Coursekit is Now Lore
When we first conceived Coursekit, we set out to build the perfect supplement to a college course: a product that combines world-class course management tools with the best of social networking. We’ve since come a long way.
It’s been a remarkable first semester. In December 2011, when we first launched the product, it was being piloted at 30 schools. Now, one semester later, it’s in use by courses at over 600 institutions.
As students and instructors engage on the platform, we’ve seen it used in ways we’d never expected. Our vision is to build the platform for learning—a global network of students, educators, and content. We’ve learned that it isn’t just about courses, it’s about people.
Today, I’m very excited to announce that we’re rebranding as Lore; a new name and visual identity that better reflect our ambitions. Lore means knowledge shared between people. The word is short and elegant, but waiting to be filled with meaning.
Our Creative Director, Aaron Carámbula, has done a masterful job designing the new visual mark for Lore. His remarks:
“We took inspiration from publishing imprints—traditional platforms for knowledge sharing—and their subtle, compact marks on the spines of books. The Lore mark represents our belief in challenging norms—a square peg in a round hole. With its stacked letters, it’s about building on what we have.”
While the current product remains unchanged for now, we’ve created lore.com/story to explain the transition and a site to explain our design process.
As we take on this new identity, I’m also thrilled to welcome Peter Thiel as an investor through the Founders Fund. He’s using Lore firsthand in his Stanford course, Startup, this quarter.
A name, and the larger brand, is a vessel. With Lore, we have a new vessel; a bigger, stronger one. Now we have to fill it. Join us.
Amazing job by the whole team.
Welcome Matt!
I’m extremely excited to welcome Matt Delbridge to the Coursekit team as our third designer. Matt joins us from Pentagram, where he was an intern. Before that, he graduated from CCA in December, and had stints at Apple and MINE.
You get the sense when you meet Matt that he’s going to be an all star in whatever he puts his mind to. I can’t wait to work with him.
— Joe
On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit. When the astronauts—Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders—took their first photographic glimpses of Earth, Lovell exclaimed: “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.”
This image of Earthrise endures as one of the most memorable space images of all time, inspiring the kind of awe that makes one lament the grim future of space exploration.
Chinese artist Lu Xinjian’s City DNA paintings, abstracting the shape of cities from Google Earth aerial images – a fine addition to the map as art.
Well said.
Name Explore
Location New YorkWhen Benjamin Franklin founded the first subscription library in America, he believed that access to knowledge was the key to creativity, innovation, and success. Today, the web is our library, and Coursekit has teamed up with Maria Popova to find the internet’s most relevant and interesting information and synthesize it into knowledge and insight. From TED talks, to vintage maps, to psychology studies, to quotes from favorite books, Explore is a guide through the landscape of the mind.
This is one of our tenets at Coursekit.
“Art and artists are very much misunderstood in our culture… Because we have this ethic of purpose and utility, and art is not useful in a very direct way. And I think that, also, our concept of artists is that they’re lazy somehow and that they don’t want to work hard… In fact, what I discovered in working with artists is that most artists, by and large, are not doing it because they want to be the next Andy Warhol — they’re doing it at huge personal expense and struggling to keep a practice going while trying to figure out how to make ends meet. They’re not making art because they want to make money, they make art because they have something to say that they want to share with the world.”—
20x200 founder Jen Bekman, one of the Internet’s pioneering creative entrepreneurs, on Design Matters – the entire interview is very much worth a listen.
Introducing Explore
Our goal with Coursekit is to reshape education for the Internet Age. We exist to restore the sense of magic that comes with learning something new. Where does knowledge come from and how do people share it? That’s the elusive question we’re trying to answer.
In that spirit, we’re introducing Explore. Explore is about the evolving definition, process, and promise of learning. It’s a cross-disciplinary lens on what stimulates, what enriches, and what matters—an intellectual and creative incubator for cultivating your interests, and a place to discover things you didn’t know you were interested in, until you are.
Explore is edited by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings. As perhaps the web’s best curator of “interestingness,” Maria’s work embodies our ambitions. We’re absolutely delighted and honored to have her on our team.
— Joe
Welcome to Explore, a Coursekit project edited by Maria Popova.
When Benjamin Franklin founded the first subscription library in America, he had a vision for democratizing knowledge by making “the common tradesman and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” Access to knowledge, he believed, was the key to creativity, innovation, and success in life.
Today, the web is our library, with information more readily available than ever before. But finding the most interesting, most relevant, most meaningful information and synthesizing it into knowledge and insight is an increasingly challenging task, yet one of growing urgency and importance.
Explore embodies Coursekit’s aspiration to reshape education in the Information Age and aims to distill the wealth of information available to us today – online and off – into a portal of discovery for meaningful knowledge, powered by cross-disciplinary curiosity.
From TED talks to vintage maps to psychology studies to quotes from favorite books, and just about everything in between, Explore will guide you through the landscape of the mind as we explore the evolving architecture of knowledge together.
Enjoy and explore.
(via loreblog)
“Cohen’s eight person start-up [Coursekit] is just one of hundreds of start-ups choosing New York City’s ‘Silicon Alley’ over its older California cousin.Total technology employment in New York City increased 28 percent from 2005 to 2010, and now accounts for more than 90,000 workers at more than 7,100 high tech establishments, according to the New York City government Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). Overall private sector employment in New York rose 3.4 percent during the same period.”—
Tech Start-Ups Choosing New York City Over Silicon Valley (CNBC)
I love this city.
