Some people are taking the idea a little further however.

Just look at Estonia, the tiny Eastern European nation (population 1.3 million), where a new project is being put in place with the ambition of getting every six year old to learn coding at school.

The “ProgeTiiger” scheme, according to reports, will begin pilots this year with the ambition of getting school kids of all ages to start coding. There’s no suggestion yet that the classes will be mandatory, but the organization behind the move the Tiger Leap Foundation, says it wants to produce more creative computer users.

“The first e-courses are meant for primary school teachers and they will take place at the educational portal http://www.koolielu.ee (Koolielu is Estonian for “school life”) that the Foundation maintains,” the group’s head of training, Ave Lauringson, told me. ”We expect about 30 teachers to take part in the first course. So we are just taking our first steps now, but we intend to expand the program significantly.”

The idea — which is being developed with funding from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research — is that children in grades 1-4 will take coding classes as part of their normal curriculum. After that, they can join extracurricular “coding clubs”, explained Lauringson. The foundation itself was developed by current Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and education minister Jaak Aaviksoo in the late 1990s, with the aim of bringing internet connections to all schools in the country.

Given those credentials, it’s clear that while Tiger Leap has no concrete agreement to expand the pilot into a mandatory system, it’s clearly a stepping stone to a larger national program.

If it seems ambitious, you must understand the context. Not only do many Western education systems fail to teach computer science to any meaningful degree — the paucity of teaching in Britain left Eric Schmidt “flabbergasted”, for example — but Estonia is already a hotbed of technical talent. There are dozens of big companies that use Estonian engineers and whole startups (Skype being the most famous example) whose products were built on the back of Estonian skills.

So how do you inculcate an entire nation like that? It’s partially possible because Estonia is a small country, but also because it’s made some decisions along the way to prioritize technical literacy.

Since gaining its independence from Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, its politicians and business leaders have followed a deliberate, direct path to try and build the country into a technologically-advanced nation.

These days most of Estonia’s government services are run online, most of its banking is done online, and there’s a significant corps of programmers who have built some really important companies. It’s working, and Tiger Leap’s idea is clearly to try and muscle that advantage along even further.

How do other countries replicate that?

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It’s a bit difficult to describe exactly what Dabble does in a few words. In essence, it aggregates, curates and sells one-off in-person classes on virtually any topic. Anyone can teach a class if they follow a few rules. Every class has to be aimed at the relative novice. You need to have a reasonable knowledge of the topic you’re teaching, but you don’t have to be a professional in the field – one Dabble instructor is an architect by day who teaches pasta-making classes on the side. And finally, each class costs only $20, though instructors can charge additional materials fees.

For a prospective teacher, there’s really no barrier for entry. You don’t need a classroom. Classes can be held in a park, at the beach, in a coffee shop or even your garage. Dabble also recruits businesses to host classes for its teachers if they don’t have access to the proper space. While Dabble approves every class, its requirements are minimal. It looks for experience and organization skills when selecting initial class submissions, but the few bad instructors that make the initial cut are eventually weeded out through its reviews process, CEO and co-founder Erin Hopmann told me during a recent interview.

Jessica Lybeck and Erin Hopmann

As for customers, Hopmann said that Dabble has a particular target in mind: the time-pressed, commitment-phobe with a wide range of interests. That description certainly fits Hopmann and fellow co-founder Jessica Lybeck. Since college the two former marketing consultants have been on a quest to expand their horizons, Hopmann said, but often hit logistical obstacles to learning new skills.

Taking a two-hour class on printmaking or a half-day workshop on the basic phrases of conversational French was never an option, Hopmann said. Instead, those classes were 6 to 8 week commitments coupled with hefty tuition bills. So Hopmann and Lybeck founded Dabble as means for time-pressed professionals to discover new interests on the cheap. “We want to be the Craigslist for classes,” Hopmann said.

There are a lot similarities between Dabble and New York-based startup Skillshare, though the latter is more focused on building a largely unregulated online marketplace that pairs teachers and students. Dabble approves every class that goes into its portal. And while many of Skillshare’s teachers tackle some pretty intense topics, ranging from Web coding to business development, Dabble — as its name implies — skews more toward lighter subjects and casual learning.

Growing one class at a time

Dabble launched in May of 2011 in Chicago and recently expanded into Denver and Milwaukee. It’s now scheduling about 20-25 classes a week. Each class ranges in size between 5-50 students depending on the interest and the level of one-on-one attention required between teacher and pupil. Dabble takes half of the $20 registration free.

Taking in $10 a student may not seem like much if you’re a prospective teacher, but Dabble has had no trouble finding interested instructors, according to COO John Gels. The number of new class submissions is doubling every month, he said. Dabble feels one of its missions is to promote the “democratization” of classes – letting anyone with knowledge instruct as well letting anyone with interest learn – but “a lot of people with a significant amount of domain expertise are showing up to teach,” Gels said.

While there are plenty of teachers like the pasta-making architect, Dabble is seeing caterers local chefs teach cooking classes and even Chicago’s famous comedy troupe Second City offer improvisation workshops. Hopmann said professionals are starting to look to Dabble as a marketing and promotion tool, using it drum up interest for their services or recruit new students for their more in-depth classes.

Dabble is even trying to recruit Chicago’s controversial mayor Rahm Emanuel to teach a class on … well, any topic he wants … with all proceeds going to charity. A former White House chief of staff, Congressman and Democratic Party enforcer Emanuel is easily an expert in politics and government, though the topics the Chicagoist blog suggested Emanuel teach are certainly more colorful.

Having recently taken up residence in Chicago’s new incubator-slash-kibbutz Catapult, Dabble is in its early stages. So far, it’s raised only $145,000 in seed funding from angel investors, friends and family, but it is working on its Series A funding round. Once it gets more cash, it plans to scale big, targeting 50 new cities for its service.

The startup’s immediate next step, however, is to expand to the tech mecca of San Francisco, where it began soliciting instructors and class ideas earlier this year. “We have enough classes submitted to launch in San Francisco, but given resources and lack of automation on the admin side of the website, we’ve held off the launch a bit more,” Hopmann said. “Stay tuned, though. Not much longer.”

Get your welding masks and pickling jars ready, Bay Area.

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Dabble only offered classes aimed at beginners. In fact, Dabble has begun offering”201″ classes for students who already have rudimentary knowledge on a particular topic and plans to expand into more advanced formats in the future.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Losevsky Photo and Video

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Playfish co-founders Shukri Shammas and Sami Lababidi founded London-based Mindshapes together with David Begg, Chrisian Dorffer and Tareq Naqib in 2010 to make interactive education games for kids on multiple platforms.

Now it is taking money led by Index Ventures together with Richmond Park Partners and previous backers.

The company last took a $5 million first investment round in November 2011. It did not say why it is taking the second investment, six months later.

So far, Mindshapes has developed Magic Town, a virtual world that launched on web on May 16 and includes 70 stories from 15 children’s book publishers including Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Penguin. The service plans to launch on iOS this summer and include 200 stories by year’s end.

The outfit also wants to target elder users, with an upcoming learning game, Language City London, aimed at the 16-to-30 market.

“Users will also be able to buy access to premium chapters based on licensed entertainment brands,” according to the company.

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Apple has updated the iBooks app, now called iBooks 2, and with that comes a whole new category on the iBookstore for textbooks with material from the big publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as well as other authors who want to sell their textbooks and learning tools there. And the really killer part of this is the easy publishing tool, iBooks Author, which is free and replicates an iWork experience, like building a presentation in Keynote, into a click-and-drag method of building a textbook. It’s not just for compiling material from scratch though; it’s very clearly tailored for already published material to be imported and easily formatted as an iBook.

But what you make with the authoring tool isn’t really a textbook. It’s an interactive learning experience. You have text, of course, but you can drag in image galleries, embed videos, 3D models, presentations and slideshows. You can touch and swipe and watch instead of just reading and taking notes. (If I was in high school today, I might actually find chemistry class as interesting as history with these very tangible, engaging tools.)

When students are interacting with these books, they can also touch to highlight, look up information, search, take notes in the margins and compile instant flashcards for studying. You can do all that with a physical book, but not with a couple of touches and swipes.

Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling, which makes similar digital interactive textbooks, but for the higher education market, says this is the reason his company doesn’t call them textbooks. They use the term “smartbooks.”

The traditional textbook “is going to have to go away,” he said in an interview last week. “The future of publishing is learning software and analytics and feedback and rich technology.”

For a generation of students that grew up using the web and social networks and is addicted to a constant stream of information, the interactive part is what makes learning something that grabs students’ attention. The feedback part is also really important. Apple hits that note with its study guides and review sections at the end of iBooks chapters.  Along with the standard questions, there comes the instant feedback of answers, so the learning process is immediate.

Joining a crowded field

Apple is certainly not the only company working on interactive textbooks or a digital education platform. Kno is one of the largest providers of textbooks for the iPad. Chegg just introduced a really nice e-book reader for a variety of platforms, and Inkling has been making interactive textbooks (and cookbooks) like this for a while — but has a number of books that’s only in the triple digits. What Apple is offering is a platform that lets anyone make these interactive books. There are already 20,000 textbooks on the iBookstore. Adding tools and important partners is guaranteed to increase that number.

So despite not being first, Apple is a force to be reckoned with in whatever industry it directs its focus on. And in this case, I think what they want, rather than disrupt the whole industry a la music and video content, is to be an assistant. The authoring tool, the distribution platform, can help drag the biggest players of a very old-school industry into the present (and hopefully, future).

And more importantly, what Apple is offering is a way to change the conversation about textbooks and bring that dialogue into the mainstream. We don’t know a lot of things yet: how many school districts can afford hundreds or thousands of iPads or how the textbook publishing industry at large will react. But we do know one thing: textbooks don’t have to be physical, expensive, static or boring.

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Become an iOS app developer

Quite possibly the most watched and most popular series on iTunes U, Stanford University programming series “CS 193P“ covers iOS development. Originally titled “iPhone Application Programming” when launched in 2008 and taught by Apple employees Alan Cannistraro and Paul Marcos, this series of lectures has kept up to date with changes in iOS development, and its latest rendition, “Developing Apps for iOS” is very well-rounded. Adding to this course’s value are the slides and assignments also made available online by Stanford.

See through a different lens

If you’re looking for artistic inspiration, consider MIT’s “Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry.” While the creator of this series of eight lectures could stand to take some lessons in videography, the discussions and dialogue are well worth the time invested in watching them. National Geographic also has a great series called “Masters of Photography” that takes you behind the scenes of some of their amazing projects. If you’re looking for something a little more technical that will help you with post-production editing with Photoshop, consider Jason Welsh’s “Photoshop CS5” from Michigan’s MI Learning.

Get philosophical

You can get a good foundation by attending Oxford University’s four-part “Philosophy for Beginners,”  then dive right into the big questions about life, the universe and everything with Yale’s Professor Shelly Kagan in “Death.” If you’re wanting something a little more practical, though, then go back to Oxford for the twelve part “Critical Reasoning for Beginners.”  Finally, a little off the beaten path of philosophy, and more grounded in mathematical logic, consider a refresher course in “Probability and Statistics” with Diane Kiernan.

Geek out on physics

MIT’s Professor Walter Lewin has a series of physics lectures called “Physics I: Classical Mechanics” that is on par with PBS’s classic Julius Sumner Miller and even the more recognizable Bill Nye the Science Guy. In fact, Professor Lewin’s lectures have been viewed over 5 million times by people all over the world. The big draw online has been his live demonstrations, including one experiment involving a human pendulum. Unfortunately ,Professor Lewin gave his final ‘performance’ earlier this year in lecture hall 26-100. But his book For the love of Physics is available in the iBookstore as both an eBook and audiobook, and of course his previous lectures are still available on iTunes U.

Explore the universe

The Michigan State University Department of Physics hosts a series of open lectures titled “Saturday Morning Physics” that has become quite popular online.  If you’re a fan of the Science Channel’s “Through the Wormhole” with Morgan Freeman or “Wonders of the Universe” with Brian Cox (both series available on iTunes), then you definitely need to check out Ted Bergin’s ”How Did Earth Get Its Water.”  The University of California has also put together a well-rounded series called “Astronomy.”

My list barely scratches the surface of what’s available on iTunes U.  And accessing the content couldn’t be easier, since you subscribe to iTunes University courses in the same way as you subscribe to podcasts. So take a look, you just might learn something.

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The latest developments with Knoodle include:

• You can now add surveys, quizzes, video and audio on the fly at the time you create a presentation, instead of toggling to another screen to pull them in.
• The ability to drag-and-drop multiple files for easy bulk uploading.
• The ability to fine-tune slide syncing: If you have the time code, you can type in the exact time you want a slide to appear in your video or your audio track.
• A new feature to manage your presentations so you can see all the presentations you’ve created in a single viewing window to help streamline the editing and publishing process.

According to the Knoodle folks, today’s workplace looks like the Web: social, integrated and on-demand. There is an increasing need for fast knowledge sharing, particularly with the rise of virtual companies. And learning within virtual teams must come from everyone regardless of location, role or function. Everyone has the responsibility to be both teacher and learner. The demand from virtual companies is that the tools they use resemble social tools: they are more familiar and easier to adopt and use. The challenge when using a holistic, social approach to knowledge sharing and information flow, within a virtual or dispersed team in particular, is to manage the chaos. Tools must be pervasive, organized, and offer some measure of control and preferably with a dashboard view.

So where does Knoodle fit in to this concept of holistic, social learning? It’s easy to implement, even for people who are not professional producers of presentations. You can create content on the fly or take pre-existing content, including slides, audio, graphics and text, straight into the Knoodle application. If everyone can capture their knowledge from the field, from their home offices, from their cubicles, and make it readily available to the rest of the team, there is less “silo-ing” of information and learning.

Pricing is flexible and based on customer needs and required hours per month in terms of viewing of presentations. You can ramp up your plan or downgrade it based on actual usage. If you export your video presentations, viewing is done out of the Knoodle system so doesn’t count against your subscription plan.

How are you capturing knowledge within your organization to foster social learning?

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My students come to class straight from their jobs at a variety Silicon Valley firms large and small. They are required to do team projects, and  much of the team work is virtual. They tell me they have the following requirements for collaboration tools:

• Privacy. While they are interested in sharing examples from work, they don’t want these examples available publicly.
• Threaded/searchable Q&A with the answers coming from both students and faculty.
• Ability to share relevant links and files for commentary. Basically Facebook for the classroom.
• A simple, clear calendar with readings and due dates available at a glance (in other words, project management tools).

And there’s also my additional requirement: On-line quizzes with a gradebook that supports the U.S. regulations for educational privacy.

While all faculty at my university have access to Angel (a Blackboard course management system), in my classes, I’m happy to beta-test student-built tools, and I find especially interesting the simplicity offered by these solutions. An effective collaboration application is not about how many features the tool has — it’s about getting the task done.

Acceledge

This term I used Acceledge, founded by one of my students, as my main course management tool instead of Angel. It’s a custom-built tool, based on the open-source Moodle learning platform. Its simplicity is what drew me to say “yes” to the trial. Because of the customizations added on top of the Moodle base, the students only saw the features they told me they needed — there was no wiki, and no deep detail around each topic.

Piazza

Pooja Nath, Founder and CEO of Piazza, was still an MBA student at Stanford when she approached me two years ago about trying her Q&A tool. From the Piazza site:

I started Piazza so every student can have that opportunity to learn from her classmates. Whether she’s too shy to ask, whether she’s working alone in her dorm room, or whether her few friends in her class don’t know the answer either.

I want Piazza to be a remedy for students who are not given the intellectual space, freedom, or support to fulfill their educational potential and desire for learning. And I want Piazza to empower instructors to have a positive, personal impact on more students.

Piazza is designed to connect students, TAs, and professors so every student can get help when she needs it — even at 2AM.

Again, the simplicity and student-focus is what made me say “yes” to the trial. The only repeat complaint I’ve had from students is about the quality of some the questions posted by their classmates and the fact that Piazza is not an integral part of the overall course management tool. Both my students and I find huge benefit in the control they have over when and how they see questions.

Coursekit

The University of Pennsylvania is apparently feeling the same push by students to take control of their collaboration space. Coursekit is the result of frustration on the part of Wharton undergraduate Joseph Cohen (cofounder & CEO). From the Coursekit site:

We started Coursekit out of frustration with existing school software.

We’ve re-imagined what a class should look like online. We give instructors and students amazingly designed tools to manage their courses — gradebook, calendaring, file management — and we make it unbelievably easy to interact with one another.

We believe that there’s a lot more to class than lecture. Post links, videos, files. Start discussions. Write a blog post. Ask about an assignment. Classes are meant to be social, but they rarely are. We’re changing that.

There is much to be learned from the priorities of students with multiple courses (projects) functioning in self-managing teams. They aren’t looking for bells and whistles; they are looking to simplify and be effective. We can all learn from these students’ experiences and perspectives: Translate academic team project to basic team work, gradebook to performance appraisal, and you have a web working environment with needs similar to those of most organizations.

Take the students’ perspective for the moment — frankly, we are all students in this quickly-changing environment — how could simplification enhance your projects? What is the minimum viable product for your setting?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Harry Wood

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While those in traditional fields may pursue study and qualifications in order to advance their careers and earning potential, and see PD as both a reward and a motivator, for those in working in technology and innovation, the pathways for — and value of — professional development aren’t so clear-cut.

And for team leaders seeking to attract and motivate truly innovative staff, the role of PD in employee motivation and satisfaction can be very fuzzy.

In a recent interview, I asked a mobile developer how he keeps his skills at the top of his field. He laughed and said, “Coming to work is a good start!” In this industry, at least, the progress is being made — and knowledge is most quickly gained — in startups and innovative businesses, not in universities.

That explains why younger players entering the industry today face such fierce competition. There are plenty of people already working in innovative technology roles on the strength of experience and talent, rather than qualifications. As the technology sector gains maturity, employers now have the luxury of valuing people with proven experience (with or without formal qualifications) over fresh graduates. And few employers will bother speaking to a candidate who hasn’t learned or created anything new since they finished formal study.

The freshly released Startup Genome Project report corroborates the value of non-school learning. The research found “Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth” than those that don’t. No mention is made of the value of formal qualifications as a basis for startup success.

Your potential team members don’t want to see professional development listed as an employment benefit in their contracts; they choose jobs on the basis of how much the roles themselves will let them learn. The risky thrill of experimenting to create world-first products and take them successfully to market is a core appeal for those who work in innovative technology.

For this reason, proven expertise is usually more respected than qualifications by peers and colleagues. In innovative development, team members expect their peers to be able to walk the talk — for the good of the team, the project itself, and the individual’s own on-the-job PD. That motivates team members to seek productive, challenging, high-profile projects with great teams that they can learn from, rather than formal qualifications. Similarly, successful team leaders know that the bottom line depends entirely on whether team members can deliver, so rewards and respect naturally flow from successful experimentation, not traditional education.

Not surprisingly, the terms on which these types of team members are engaged aren’t those that appeal to those opting to work in more staid, traditional fields. The innovators thrive on possibility, the thrill of pushing boundaries, and the chance to have an impact. Offer to foot the bill for an MBA, and you’ll likely get a lot of blank stares. Employers may expect staff to walk the talk, but team members, too, judge employer credibility in terms of on-the-job projects, tasks, and teams. They want:

• roles that effectively amount to paid experimentation, perhaps through the opportunity to participate in rapid prototyping projects where team members can focus on mastering a new skill or its application in a certain environment
• to attend industry events that combine seminars with networking events — providing access to the “thought leadership” and “mentoring” mentioned in the Startup Genome report
• the ability to contact and engage with other specialists outside the organization, on the organization’s time and, potentially, money.

Rather than being an after-hours, formal, institutionalized proposition, successful PD in innovative teams is holistic and always-on. Instead of tracking the team member’s achievement on the basis of grades, leaders are more likely to assess the ROI on what may be a guesstimated investment in PD by looking at individuals’ influences on company revenues and profits. And team leaders who understand these motivations can consistently attract and manage good innovators.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user madame_min.

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Inkling is one of those that had a very slick website apparently waiting to go, since its updated site design went live shortly following the announcement, complete with mock-ups of the new iPad running its yet-to-be-released software. And Inkling covers a blind spot in Jobs’ iPad announcement, one which may have been created by a McGraw-Hill faux pas: education.

Billing itself as “the world’s first end-to-end platform for mobile learning content,” Inkling aims to go beyond the traditional textbook before traditional textbook availability has even really been discussed as an iPad advantage. As of yet, details about what that means for an actual distribution product aren’t that clear, though there are some promising suggestions about what it could mean.

First of all, there’s interactivity. It may seem like an obvious detail, but truly interactive independent learning education material is actually quite hard to come by. I can count on zero fingers how many times I cracked the seal on the CD cases that came bundled with my university textbooks which promised interactivity through software applications.

I think the iPad has a better chance at accomplishing true interactivity for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is the potential for sharing learning experiences between iPad devices. As Inkling’s site points out, learners and educators will be able to network using the devices and share what they’re working on. Research and comparing notes could actually take place with an ongoing element of synthesis, instead of via periodic check-ins, which could change the way we learn in a fundamental sense.

Right now, Inkling is mostly vague promises about a fairly Utopian view of a futuristic educational environment in which every student and every educator has an iPad, all of which can be connected. The scenario effectively eliminates the need for paper textbooks, and promotes collaborative work and healthy competition between students. I’m not naive enough to imagine that this is how things will look in June, or even in a few years following the iPad’s release, but I am glad to see people thinking this way.

If I’d had an iPad when I was a student, I probably would’ve paid a lot more attention to my studies. I definitely would’ve been more organized, since I wouldn’t have been using a single padfolio to organize all of my course notes. And I might’ve become a better group learner and worker, which would definitely be beneficial in the long run. I may not be sure about how useful the iPad is for everyday use, but it definitely has a future in education, so long as Apple makes a concerted effort to cultivate that future.

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Naturally, as a contributor to this blog, my first thought was to upgrade from iPhoto to Aperture. The problem is, where do I turn to learn how to use all of Aperture’s features? The One to One program would be perfect for me, but that’s no longer an option unless I purchase a new computer from Apple.

For those of you who may have forgotten, the old One to One program cost $99 and included weekly one hour (read: one academic hour, which actually means 50 minutes) sessions for an entire year. Customers could learn about a wide variety of topics, from how to use a Mac, to uploading photos to MobileMe, to editing images in Aperture.

In order to provide an alternative for those like me who’ve been hung out to dry, I’ve done my best gathering resources for people who like a little guidance when learning new software. Fortunately, Aperture is designed so that newcomers can easily figure out how to import photos from a memory card and organize them into projects, but anything more advanced may require additional patience and resources.

• Apple tutorials podcast
• Quick Tips with Richard Harrington podcast
• Apple’s Aperture forum
• Apple’s Exploring Aperture book
• Amazon’s Aperture 4+ star books
• Retail workshops – Don’t expect much unless you live close to a major store. Those in Northern California have two options: San Francisco and Corte Madera.

Let us know about any other good resources you’ve come across for learning Aperture.

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