Two recent tech stories, one involving Facebook not deleting pictures for three years and the other Path sucking all the contact data of its users on their servers, show once again that posting stuff on the Internet is not as straight forward as most people think.

Just because you hit a delete button does not mean that the content is really deleted from the web, it’s not as simple as on your local hard disk. And just because an application did not ask for all your private data in the first place does not mean it cannot get it at a later stage without your approval.

Posting on the Internet is like getting a tattoo. At the moment, it might seem like a great idea, but as soon as you get sober it will be impossible or at least very hard to remove without any trace.

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It was about time for a new KWestions talk, and what better way to start into 2012 than with one of my key issues this year: crowd-funding and its opportunities for education.
As some of you might have noticed, we have started a new series around crowd-funding in education just a few weeks ago, and you can watch the first episodes over at EDUKWEST.

I feel honored that I now had the chance to ask Slava Rubin, co-founder of crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo, a few questions.

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My second prediction for 2012 is about two of the oldest players in the language learning community space, Palabea and italki.

Both disappeared from the main screen about two years ago but none of them ever hit the dead pool though we have to say that Palabea has been very close to a cardiac arrest. But looking at some of the recent posts, I predict that both will attempt to make a comeback in the first half of 2012.

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As I have been pretty busy with working on EDUKWEST up to now, I did not had the time to write down some predictions for 2012. But better late than never! Here is my first look into the future.

Salman Khan is going to make an offer to Henry Reich, the creator of Minute Physics to join the faculty of Khan Academy. Probably, this will happen in the first quarter of 2012, latest by June.

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As the anniversary of this blog is getting closer, I started looking through the archives as I do every year. Sometimes, I am really surprised to find posts I can’t remember to have written and a lot of them bring back memories, of course. What a ride!

One of the first startups I wrote about back in January 2009 was Livemocha. Back then, the language learning community just cracked the 1 million user mark and started to offer its first premium content. It was a travel course in Italian priced at $9.95

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It’s the last week of 2011 and therefore the last number of the week for this year as well! Although my new series is still at an early stage., I hope you’re enjoying the number I pick every week to write a short article around and thus to put it into perspective.

My number this week is 3952 which is the average number of text messages, SMS and MMS, the typical 13 to 17 year old teenage girl writes every month! In other words that sums up to 7 messages per waking our, making it the centerpiece of teenage mobile activity.

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SO LO MO (social, local, mobile) was one of the buzzwords this year and even the topic of LeWeb in Paris.

Smartphone devices and tablets are evolving rapidly in shorter product cycles and the digerati are always after the next big app. For some weeks it was Oink, Kevin Rose’s first product out of Milk, now it is Path, the limited social network that only lets you connect with a small number of close friends and family.

Since I watched a talk with Clay Shirky about how technology changes society at the moment when it becomes technically “boring”, e.g. the most part has access to it and knows how to use it, I have been thinking if we are actually moving too fast and hence only the ones who can keep up with the latest gadget trends benefit from them.

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Sunday is always a great day for me as it’s probably the day when I have the most time to consume media and educate myself reading all the relevant blogs I love but also write one or the other piece myself.

Today, I thought it would be fun to start a new weekly series in which I share an interesting number in online education each Sunday. Based on that definition, I call it my number of the week.

For this week, Dec 12 to 18, my number is 11,143,333 and although it comes from an education startup, it reached me in the most classic way – per snail mail.

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In case I did not thank you personally for your birthday wishes on Facebook, Twitter and Skype – Thank you so much for your support! Because of you, may you be a friend, fan, supporter or sponsor I am able to do what I do here, on EDUKWEST, Deutsch Happen, Big Think and everywhere else.

I truly appreciate it.

Free to be whatever I want. Whatever you do, whatever you say, I know it’s alright.

Kirsten xxx

Yesterday morning I learned that Facebook has apparently acquired Gowalla, one of the location based social networks that compete with Foursquare. While the writing that the startup lost the battle against Foursquare has been on the wall for a while there, some hope remained that Gowalla might have been able to turn its network into a digital travel guide.

Now, you might ask what this has to do with education. Well, first of all I wrote a post on Disrupt Education titled “Don’t Check-In for Yourself – Check-In for your Grand Children” in which I explained why I think those location based services have indeed a role in an educational context. But what if the service did not last that long?

Today I would like to focus on the risk of having all your eggs in one basket or all your photos = memories on one service.

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Audrey Watters wrote an analysis of the current state of business models in education titled “What’s the Future of the Ed-Tech Business (Model)?” on Hack Education that meshes well with my Sunday post on Big Think about Khan Academy and the potential shift towards free education.

Audrey bases her post on the example of Rosetta Stone as she had the possibility to talk to CEO Tom Adams (former class mate of hers) during the Startup Weekend EDU in Washington. The language learning market is of course a very tricky and crowded one compared to rising verticals like math education.

What tickled my fancy are the open questions Audrey leaves us with like the following at the end of her post:

Sell to schools? Sell to teachers? Sell to students? And in any of those education markets, how do you compete with “free” — even when what’s offered that way is actually of inferior quality? Will learners demand high quality ed-tech? Will they (be able to) pay for it?

So, here are my thoughts on future business models in education.

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