Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The First Crack of EdTech 2.0: The EdTech Hype Bubble of 2011-2013

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I hardly think that seven funded companies constitutes an 'ed tech bubble', nor that the failure of a couple of them constitutes the popping of that putative bubble. But there is a sense in which the 'get rich quick' mantra so popular among investors doesn't really work in this field. Education is, at best, a time-consuming and resource-intensive enterprise, and at worst, can fail completely to meet learning objectives. And the amount invested by the VC firms into the seven companies listed amounts to a tiny fraction of all education investments (the real investors in education are governments and students). So while there will no doubt be much press about the popping of the ed tech bubble, remember that this bubble was a chimera to begin with, and represented very little of any substance. (p.s. to - when you have to say "my Seven Sisters nomenclature is not necessarily pejorative," everybody knows that your meaning actually was pejorative, and we wonder why would think being a sister is pejorative.)

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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