There is a lot going on in terms of educational content on YouTube lately, and I am not talking about classic education providers like universities and colleges. There is a whole new breed of young creators, some of them already … Continue reading →

It’s late on Sunday here in France, close to 11pm but that won’t mean that I can’t post a short one for you, right? Right. Though I took half the day off to visit my aunt and have some family … Continue reading →

A good friend asked for some advice where to find teaching platforms or portals in the ESL space that actually attract paying students. The problem is that he is not asking the right question. The question has to be "How … Continue reading →

Today a shorter article on emerging business / revenue models in education. Edmodo, the secure social network for K12 schools and teachers announced their API today along with the launch of their own app store with 35 partners. As Chris

Yay, the "new" iPad is here!!!…meh. But the thing is that Apple does not need to bring out cutting edge, insanely great devices at the moment. Even their old iPhones, iPods and iPads are playing in another league compared to

Somehow I ended up where it had all begun, life goes in circles, I guess. The post featuring the ant and the grasshopper seems to have struck the nerve of the edupreneurs out there, it even landed on the agenda

As you might have noticed, I did not write a post yesterday though the goal was to write one article a day. Well, I think I have kind of an excuse: I had a slipped disk and did not really

Here is a short one, but I’ll work out this thought in a lengthier post this week. I see many educators creating content in order to support learners from less favored corners of the earth. They want to make this

It’s up to you to decide if this is a good or bad thing, I for once say it is better than most stuff we have at the moment. I have always been a fan of production quality and thought

Well, I suppose this had to happen sooner or later. Today, I saw my first ad during a Skype call. Though I was able to minimize it, there was still a constant little message reading "show ad" on the right

Based loosely on "A Tale of two Cities" let’s talk a bit about books today. To be precise about the two different business decisions two of most renown brands in the book sector took recently. Encyclopedia Britannica decided to go

I quoted Clay Shirky on that quite a bit already, but I think his idea that tech first needs to become boring in order to make a real impact on society is straight on, still. It seems that Skype finally

This week I wrote two pieces for Big Think and edcetera. One about note sharing and the other about Facebook stock and why I think it is undervalued.

My old friend George has just rebooted his Edupunk / My ESL Friends venture with the premise to finally earn a living from teaching English on the Internet. Hurray to that! Of course, offering live classes on the web that

About two weeks ago Skype introduced in-call advertisements in voice calls. Well, we can't say that we did not see this one coming.

There was an interesting discussion on the last The Verge Show. Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge talked with Tim Wu who coined the term Net Neutrality. During this talk he made an interesting point about industries getting

This is a quick post for all the people on my Facebook fanpage who request that I help them learn English. Most regular visitors of this blog know how to make the distinction between coverage and analysis of all the

On Saturday a group of members from the Edupreneurs Club got together in a Google+ Hangout. Initially I thought we would be talking about the different online payment systems and the need for platforms as a middle man or better

Earlier today I had an interesting Skype chat about the possibility of me launching a MOOC for German. During this talk I had a somewhat Faustian inspiration: what if the classic publishing model wasn’t as bad as it seems? Yes,

By popular vote in our Edupreneurs Club, here is my take on the Edulang / ETS kerfuffle. I am shocked. Shocked that people in the comments were shocked that something like this had happened. In today’s publishing world the big

Back in January I predicted that italki will give it another shot and probably raise some more money. Well, yesterday I received an email from Kevin Chen in which he announced just that, a second angel round. Though Kevin did not disclose the actual numbers, he wrote that the funding is "in the hundreds of [...]

I think, it’s time to give you some updates on what I’ve been up to during the past couple of months. Yes, I am still here - if here means the Internet in general Honestly, I started too many times with a sentence like "I will blog more often here on KirstenWinkler.com" but we all [...]

One of the upsides of having a blog that goes back nearly four years now is that I have a lot of material I can use to write posts with titles like "Told you so", at least when I can remember what I wrote when and where. The downside is that when you are planning [...]

I feel that I need to explain the phrase "paying it forward" a bit as I am pretty sure that most people think about it as an altruistic move, a gift in the hope that someday, someone will come and pay back. Spoiler: that’s a fairy tale. You read and probably will read about this [...]