Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Da Vinci Fest – Science, Art & Technology

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Exciting our kids about the world they will inherit — not just the future but their future — means that getting them engaged and excited about science, art and technology will enable them to invent it. A unique festival in Stillwater on January 5, 2013 is one that sets up a venue for kids to showcase and demonstrate what fills them with passion and motivating them to think about, and work toward, the possibilities of what they can create.

For a long time Minnesota has been a leader in educational uses of technology and has a high degree of focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and many, like the US News and World Report tout that STEM Education Is the Key to the U.S.’s Economic Future and even have this dedicated site about STEM.

The Stillwater school district has a unique, community-driven non-profit called The Partnership Plan whose focus “…is to be a catalyst for exciting and innovative learning for students of Stillwater Area Public Schools by forging community partnerships of time, talent and resources.” Driven by parent and community volunteers, they are the ones who put on the event alongside the teachers and school administrators engaging our kids.

Click to view the Da Vinci Fest poster

Click to view the Da Vinci Fest poster

The DaVinci Fest, named after Leonardo Da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance genius who was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, is an annual educational fair highlighting art, science and technology projects by the Stillwater District’s students in grades 4 through 12. Last year, over 700 student projects and 60+ interactive exhibits and demonstrations by businesses, clubs and organization were on display for more than 3,000 attendees!

But did you also notice the word “art” in their event’s title? Let’s face it: without deep design thinking — and the depth and texture an artist brings to our human perceptions of just about everything we see, hear and touch in the world — even the best science and technology functionality falls flat. One of the reasons Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave for purchasing Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘codex’ for $30M was that this genius Da Vinci not only invented, engineered and analyzed, he could articulate his vision and communicate it in a beautiful and highly useable way. It’s one reason why having art within this event seems both logical and insightful.

The best part? You can attend on Saturday, January 5, 2013 held at Stillwater High School (map) and also participate as an exhibitor by contacting Paula Thrall by email. Take a peek at some of 2012’s exhibitors here and see that you would be in good company as an exhibitor, support this cause, and help build a future smart population that will keep Minnesota and the U.S. great.

Take a peek at their 2012 promotional video which will give you a good overview:

[youtube=”http://youtu.be/qnF4gD12vpQ”]

A Minnesota Startup Returns from Silicon Valley, Wiser and Richer

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Well, let’s say nicely funded, anyway — a fully subscribed seed round that fulfills their near-term capital needs. I wanted to write a post to report the latest update on this amazing Minnesota tech startup: Kidblog. You’ve seen me write about these guys before:  earlier this summer … and almost a year ago when I posted an update from the EduTech Minnesota conference, when the company hit a million users. We also had one of the Kidblog cofounders as our guest on the podcast about that same time: Minnov8 Gang 97: R U Kidding about Kidblog? 

The company launched a new website and identity in August. But here’s the biggest update of all: it just reported its user count has shot past 1.8 million!  Kidblog is a safe blogging platform designed for K-12 teachers, students, and schools — and it stands head-and-shoulders above other solutions out there.  It’s an amazing “Grown in Minnesota” story that is a testament to the  Internet innovation that happens here in our state!

I’ve known the cofounders, Matt Hardy (left, with admirer) and Dan Flies, for at least three years, and have been closely monitoring their progress. So, I’m especially excited about the success they’re achieving. They’ve now received validation from some very savvy investors, not to speak of even more from their market: the teachers who have loved them for a long time, and continue to support the product with gushing testimonials and positive reviews.

The $400K seed round Kidblog opened in the spring was completed in June, with California investors Scott Banister, 500 Startups, and Maneesh Arora participating, joined by Minnesota angels Peter Schleider (RKB Capital) and Scott Burns (founder of GovDelivery).

Matt and Dan, who met as college buddies at U of M-Morris, have worked really hard to build something great. Kidblog began as a passion for them, and very much continues to be. It’s only within the past year that they didn’t have to maintain days jobs, too! Matt was a primary school teacher in Eden Prairie for many years, and Dan has worked in IT, most recently at Lawson Software.

Here’s how they describe their creation: “Kidblog is built by teachers, for teachers, so students can get the most out of the writing process. Our mission is to empower teachers to embrace the benefits of the coming digital revolution in education. As students become creators – not just consumers – of information, we recognize the crucial role of teachers as discussion moderators and content curators in the classroom. With Kidblog, teachers monitor and control all activity within their classroom blogging community.”

See the video interview below for more on their summer in the Valley. The duo participated in a large edutech event in San Diego in late June, where Matt said “they received a lot of love” from educators, and were the envy of other edutech startups that exhibited. The two wrote about that experience in this blog post.

During their last month in Mountain View, on August 20, Kidblog released a massive update to its platform. “We’ve listened to our users and made the world’s best student-publishing platform even better with a plethora of new features for teachers and students,” they declared on this blog post: 14 New Kidblog Features You’re Guaranteed to Love.

Stay in touch with Kidblog at its company blog here. Get more great updates at their Facebook page (including posts about their summer in CA).  And follow the company on Twitter @KidblogDotOrg.

Here’s the eight-minute interview I recorded before we had lunch on Wednesday:

I asked a few followup questions of Matt. Here’s that exchange:

Graeme: What’s your stance now on Minnesota vs. California as far as a base of operations?

Matt Hardy: We deliberated carefully about these two locales. Silicon Valley is the heart of the startup universe and access to capital is unparalleled. Minneapolis has its own burgeoning startup culture, and there is developer talent here equal to the Bay Area. Cost of operations in Minnesota will be significantly lower. We can fly to San Francisco four times a month with the cash we save by not paying rent there.

Graeme: Did any existing or potential investors in California tell you they thought you should, or would eventually have to, relocate to the Bay Area?

Matt Hardy: None of our current investors has given us an ultimatum. It was suggested that it will be harder to raise funds with a pre-revenue, consumer web, growth model outside of Silicon Valley. We agree, but we also know that savvy investors can identify great companies anywhere.  Dave McClure of 500 Startups has indicated that some VCs in the Valley can miss opportunities by limiting investments to their own backyard. (Here’s a great recent post Dave wrote that touched on that point — it’s long, but filled with insights for startup founders and investors.) 

Graeme: What was the attitude of your 500 Startups peers to this question, assuming the vast majority of them are based in the Bay Area?

Matt Hardy: Many founders in the Bay Area are gravitating toward San Francisco specifically. As Google and Facebook absorb talent at the southern end of the Peninsula, the hot place to be is the city. The sheer density of startups and investors creates a climate that drives everyone to build products better, bigger, faster. You definitely feel pushed to keep up with other teams doing awesome things. On the other hand, you can also get so caught up in the “cool kid” scene, attending trendy events and worshiping certain entrepreneurial icons, that you forget to put your head down and build something great that people want. We’ve spent the last three months in Mountain View working 16-hour days to build just that — the world’s best student-publishing platform, beloved by teachers around the world.

Best of luck to Matt and Dan as they grow their business! This is a company I have no doubt will continue to make Minnesota proud.

Latest Kidblog Buzz: Summering in Silicon Valley

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Minnesota startup Kidblog has been on a roll, but they’re hardly taking the summer off. If you know the cofounders, Matt Hardy and Dan Flies, you’ve likely heard by now that they were invited by their latest investor, 500 Startups, to spend the summer working in its offices in Mountain View (which I’m told has the best view in town from the 12th floor).  The reason: to continue building out their platform and getting great advice and counsel from the 500 Startups ecosystem.

Matt Hardy & Dan Flies

Matt Hardy & Dan Flies

Kidblog has grown from modest beginnings here in the Twin Cities some years ago — first as a non-profit at a dot-org domain — to nothing less than “the world’s largest education blogging platform.”  Now graduated to a full-on business, the founders have already raised a seed round of something close to $400,000 from a handful of savvy angels in the Valley, including 500 Startups’ Dave McClure.  Kidblog is officially now a portfolio company in 500 Startups’ “Family Tech/Education” category, and will be listed on that page of its web site soon with the new Kidblog logo (above).

The story of this startup all began because Matt Hardy, a grade-school teacher in Eden Prairie and an experienced developer, had a passion — he decided he had to build something better than what he’d found at the time was available to teachers to help their students learn to write through blogging.  Soon joined by his college buddy Dan Flies, also a crackerjack developer, they began finding that more and more teachers, all over, started hearing about the Kidblog platform and were loving what the two had built!  Growth in users started to take off like mad a year or so ago. (See chart – and that’s just up until March of 2012.) Fast forward to today, Kidblog now has something like 1.5 million users and close to 150,000 classrooms worldwide using the platform. And those users are across all fifty states and many foreign countries.

I’m sure the work hours for Matt and Dan have been very long this summer at their temporary new home — undoubtedly building new features and plotting revenue models going forward.  But I trust they are also having fun and meeting tons of great, new contacts — and raising more money to fuel their growth.  A bit of news came this week that they had just launched a new Kidblog Facebook page.  So, all you Minnesota techies out there, “Like” ’em here! — and watch the ongoing updates.  I’m also hearing that a brand-spanking-new web site is about to go live — this time, sporting a dot-com domain.  The non-profit days are in the rear-view mirror!

We wish Matt and Dan all the best as they get an intense education themselves — namely, in how to build a real business from a technology platform that simply and effectively filled a legitimate market need and thus became very well loved. Kidblog is fortunate to be a rising star in one of the hottest startup spaces going right now: “edu-tech.”

I look forward to seeing Matt and Dan again soon, either back here in Minnesota or on a visit to the Valley. And we’ll be sure to get them on as podcast guests after their summer adventure.

The Singularity & Schools

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John W. Moravec, PhD

John W. Moravec, PhD

Even a casual observer can’t help but notice that the pace of change is accelerating, especially when it comes to technology. As we’ve joked here on the Minnov8 Gang in many previous shows, summers used to be pretty dead as far as topics were concerned and we had to pull ones out of our $^&% in order to have stuff to talk about every week.

But no more. Everything is moving faster and faster and, if Ray Kurzweil is right and The Singularity is Near, we need to listen to those who understand it and how it will impact us all — especially when it comes to our children and how they’re being educated to deal with exponential change.

One of the smart folks I read consistently is John Moravec, PhD, who is a, “…co-initiator of the Invisible Learning project; a co-founder of the Horizon Forum, a roundtable on the future of education at all levels; and am the editor of Education Futures (ISSN 1940-0934, http://www.educationfutures.com). I am also a faculty member in the Innovation Studies/Master of Liberal Studies graduate programs at the University of Minnesota.”

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge

Dr. Moravec just wrote this post on his blog and embedded the audio below about his interview with Vernor Vinge [Wikipedia | website], a retired San Diego State University professor of mathematics. Vinge is better known as a five-time Hugo Award-winning science fiction author. His works include True Names, Fast Times at Fairmont High, and Rainbows End. Most importantly, his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity,” argues that accelerating technological change will bring about the end of the human era as we know it, and that the world will become so complex and foreign to human observers, it will be impossible to predict what will happen next.

[media url=”http://www.educationfutures.com/res/educationfutures_vernor_vinge_interview.mp3″ width=”400″ height=”25″ jwplayer=”controlbar=bottom”]

CoCo to Launch Skillshare School

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Whatever you call it — learning, education or training — it is undeniable that gaining skills in this time of accelerating change is critical for each-and-every one of us. Especially as the world undergoes continued and profound global economic and job disruption.

The question is, however, where do you go to gain the skills you need now instead of at the end of some multi-week course delivered via traditional teaching methods? CoCoMSP has engineered a way to get what you need now (my emphasis):

Working with Skillshare.com, CoCo is setting up a community-powered school that focuses on big ideas…and the tools that make those ideas reality.

Beginning in July, CoCo will open its doors on weekday evenings to host classes that are created and taught by experts in the Twin Cities community. Depending on participation, classes will most likely revolve around business, entrepreneurship, technology and creativity.

Skillshare is a unique, crowdsourcing platform that leverages the skill-sets that exist in a community and provides suggested ways instructors can get paid for their efforts. Though classes can be sponsored (e.g., a company like Adobe could sponsor courses on digital publishing) the suggested fee is $50 per 2-hour session.

CoCo says that they are, “...kicking things off all proper-like with Skillshare Fair on Saturday, June 23, a free, day-long unconference that will give everyone a chance to teach, learn and share ideas on business, entrepreneurship, tech, marketing or whatever! Oh, and there will be beer.” Read all about this initiative and their plans here.

Though there have been many attempts at community education in the past by others, they’ve been geared for a wider audience of ‘consumers’ vs. the intent of this new venture between CoCo and Skillshare: a focus on technology, creative and other innovation skills that entrepreneurs, creatives, technologists and visionaries need right now to address today’s needs and, most critically, what’s coming next.

U of MN Paying Professors $500 to Review Open Textbooks

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The University of Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and it’s just been revealed that the University will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, according to this article on Inside HigherEd. Minnesota professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500, with all of the money coming from donor funds.

This is a brilliant move on the part of the University, especially when you consider the accelerating cost of a higher education as well as the increasing demand to for students to have textbooks they can view on multiple digital devices. With this payment motivator for professors, the University is clearly working to align the incentives of professors with those of a concerted effort on the part of higher education institutions to move toward an open textbook and open courseware.

Below is an infographic from OnlineSchools.org that will give you a glimpse in to the drivers behind the open textbook and open source books movement.

…  [Read More…]

“Your Inner Neandertal” DNA Day Talk

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Do you know why some people are 1 to 4% Neandertal? During her talk Lynn Fellman will explain how your Uncle Ned and maybe you have an “Inner Neander” during her art and science talk on April 28th. Lynn’s presentation is one of many talks at Twin City libraries to celebrate National DNA Days.

The discovery of modern day humans with some neandertal DNA came as a surprise to many in the scientific community (especially when you consider that most depictions of neandertals show them as very ugly and that “mixing DNA” meant modern-looking humans back then were having sex with these knuckle-draggers!).

It came as a surprise to me too, not because some other people have this DNA within them, but because I have had my DNA profile created by 23andMe and recently discovered that my genetics contain an estimated 2.5% neandertal DNA. Maybe that’s why I have a thick protruding forehead and think about living in a cave!  😉

“Your Inner Neandertal” is a 30 minute presentation showing how art can uniquely express science concepts and why some of us may find a little “Neander” in our genes. With examples from “At the Crossroads” video and her very cool DNA Portrait traveling show, Lynn will explain how some genes may be a surprising and generous gift from our ancient and now extinct cousins (and this I gotta hear).

Saturday, April 28th at 11 am
Minneapolis Downtown Hennepin Library
This keynote talk for Minneapolis DNA Days
is free and open to the public. Please register (go here).
For more information, parking and directions (go here).

More DNA Days events at area libraries (info here) will cover topics like genetic testing and screening, capturing family health history and tools for collecting the information.

To learn more about multimedia artist Lynn Fellman, someone focused on “illuminating the human genome through art, design and narrative,” check our her site at: FellmanStudio.com

Minnov8 Gang 154 – iPad, iLearn

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Tablets, and specifically the iPad, are being adopted quickly in education.  A leading K-12 education publication, T.H.E. Journal, wrote this article about the top trends in education in 2012: “…education technology will see an increased focus on individualization–from personalized learning environments to digital textbooks designed to connect students to the resources that work best for them. And with a growing number of students using handheld devices to access these learning tools, trend watchers can expect to see big pushes for faster innovation to tie everything together.”

Dr. Lisa Snyder

So does this mean we give tablets to kids and education is magically transformed? Hardly. Fortunately we have one of the thought leaders in this space in our backyard. Her name is Dr. Lisa Snyder, she is the new Lakeville MN School Superintendent, and we were pleased to have her on the show to talk about their new iLearn initiative, whether or not it’s magic, how tablets and tech fit in to it, and her perspectives on the challenges adopting new ways of teaching and learning.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson
Music: Dave Hole & the song “Keep Your Motor Running” from the podsafe Music Alley.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:12:49 — 42.3MB)

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Discussed during the show:

Upcoming Events:

Student Led Technology Conference

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Inver Grove Heights Community Schools has an upcoming event that seems so delightful that I had to bring it to you. It’s likely you know of someone who would really enjoy being enlightened about technology by a bunch of students, or perhaps you’d like to attend too and see how these kids have learned to use all the technology this district uses (you can get a sense in this highlights video).

A guy from the Inver Grove Heights Community Schools Office of Communications, Johnny Germscheid, reached out to us here at Minnov8 to tell us about the event. Its focus is about technology, education and breaking down the communication barrier between children and adults. I’m guessing there will be a lot of learning occurring on both sides (student-as-teacher and adult-as-student).

Students in grades K-12 will be teaching adults how to use iPads, iPods, and other devices and software programs. Conference highlights include:

  • Produce and publish an eBook using rich multimedia content.
  • Create a digital scrapbook to capture family memories.
  • Design a webpage or blog to share your story on the web.
  • Find out how to set up and manage your own social networking profile.
  • Collaborate electronically to edit documents in a more efficient manner.
  • Compose original songs to add flavor to your movies.
  • Learn how to get the most out of that new iPad.

This is the second year Inver Grove Heights Community Schools has offered this Student Led Technology Conference. Turns out the Inver Grove Heights school district (ISD 199) was nationally recognized in Washington DC by the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) this winter for this innovative concept.

The conference is free and open to anyone in the metro, or our entire State for that matter. To check out details about the conference, which takes place on Saturday, February 25th from 8:30am until Noon, visit the event mini-site here.

“Thank You” for the Books for Thai School

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Back in September I wrote a post called, “English Books for Thai School – Can You Help?” and was so pleased people jumped in to help. We collected well over 250 books for the school and delivered them when the students and teachers arrived at the Mall of America at the outset of their time here in Minnesota.

I cannot express enough my thanks for all who helped out:

Lerner Publishing: Kathleen Clarke responded to a blind email request of mine and she put together a big box of brand new, amazingly high quality books, perfect for the English program at Strisuksa school

Meg Knodl

Meg Knodl: As senior librarian in Communications and Community Engagement with Hennepin County (Minn.) Library, Meg had great suggestions on buying surplus books from the library system (a sale was just ending and she connected me with the right folks).

Paul Schroeder

To show the power of social media, I’d placed a plea and link to that Minnov8 post mentioned above on my Facebook wall. Two people responded immediately with a third who joined in:

Paul Schroeder:  A fraternity brother of mine who read about my plea on Facebook responded by collecting several dozen books and even cajoled a friend of his in participating with some novels. These novels, while not perfectly targeted to the students, surprisingly were very welcomed by the teachers!

Sherry Collins: She had several ideas I took advantage of and then recommended a site I’d never heard of, FreeCycle, a kind of “Craigslist for free stuff” and I placed a post in the Minneapolis Group

The very generous donation by Beth Sullivan, volunteer for The Women's Prison Book Project

Beth Sullivan: She responded with 75 classic (and new!) books that were extras from a non-profit she volunteers for, The Women’s Prison Book Project.

As these great volunteers were putting forth such kind efforts to gather books, I’d been interacting with my contact at the school, Lynn Brown. Mentioning the phenomenal work of Project Gutenberg, I asked her to go through the books there and make recommendations and we’d download the books for her (since their internet connections are pretty minimal at the school).

What happened next surprised even me and set me on a course I hadn’t expected. …  [Read More…]