UN charitable learning system for programmers - against hacktivism

Global union and charitable learning system for programmers.

In the ever-sprawling hacking movement, the United Nations, together with Google are developing a program of socialization of programmers.

According to an Edward Mushinski  source from the endowment fund Google  Endowed Scholarship, the program will offer free online courses for learning new technologies, such as software for mobile applications. The only condition would be to join the Union of IT-specialists (IT-workers Union, ITWU).

ITWU will be a specialized UN agency, which aims to involve young people in socially useful work, their employment and the protection of their rights.
Funding for these activities will be carried out initially charity Google Endowed Scholarship (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/ugradscholars/google.html), which also will contribute all the companies that have signed the UN Global Contract on social responsibility (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/languages/russian/GC_Brochure_Russian.pdf).

Due to this flow of charitable contributions (and turnover of philanthropy is about 300 billion dollars a year), the courses will maintain the most highly paid guru IT. Their participation will ensure the interest is all the programmers to participate in the union.

In the opinion of the editorial board, motivated Google to participate in this program is quite a selfish desire to attract the best minds of the programmer in its ecosystem of Android.

John Connor
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003231967366

Facebook has hired the team at online reputation system Legit

The company changed names two times, starting out as Quantifi before the name was changed to Cred and then Legit. It also changed its approach to online reputation numerous times as well.

Legit started life as consumer-first reputation site, where users could go to make sure that the person they were dealing with was not a con artist. But it didn't work because "a system requiring a person to go to a different site for reputation information before proceeding with a transaction on a marketplace presented too much friction."

Also, most people who used sharing servies did not seem to need additional sources of trust, so the company wasn't solving a problem most people had. 

The company then developed an embeddable widget " that would integrate into a user’s reputation profile within a marketplace." This failed, though, because "marketplaces want control of their User Experiences."

After that, the company built the LRG, its cross-platform reputation system. Partners who joined the LRG contributed user reputation data specific to their marketplace. Legit aggregated and analyzed this data and returned a LegitReport and LegitScore summarizing the user’s reputation across all marketplaces.

Legit also provides real-time alerts to LRG partners that were sent when Legit becomes aware of a significant reputation event on a marketplace, like a crashed car or vandalized apartment.

Despite that they " were not able to achieve Legit’s vision", Barton and Boyle say that the lessons they learned "feed our excitement about Facebook."

"On Airbnb, Facebook is used to tell you if your host went to the same college, or whether a friend of yours has stayed there before you. When you sign up for Lyft, you have no option but to connect with your Facebook account to provide proof of your identity," Barton and Boyle wrote.

"Facebook is a core piece of infrastructure for many marketplaces as the source of your offline authenticity and reliability. While we will be working on other initiatives within Facebook, we remain huge advocates of the Sharing Economy / Collaborative Consumption and are confident the movement will continue to grow."

The news was first reported by TechCrunch on Monday.

Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2013-03-19-facebook-hires-team-from-online-reputation-site-legit#8thFRubWf4FA4B7Z.99 

The most wanted educational startups

1. Codecademy.com offers game-based online courses that teach people of all ages and experience levels how to code

2. Coursera.org Founded by Stanford computer science professors, Coursera provides access to courses from top-tier universities for free. 

3. Lore.com Formerly known as Coursekit, this company got its start in late 2011. Since then, it has raised over $24 million to fund its goal: to become a real competitor to education management platform Blackboard, partly by incorporating a wealth of social features into the site

4/ Udacity.com Former Stanford professor and Google VP and researcher Sebastian Thrun launched this online education venture earlier this year. Udacity hopes to bring high-quality university classes to as many students as possible, free of charge. How does it make money? If students want certifications for the skills they’ve learned, they can pay to take a test at one of the company’s testing centers. 

5. Clever.com - has built up a successful business model over the past year. The company helps educational institutions develop apps for managing student information by making it easier to access student data from Student Information Systems. Since launching, the company has earned more than $3 million in funding and has doubled the number of schools it works with from 1,000 to 2,000

6. Coursera wants to bring classes from top-tier universities to the Web for free.  On the platform, students can sign up for classes on everything from business and technology to sociology and literature. Students can’t earn degrees through the site, but a student could use it as a credential that opens up new opportunities. The startup has said that it plans to  match employers with people who have performed well in classes on its platform

7. Voxy.com

There are a lot of companies out there vying for supremacy in the online language-learning market

8. knewton.com/

9. Udemy.com is unique because it allows anyone to take or build an online course, not just colleges and universities. Instructors can implement videos, PowerPoints, zip files, audio files, and PDFs to create a course and share it with the world. The site offers courses on technology, business, music, art, languages, math, science, games, sports, and more.

The basic premise is to crowdsource education.

• TutorVista – started by offering online tutoring to Western students using tutors in India. All you can eat for $99/month or so. They burned millions on search engine marketing and were able to build a business that generated eight figure revenue — nice but not enough to IPO on. So they pivoted and opened education centers in India and were acquired for $213 million by Pearson. A $200+ million acquisition in India is unheard of.
• Tutor.com – started a decade ago to offer online tutoring to the masses. Never went mainstream, even after 5 rounds of funding. They’ve built a niche business that survives through deals they’ve struck with various government bodies — libraries, schools, etc.
• GlobalScholar – started by the CEO of Drugstore.com, tried initially to do a direct to consumer play. Realized it wasn’t working and bought an electronic gradebook company that works with schools and was sold to Scantron that has great distribution with schools.

VENTURE CAPITAL MAGNET

Fans of the project respond that the files are safer in the database than scattered about school districts. Plus, they say, the potential upside is enormous, with the power to transform classrooms across the U.S.

Does Johnny have trouble converting decimals to fractions? The database will have recorded that - and may have recorded as well that he finds textbooks boring, adores animation and plays baseball after school. Personalized learning software can use that data to serve up a tailor-made math lesson, perhaps an animated game that uses baseball statistics to teach decimals.

Johnny's teacher can watch his development on a "dashboard" that uses bright graphics to map each of her students' progress on dozens, even hundreds, of discrete skills.

"You can start to see what's effective for each particular student," said Adria Moersen, a high school teacher in Colorado who has tested some of the new products.

The sector is undeniably hot; technology startups aimed at K-12 schools attracted more than $425 million in venture capital last year, according to the NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the sector. The investment company GSV Advisors tracked 84 deals in the sector last year, up from 15 in 2007.

In addition to its $100 million investment in the database, the Gates Foundation has pledged $70 million in grants to schools and companies to develop personalized learning tools.

New products regularly come to market, but both educators and entrepreneurs say adoption has been slow because of technical hurdles.

WARNING SYSTEMS TO FORESTALL DROPOUTS?

Schools tend to store different bits of student information in different databases, often with different operating systems. That makes it clunky to integrate new learning apps into classrooms.

At the Rocketship chain of charter schools, for instance, administrators must manually update at least five databases to keep their education software running smoothly when a child transfers from one teacher to another, said Charlie Bufalino, a Rocketship executive.

The extra steps add expense, which limits how many apps a school can buy. And because the data is so fragmented, the private companies don't always get a robust picture of each student's academic performance, much less their personal characteristics.

The new database aims to wipe away those obstacles by integrating all student information - including data that may previously have been stored in paper files or teacher gradebooks - in a single, flexible platform.

Education technology companies can use the same platform to design their software, so their programs will hook into a rich trove of student data if a district or state authorizes access.

That prospect has some companies dreaming big.

Larry Berger, an executive at Amplify Education, says the data could be mined to develop "early warning systems." Perhaps it will turn out, for instance, that most high school dropouts began to struggle with math at age 8. If so, all future 8-year-olds fitting that pattern could be identified and given extra help.

Companies with access to the database will also be able to identify struggling teachers and pinpoint which concepts their students are failing to master. One startup that could benefit: BloomBoard, which sells schools professional development plans customized to each teacher.

The new database "is a godsend for us," said Jason Lange, the chief executive of BloomBoard. "It allows us to collect more data faster, quicker and cheaper."

Whether all this data, and all the programs that use it, will transform education is another question. Most data-driven software has only been tested on a small scale; results are often mixed.

Though he is bullish on the sector, Michael Moe, the chief investment officer at GSV Capital, cautions that there is as yet no proof the new technology will produce "game-changing outcomes" for students - or, for that matter, sterling profits for investors.

There are lots of opportunities, especially if you take a long term view of it and want to build something meaningful for the next 25 years. However, don’t make the following mistakes:

• Don’t believe that building a better product will make you successful. Delivering something for cheaper will. Even if that cheaper thing is lower quality. This is usually repugnant to most well-educated entrepreneurs.
• Don’t start in developed, western countries because that’s where large, Internet businesses have been built. Asia is a much better education market if you want to target consumers.
• Don’t take VC funding because the growth curve in your education business will not live up to VC expectations early on. Take angel money from people who want to make a difference in education. Then take private equity money once you’ve figured out how to get to $10 million in revenue on your own. Even better, don’t take any PE money and grow it on cash flows. Successful education businesses are often not capital constrained.
• Don’t target suburban or urban, middle class users with disposable income. You’ll build a niche business that can’t go mainstream.

Others are more skeptical still.

"The hype in the tech press is that education is an engineering problem that can be fixed by technology," said Frank Catalano of Intrinsic Strategy, a consulting firm focused on education and technology. "To my mind, that's a very naive and destructive view."