When Cindy Gallop launched MakeLoveNotPorn more than a decade ago, her goal was simple but radical: to separate real-world sex from porn and encourage healthier conversations about intimacy, relationships and consent. Now, she is taking that mission even further with the launch of MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, a global aggregator platform for sex education resources designed for lifelong learning.

MakeLoveNotPorn Academy aims to become a global hub for sex education

The Academy is now live in early-stage beta and aims to become what Gallop describes as “the Google of sex education” — a searchable hub that organizes educational content for parents, teachers, young people and adults.

Why Sex Education Needs Its Own Platform

According to Gallop, one of the biggest problems in sex education today is not the lack of information — it is discoverability.

Search engines often censor or filter sexual health and education content, making it difficult for parents and educators to find reliable, fact-based resources. The result is that many young people end up learning about sex primarily through pornography rather than education.

MakeLoveNotPorn Academy aims to solve this by acting as a human-curated aggregator, where every educator and resource is vetted to ensure that content is:

• Educational
• Fact-based
• Non-judgmental
• Age-appropriate
• Culturally sensitive

The platform allows users to search resources by age group, comfort level and cultural context, creating a structured approach to lifelong sex education.

From MakeLoveNotPorn To MakeLoveNotPorn Academy

This new platform builds on Gallop’s long-running work in the sex tech space. In a previous Tech Trends article, we explored the broader challenges and opportunities in the industry and why investment in sex tech is still often overlooked despite its massive social impact.

That article argued that sex tech is not just about products — it is about education, safety, relationships, consent, and culture. The launch of MakeLoveNotPorn Academy reinforces that argument by positioning sex education as infrastructure, not content.

A Human-Curated Model In An Algorithmic World

One of the most interesting aspects of the Academy is that it deliberately does not rely purely on algorithms.

Instead, the platform uses a 100% human-curation model, where educators and content are reviewed and approved manually. In a digital world dominated by algorithmic recommendation systems, this approach is intentionally different — prioritizing safety, context and educational value over engagement metrics.

The Academy is free to access, and operates on a membership and donation model to support operations and future development.

Sex Education As A Technology Platform

The launch of MakeLoveNotPorn Academy highlights a broader trend within the sex tech industry: the shift from devices and apps toward platforms, education, and digital ecosystems.

Sex tech is increasingly intersecting with:

• EdTech
• Online learning platforms
• Community platforms
• Creator economies
• Digital health
• AI and personalization
• Content aggregation platforms

In that sense, MakeLoveNotPorn Academy is not just a sex education site — it is a knowledge platform, and potentially the first global aggregator dedicated entirely to sex education.

The Future Of Lifelong Sex Education

Sex education has traditionally been treated as something that happens once, in school, often awkwardly and incompletely. MakeLoveNotPorn Academy takes a very different view: sex education should be lifelong.

From early childhood conversations about bodies and boundaries, through teenage years, relationships, consent, communication, pleasure, aging, and long-term relationships — education around intimacy and relationships evolves throughout life.

If Gallop’s vision succeeds, MakeLoveNotPorn Academy could become a central hub for that lifelong learning journey.

And in doing so, it may help reshape not only sex education, but how we think about relationships, communication and intimacy in the digital age.

The post Building the Google of Sex Education appeared first on Tech Trends.

We’re heading over to Dubai for the biggest event in Education Innovation.

#GESF 2018 will see the launch of The Next Billion Prize - awarded to the Ed-Tech project destined to impact the developing world
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Now in its sixth year, the Global Education and Skills Forum is an initiative by the Varkey Foundation. Tech Trends was at last year’s event, and we’re excited to see what’s in store for this year, where the theme is “How do we prepare young people for the world of 2030 and beyond?”

Ed-Tech has the huge potential to change young people’s lives for the better - @sunnyvarkey_
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As that implies, technology and innovation will be a big focus at GESF 2018, as in the Digital Age they must play a big part in the Varkey Foundation’s mission of improving the quality of education for children throughout the world.

Start-ups from all over the world will pitch their EdTech products to a panel of expert judges including Tech Crunch Editor-at-large @mikebutcher
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Hence the fact that a large part of the conference will be dedicated to EdTech. The GESF FutureZone is billed as the largest ever showcase of innovative tech dedicated to education, and will feature some big players in the tech space such as Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra, who will be talking about the potential of emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality and AI to democratize access to learning all over the world.

From digital tests to new subjects, this is how technology will be changing the #classrooms of the future https://t.co/vrRvTlWNBB #GESF pic.twitter.com/HqsHgUkh4t

— Global Ed & Skills (@GESForum) March 11, 2018

The FutureZone will feature an Immersive Learning Showcase, where there will be demonstrations of VR/AR/MR applications and a series of Future Talks exploring how Immersive Tech will transform education, and will also host the launch of The Next Billion Prize – the first prize of its kind that will be awarded to the Ed-Tech project destined to make the biggest impact in the developing world.

Technology and innovation will be a big focus at #GESF 2018
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Dozens of start-ups from all over the world will pitch their innovative products to a panel of expert judges including Tech Crunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher. The winner will receive a US $50,000 prize in addition to expert mentoring and support in implementing and scaling up their solution, conducting pilots in public schools in selected countries for a year to demonstrate proof of concept and access new markets and opportunities.

“In a world where access to quality education is a real issue for millions of children, Ed-Tech has the huge potential to change young people’s lives for the better,” says philanthropist Sunny Varkey, Founder of the Varkey Foundation. “ The FutureZone will showcase the latest innovative Ed-Tech poised to make a real difference in emerging markets and the developing world where problems of accessing education and getting the best quality teaching are most pressing. The event will also help the creation of a community of practice around education technology,” he concludes.

As usual GESF attracts a host of high-profile attendees and there are plenty of familiar names on the speaker list such as Al Gore, Simon Schama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Rory Bremner to name but a few. And if last year’s Global Teacher Prize ceremony – where the trophy was delivered by a parachuting Bear Grylls and winner Maggie MacDonnell was announced from the International Space Station and congratulated by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – is anything to go by, we can expect a few surprises for this year too. The fact that none other than Bill Gates announced sets the tone:

The FutureZone will feature an Immersive Learning Showcase highlighting how VR/AR/MR technologies will transform education
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Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, GESF 2018 Takes place at The Atlantis, The Palm from the 16^th to the 18^th March 2018. Follow the latest right here and on Twitter @techtrends_tech

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter

The post Tech Trends at #GESF 2018 appeared first on Tech Trends.

The Winners of this year’s EdTechXGlobal Awards were just announced, and show how Education Technology is still booming.

The winners of the EdTEchXGlobal Awards were just announced
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Europe’s largest Education Technology Summit, EdTechXEurope, just wrapped up and the winners of the prestigious prize were announced on June 21^st 2017 in London.

“Participation for this year’s awards has been higher than ever with 179 applications from 32 countries showcasing the best and brightest companies in EdTech. The six winners were selected for market impact, production innovation and growth trajectory of their EdTech startup. All the entries from the EdTechXGlobal All Stars Awards highlighted the impressive work being done by EdTech players at a global scale” said Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet, Co-Founder of EdTechXGlobal.

These awards featured companies who demonstrated the most significant innovation in the past year. The 3 winners are:

Lingvist –Language learning program that uses AI to help users learn more quickly and effectively by tailoring materials to their specific needs, based in Estonia

 

Primo – Award-winning educational toy company designed to teach children how to code using a tangible programming language that doesn’t require screens or literacy

 

Thinglink – A dynamic platform from Finland that incorporates 360 storytelling with content from online publishers, with over 2.5 million teachers and students in 190 countries

EdTechXGlobal All Stars Growth Awards also highlighted companies that have shown the most revenue growth momentum over the past 3 years. The panel of international judges also evaluate a variety of additional factors including, scale, innovation and market impact. For each category, the awards showcase the top three start-ups across segmentation, geography and industry trends. This year’s winners included:

Touch Surgery –Touch Surgery is a surgical simulation platform started in the UK which uses cognitive mapping techniques to train surgeons and healthcare professionals using AI and 3D rendering technology to help rehearse steps of the operation on the go.

 

Youscian – Another Finnish start-up this interactive music service with over 60 million users around the world lets you learn, play and create your own music

 

Learnlight – Is a Barcelona-based start-up focusing on the global language and skills training sectors

The six winners received prizes to enable the continued growth of their companies from the partners of the EdTechXGlobal All Stars awards, including boutique technology-focused law firm Kemp Little, global leader in skills development City & Guilds, IE Rockets, a programme powered by IE Business school designed to reinvent higher education in partnership with startups and specialist investment and corporate advisory group IBIS Capital. Finalists have also been awarded the opportunity to join the EdTechXEurope team at worldwide partner events including Slush, SXSWedu, WISE and GETT.

There were 179 applications from 32 countries for the awards
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Here is a list of the 20 finalists from which the winners were chosen: Blinklearning.com (Spain), BridgeU (UK), Busuu (UK), Cialfo Pte. Ltd. (Singapore), Coursedot (Bulgaria), Examus (Russia), Fullstack Academy (USA), Goodwall Org (Switzerland), Growth Tribe (Netherlands), Learnlight (Spain), Linvist (Estonia), Open Classroom (France), Peergrade.io (Denmark), Primo (UK), Snapask.co (Hong Kong), Thinglink (USA), Toppr (India), Touch Surgery (UK), Wonde (UK), Youscian (Finland).

Tech Trends is an official EdTechX Media Partner

Now in its fifth year, EdTechXEurope was part of London EdTech Week, which brought together 6000+ attendees to London in June, and the EdTechXAsia summit will invite 1200+ global thought leaders to Singapore in October.

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Meet The Hottest EdTech Start-Ups of 2017 appeared first on Tech Trends.

In data – like many things in life – what counts is not what you have, but what you do with it.

Employing a data analytics culture is the first step to creating value from data
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By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of data as it did in 2011. But while all this information provides huge opportunities, it is meaningless unless you can use it to make informed decisions. I caught up with James Eiloart from Tableau Software, which makes software that translates these gigantic datasets into meaningful insights for businesses.

Eiloart told me that companies in the private sector would do well to follow some of the approaches to data adopted by schools and universities.

“Several of today’s leading public institutions are implementing data strategies that can teach even the largest, most commercially-minded organisations a few lessons. For example, using visual analytics platforms to gather important insights into student attrition, growth rates and performance.

Here are three approaches to data analytics that he found are making a difference at schools and universities and could perhaps be adapted to other sectors:

James Eiloart, SVP EMEA, Tableau Software

Predicting student problems before they escalate

League tables are an important metric for assessing school performance. But what they cannot measure are the more intangible elements of the school environment. Specifically, there is an increasing focus on student well-being, particularly as today’s students report high levels of stress and mental health issues. Such factors could be taken into account using data to give parents and local authorities a more holistic view of overall performance and student retention rates.

 

At Spokane School District in Washington State (US), a large school of nearly 30,000 students with a higher level of poverty than the state average, administrators wanted to see if they could explain why some students were dropping out of school early and whether they could do a better job reading the early warning signs.

 

By analysing their data, the school discovered a series of tipping points – changes in the student environment that tended to trigger disengagement. “We learned that transitions are critical for kids,” says Steven Gering, Chief Academic Officer. “For example, when kids transition up to the middle school… about 20 percent of our dropouts start showing warning signs. They start having behavior problems or discipline problems or their test scores start dropping. At the transition to high school, about 40 percent of our kids start exhibiting some warning signs that we’d never seen before. Some of our data visualisations are helping catch kids fast and intervene.”

 

Harnessing the power of data with visual analytics, the Spokane School District is able to develop a better understanding of what is happening in their schools and why, giving administrators the power to provide support and guidance to students when it matters most.

Private sector would do well to follow some data approaches adopted by schools and universities.
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Visualising data to manage growth

In the same way that unpredictable growth can be a challenge for businesses, fast growth rates can put a strain on university infrastructure and budgets. With over 50,000 students and 3,000 faculty members, the University of Texas, Austin is a huge organisation, and demand for places is growing. To manage this growth, the university’s operations team uses self-service analytics to track growth and its impact on areas such as human resources, the physical environment, and the university’s finances.

 

The University found that by visualizing their data, they could identify “high-spend” buildings, and hone in on worrying outliers across the campus. Capturing this data for analysis, the operations team was able to find valuable efficiencies across the organisation and eventually discover a rare trend: steady expansion accompanied by shrinking budgets.

The University of Texas found that by visualizing their data, they could identify high-spend buildings
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The journey to data centricity

Employing a data analytics culture is the first step to creating value from data. It can seem daunting to many. In order to make informed decisions and uncover insights into areas like operations, human resources or stakeholder engagement, building a culture around data – where data is at the center of all conversations and decisions are driven by fact rather than gut-feel – is a first and critical step.

 

While university administrators drive a data-centric culture across the campus, students are discovering the importance of visualizing data to enrich their learning experience. At the University of Washington, data analytics is used in multiple departments across the institution.

 

“Our goal is a cultural change around data, where people are able to access the data quickly, ask advanced questions, explore, tell stories and derive insights,” says Anja Canfield-Budde, Director, Enterprise Data and Analytics, UW Information Technology. Administrators currently assess academic data, including major enrollments, student credit hours, degrees awarded and student progress. The team is looking to add budgets, revenue and expenditures, undergraduate applications and admissions data in future.

 

Just as in the private sector, schools and universities today face increased pressure to find efficiencies, amidst growth and budget constraints. The use of data analytics means that teachers and administrators have a more holistic view of how students and the wider institution are performing.

 

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Data enables teachers and administrators to have a more holistic view of students and the wider institutions
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The post Schools Can Teach Businesses a Lesson in Using Big Data appeared first on Tech Trends.

In this article for The Times Higher Education I visit the San Francisco Headquarters of Linden Lab and talk to the creators of Second Life about how Virtual Environments have already been a feature of education for years, and how the commercialisation of VR will bring it to the masses.

Picture this. You’re walking through a chemistry lab, watching as some students happily experiment with hazardous substances while others interact with 3D projections of the molecules as they react to each other. Over in the next room, a trainee nurse triages a stream of patients based on their various symptoms, while across the hall a group goes through a realistic emergency simulation for an oil drilling platform fire.

It might all sound futuristic, but these are real examples from what is now the granddaddy of the virtual world: Second Life
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SL launched in 2003, and 15 years is a very long time in the technology world. So long, in fact, that people are often surprised to find that it’s still around (or, indeed, that it turns a healthy profit for its developers, Linden Lab).

By the time today’s children grow up and enter university, this kind of Virtual enhanced environment could well be commonplace
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Linden Lab is back in the limelight after announcing plans to develop a fully fledged immersive virtual reality platform, code-named Sansar.

I met Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, and he told me that “if you boil down what human beings do, it’s basically creating spaces and sensory experiences, inviting people to share it, and interacting with them”.

One of those user creations was the chemistry lab described above, designed in Second Life by Texas A&M University as a learning aid for its students. In spite of the technical and graphic limitations of the platform, teachers using the facilities found that their students outperformed those learning solely in the real world.

“You can read about something, you can watch a video; but it’s only when you’re doing it that you truly absorb that knowledge,” Altberg says. “In that lab, I can take the molecules, move them around, sit on them; I can pour this liquid into that liquid and see what happens…Nobody reads the manual.The experience is more powerful than video lectures, he says, because it gives learners the ability to socialise with other people in real time. “If I’m at home watching a feed by myself I’m just consuming that content, but if I’m sharing the experience and feedback with others that becomes something entirely different, and much more powerful.”

His vision for Sansar is to make it accessible for anyone to create and share virtual experiences, something that at the moment is impossible for those without advanced technical skills.

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has conducted extensive experiments that show how effective virtual environments can be for optimising the learning experience. He believes that such technology will have a profound effect in education.

“We know, for example, that when a teacher looks at a student, that student has a better chance of actually learning. That makes sense in a one-to-one setting, but in a lecture hall with a hundred students, it is impossible for her to do that. However, when teaching a class in virtual reality, that teacher can employ augmented gaze powers, because the rendering computer in a virtual reality system sends information to all of the students’ systems individually, so the information can be tailored to each person,” he says.

In his experiments, participants never realised that the teacher’s gaze coming from their avatar was not “real”, and as a group, students under that gaze paid closer attention to the teacher’s avatar and retained more information.

By the time today’s children grow up and enter university, this kind of enhanced environment could well be commonplace. For universities just beginning to get their heads around the concept of video lectures and massive open online courses, it might seem like a daunting prospect to build entire virtual worlds and integrate them into their mainstream offering. But if Altberg has his way, universities will be able to not only provide those experiences, but to monetise them, too.

“Take the A&M chemistry lab, for example. They created this amazing, really effective environment and experience in Second Life, but only their students could use it,” he says. “In Sansar, they would be able to put that lab in the marketplace so that another department in another school anywhere in the world can buy it. That school would then have a duplicate of the lab for their own students, which they can customise as appropriate without having to build everything from scratch.”

Sansar launches later this year, so we’ll see how quickly this vision materialises, but Altberg is in no rush. Perhaps unusually in the tech arena, his company is really good at playing the long game. “Second Life’s 13th birthday was in June, so we’re building a platform with the assumption that it will be around for decades.”

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has conducted extensive experiments that show how effective virtual environments can be for optimising the learning experience
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Virtual learning really is coming to universities, via @secondlife creator: @alicebonasio https://t.co/sA8lMGgUZK pic.twitter.com/OGlUb37w4o

— TimesHigherEducation (@timeshighered) July 8, 2016

Read the full article on the Times Higher Education website

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Virtual Learning is Coming To Universities appeared first on Tech Trends.