Will @schooX do for school-level educators what Mendeley does for academics?
SchooX is just starting out and it’s not yet clear what tricks it has up its sleeve to support learning, teaching, discovery and accreditation — or whether it will be “just another social network” with a skew towards education. Or as they put it, in one of my least favourite words, edutainment.
What’s interesting is that SchooX seems to be completely agnostic (or more accurately, silent) about whether they expect the network to be used within formal education settings, alongside them, or instead of them. There seem to be opportunities for independent course creators, and maybe tutors (though it’s hard to see how that will work since there is no control over the pedagogical model of the courses), but these aren’t fully fleshed out yet.
They said Mendeley was Last.fm for academics and researchers. Will SchooX be Mendeley for school educators?
Opinions and clarifications welcome!
What is schooX
In 5 Words
A cool Social Edutainment Network!
In 125 Words
SchooX offers a pleasant way to discover and transform information to knowledge. It offers a social environment where anyone can discover, collect and review knowledge resources of any
kind. Users who know what’s what can even create online courses and promote them. By using resources of different kinds (web pages, videos, blogs, wikis, online books, documents, online
courses) users can knuckle down to any subject they want and even certify their knowledge. On schooX different kinds of resources are supported with special features according to their format.
Online courses, for example, are supported by an internal Learning Management Module capable of maintaining the users learning process. SchooX is great and is for everyone! On schooX
everyone can be a Discoverer, Collector, Reviewer, Learner or Instructor.
Our Mission
To help people learn, empower their qualifications and improve their lives in the most possible pleasant way.
And by the way, we have just launched and are on beta … so don’t be austere, a lot of features and improvements are in the pipeline ☻
Agile Learning 
@agilelearn We appreciate your thoughts and opinion about schooX. First, regarding the word edutainment it was chosen spontaneously when we read a paper by Filomena Cutugno from Indiana University South Bend in which we found a very interesting definition of the Internet “The Internet is a wonderful place of Entertainment and Education”. Our immediate response was “That’s why it needs a Social Edutainment Network”. Being at that time at the last phase of schooX we realized that we had several characteristics in common with some of the aspects of edutainment as they are given in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edutainment | Theories).
Regarding our expectations about the usage of schooX our intention is to offer at first a network which can be used alongside of formal education and let the community decide whether it will later on also be used within more formal education settings. In the coming months we are going to add some very interesting and innovative features which will allow the usage of schooX in either ways. We want to offer our members a powerful learning and information management tool which will implicitly lead to a strong learning community even when used for personal use. Members will be able to keep all their valuable content (videos, articles, etc) on one place and browse it from there in a very pleasant and innovative way (…let us surprise you). But they will also be able to organize and bundle their content for educational purposes (e.g. creating private courses)… fast … we mean, really fast … just in case they want to knuckle down on something. Of course they will be able to share those courses (e.g. public courses) with the community. So there are no restrictions on how one can use schooX. Professional tutors and educators are of course welcome to create courses for a close group of learners or for the whole community.
Education is a very sensitive personal and social process. The rules and expectations on how this process should take place are deeply in our nature as human beings. The Internet has influenced a lot of personal and social activities and some expect the same to happen for education. Even though we have seen a lot of commercial trials and academic experiments, we haven’t really seen any serious influence or change yet. Most users learn as they used to learn and use the Internet to find resources and some valuable answers to their questions. With schooX we want to approach this process step by step and evolve it according to the feedback of our community. We’d like to be the first to achieve a real breakthrough on how the Internet can be used to gain knowledge and learn.
Kind Regards,
Elef Ntouanoglou
Co-founder of schooX.com