Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

2.24.10 |

Will classroom teachers go the way of bank tellers in the 1970s and become obsolete? Phoenix Wang, co-founder and managing director of Startl, a new social enterprise focused exclusively on educational entrepreneurs and bringing to scale digital media and learning products, says no.

Instead, Wang asserts that the digital world of the future will require teachers to shift roles and “be better at what they do,” and “add different kinds of value.”

Schooling and teachers, she says, will have to be “part of a whole ecology of institutions or modalities of access available to learners to enable them to develop an interest, engage, deepen and extend their learning.”

These comments are from an interesting interview with Wang in this month’s Fast Company. Spotlight covered Startl here last month. Wang names technology, decreasing cost, and perhaps most importantly, participatory learning as important forces of change in the education world right now. She says:

There’s a whole new generation of kids who expect I should be able to have control over how I learn, what I learn, and where I learn. I’m not just a consumer, I’m a co-creator and collaborator. I can share/mashup/remix knowledge.

Wang says new emerging markets and product categories in educational technologies right now include “referenceware, simulations and virtual worlds, and mobile learning.” 

Startl is working to help entrepreneurs take advantage of these trends to develop and take to scale products that are more “learner-centric.” In this way, the organization hopes to play a role in shifting the culture of education at large.

With support from a group of foundations that includes Gates, Hewlett and MacArthur, Startl has also partnered with companies like IDEO, DreamIT Ventures and Berkeley & Noyes.

Startl holds its first boot camp next month to guide young developers in effective learning models and a user-centered product design process. This session will focus on the design of mobile applications for learning. Stay tuned for what participants come up with.