Posts Tagged ‘web’
RosePad
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
I remember back in the day when we first started using computers in school. I think my classroom had a Mac Plus and it was an instant hit with all my classmates. At the time, the applications were simple/intuitive to the point where simple point, click and drag was all we needed to do. We used it to draw and play games like Oregon Trail and Bolo (my all time fav).
A lot has changed. Students use computers in their everyday lives at school, home and in some cases keep one in their pocket. Whats going on in the world?…Oh I’ll go to Hulu and watch the latest Daily show; what is everyone up to? …lets head over to Facebook. Literally at their fingertips, students can find what they need courtesy of the web.
But has the classroom changed all that much? We have replaced handwritten papers with word documents and library research has been swapped with Google. But my fear is that schools have been too slow to adapt to newer web technologies and are quickly realizing that students are learning and creating in much different ways that in the past. Students are so connected outside of the classroom that they are fully immersed in online social networks, games and creating real content (blogs, tweets, status, videos, etc).
This disconnect or what we consider a gap…is what sparked the RosePad idea. Along with my other partners (Matt and Guillermo) we decided to create an education platform for secondary schools. We will take many of the features that social networks have such as messaging, collaboration and applications but focus that offering for schools. The applications are really the key as we plan on creating dynamic apps that allow for students to work together in real time whether it be a paper or simply a debate practice. See an example here http://www.rosepad.com/our-screencast/
3 weeks ago this journey started …keep posted on our progress with @rosepad ; also huge thanks to my incubaker family for supporting us.
The web and its borders
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
It is a popular belief that thanks to the Internet, the world is getting smaller and smaller. But is it really? Even though the web is world wide, language and cultural borders still matter a lot. A good example is the usage of social networking sites that varies greatly from region to region, as is shown in this map (from the French newspaper Le Monde):
Especially in China, a lot of Western Tech companies have tried to establish themselves – and have failed miserably. The main reason for this, says Jonathan Haagen from the Economist Intelligence Unit in a presentation (found at Read/WriteWeb), is failure to adapt the services to local needs. It isn’t so much the huge cultural divide, but rather small details that make difference (for example, Chinese people have difficulties spelling “Google” and thus switch to a search engine whose name is easier to type for them). Moreover, says Haagen, China is still a developing country, but Western tech companies often fail to connect to the vast majority of Internet users who are not white collars living in Shanghai or Beijing. The most important key to success, says Haagen, is therefore to “give ground operations the freedom to react in a timely manner, and respond to the needs of a specific market”. In other words: The only way for a tech business to eliminate the borders is to be very aware of them.
