How to Succeed in Ed-Tech (By James & Adam)

I respect these guys, their company, and their product a lot. They’ve always been generous with their time and expertise – and I’ve learned a lot from them since first meeting Adam at an edublogger meetup in 2006. I’m thrilled to see Adam and James sharing their experience (and their focus on teachers and students) with others working to be successful in the education technology market. I hope this article (a manifesto of sorts) is influential and helpful for many, so I’m thrilled to share it here.

How to Succeed in Ed-Tech
By James Byers and Adam Frey, Founders of Wikispaces, November 2012

Along the way we’ve formed a strong opinion about what success means for us, and the short list of characteristics we believe are crucial for the success of ed-tech companies. We’re sharing what we’ve learned because the opportunity to improve education through technology is vast, large enough for many times the number of companies in education today. Taken in combination, these characteristics run contrary to much of the prevailing Silicon Valley wisdom about how to address this market. We hope that today’s young education startups will consider this alternate path.

http://www.wikispaces.com/content/topic/how-to-succeed-in-education

Since there aren’t comments on their site, I hope you’ll leave your own thoughts here below. :)

Wikispaces Offering Free Wikis for Higher Ed

It looks like Steve, Alan, and Others beat me to this news already, but… starting this month, Wikispaces is offering free, ad-free, fully featured wikis to higher education, as well as extending their free wiki program for K-12.

Their wikis for education have no advertising on them, are fully featured, and never expire. (They also include the option to be completely private if desired, though I personally think that detracts from many of the benefits of a wiki.) The features included in the education wikis usually cost $50 per year — but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education. And teachers are welcome to sign up for as many of them as they like. They’ve given away over 980,000 free wikis for education so far, and are committed to giving away at least 2,000,000 in total. (This is an awesome new goal as they approach their original goal of 1 million free wikis for education!)

This announcement will be posted next week on the wikispaces blog, but I’ve included it as a PDF so you can get a sneak peak. ;)

If you have any questions or comments feel free to let me know in the comments below… or just contact the always responsive team over at wikispaces. :)

You can now get free higher education wikis here:
https://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/highered

You can still get free K-12 education wikis here:
http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/teachers