Meet me at the MeetUp: Second EduTech Meetup event, this one last night (Tuesday), nicely hosted by Mitch and Freada Kapor at the Kapor Center (which does double-duty as a nifty modern art collection). Unlike last week's (different) ed Meetup, which was a pure networking approach, this session featured about 100 people, generous nibblies and three guest speakers: Kapor himself, Imagine K12 co-founder, Alan Louie, and edtech entrepreneur, Jon Bischke, and a wrap up by Gene Wade, chairman & CEO of Platform Learning. A couple of big money quotes:
- Kapor: It's a wonderful climate for innovation. "Let 1,000 flowers bloom" means let 'em start--but not all of them will keep blooming. You've got to do well--by doing good.
- Louie: If you can build an adaptive learning engine -- like Dreambox -- for literacy in grades K-6, Alan has your funder all locked up. Other topics Imagine K12 would like to see apply including gaming applications and other types of adaptive learning systems.
- Bischke: Gearing up for HackingEducation dinner in Detroit in September. (Details next week.) Very excited about "post-education companies," in which he'd include Quora and Stackoverflow.
- Wade: Play to win the long-term game. This is not a career for the faint of heart.