low end by creating a product that's simple, efficient, and inexpensive; something that every teacher would want. I'm not competing with Blackboard. I'm sidestepping them. I agree that teachers have methods that they've employed for years to teach students. But part of that is exactly the problem. When something is done exactly the same for years on end, it gets stale. A teacher would have -fun- with my product, exploring other's ideas and communities. I plan to make them happy. They may be reluctant to use my product, but I plan to be with my two cofounders, on foot, visiting local high schools as soon as I have a feature set that's useful, and spending time with individual teachers to show them how they might benefit from it. Then it's up to the teachers whether or not they'll use Classbug, but if I've done my job well, they'll most certainly want to. Shawn