With over 20,000 attendees there is no surprise that there is a lot of sub societies at the Web Summit. There are marauding groups of site guys, app guys, groups of hardware startups that you don’t understand and little herds of coffee heads who seem to be more obsessed with the free 3FE than any of the startups. However the most surprising and interesting to me was the sheer amount of educational based startups there. Just by a rough headcount there was 40 with stands on Wednesday. They covered everything, attempts at redoing university, college, secondary, primary and infants education. There were many attempts at bridging the educational and work world as well (quite possibly as the work world has more money than the educational).
www.10minuteswith.com
One of these attempts was 10minuteswith.com, which most surprisingly is already partnered with Trinity as well as many other colleges and universities around the world. This is a site that attempts to draw students in with 10 minute pitches by company execs. Then when the students are there the companies can search them out and offer them places, it’s a place where site tracking is beneficial, as by watching more about that company you get into that companies radar.
While talking to CEO Manfredi di Cintio about this he seemed very positive for the future. He mainly seemed worried about whether colleges will do the promotion for him, so don’t be surprised if you see pushes from them online directly to students to get involved with the platform.
learningplaces.net
Another attempt at bridging the gap between colleges and the real world was learningplaces.net, however they were in a much earlier stage. Chris from Learning Places was quite positive about the future although they’re only in early stage funding atm. Learning Places is trying to get into the market of recommending college courses and modules to students, however with only one college partnered they obviously have a long way to go. Chris was quite effusive about the Web Summit though, saying that being around all these other startups was quite the educational experience as well as the obvious opportunities around funding the week provides.
konozlearning.com
However the most interesting for me were the startups that are trying to improve actual education. konozlearning.com (pronounced konos) is trying the rather interesting route of crowdsourcing learning, well they say crowdsource, it’s really a freemium model. The idea is to get people who already have lessons on Youtube, put them on a free more structured site and let students pay for extra stuff. Obvious things like extra face to face lessons would be provided through the site as “perks”, though completely up to the teacher. You can also donate for simpler support, a dollar for a thank you email etc. Through this the basic levels are free, without ads and more structured than a site like youtube can provide.
Camara
The last one I talked to was not a startup at all but Camara, a really interesting charity that packs up computers for third world digital literacy projects. They’re currently on a drive to get 24,000 computers around the websummit that would provide classes for half a million students. They’ve got many contacts for that throughout the week and even got broader contacts as well. “We met with the founder of indiegogo to help us improve our crowdfunding efforts” to get monitors said Mark Fox who I was talking to. They got their stand (which was by far the best positioned spot I saw the whole weekend) sponsored through a charity competition sponsored by American Embassy. These project go all around the world (full disclosure, I worked on one in a previous life) and are a continuous effort involving the hardware but also the skills for teaching and they revisit their projects year after year to make sure they’re growing and developing in the right way.
All in all the attendees were very positive about how useful the week was. Whether we’ll see many of these affect our educational lives at Trinity is doubtful, but after seeing the products people had I have no doubt that one or two will impact many budding students around the world.
