November 25th, 2008

This past week I was at a conference in Las Vegas called E-Learn 2008. The main objective of the conference was to get a group of E-Learning educators, professionals and philosophers together and discuss the future of open education.  For those of you that are not familiar with the idea of open education or open learning, essentially the goal is to provide a forum for students to learn without any barriers.  A place for students to share, learn, organize and disseminate information without the constraints of administrators or “the system”. 

There are some really cool classes and schools out there are now that are experimenting with this very idea ( http://openhighschool.org/ or Free Online College).  However, as you can imagine many schools and administrators have issues with these sorts of learning environments because it is difficult to monitor the ciriculm and even more so, it is difficult to monitise this sort of adventure.

This is where Academic Networks like StudyBlue.com come into play.  Here are pictures of Chris Klundt and Hicham Bouabdallah our President and CTO, both hard at work at StudyBlue.com. 

StudyBlue.com offers students a place that they can openly express their ideas, share their information, and learn from one another.  We have created a forum for students and educators to work together to share knowledge…not to mention a great place to study for finals…thats right folks, finals are right around the corner…better start studying today.

I digress, all in all, the conference was very productive.  I met a lot of informed and interesting people, heard some exhilarating discussions, was able to present and give some people some insight into StudyBlue.com.  The thing that was very promising was that we are certainly on the right track.  Education is headed in a more open direction and StudyBlue will continue to help students study utilizing the tools that need to study smarter not harder.

So, I finally left Vegas -

Jumped on a plane back to Madison, with a stop in Minneapolis -

Oh, and on my way back from Minneapolis, the Governor of Wisconsin, Governor Jim Doyle was on my flight, sitting a couple of rows behind me,in COACH!!!

All in all, it was a very productive trip, lost a bunch of money, met some very interesting and people, and learned a great deal about the future of open education.

Thanks-

Ben

Tags: E-Learning, Open Education, StudyBlue.com, Vegas

Posted in Academic Network, News, Representatives, Startups | Tags: E-Learning, Open Education, StudyBlue.com, Vegas
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.