The edWeb began with a vision to create a better way for people in education — teachers, professors, librarians, administrators, and other education professionals — to connect and share information. We wondered whether we could take some of the concepts popularized by social networking sites and adapt them in a way that enabled educators to use them for professional purposes — creating and sharing content, networking, collaborating.

Recognizing that educators are associated with multiple organizations and have personal connections with potentially hundreds of other educators, the edWeb provides a central hub where our members can interact with all the people they know and all the groups they are affiliated with in the education world. Not only is this great for individuals, it is a very useful new tool for groups, associations, and organizations.

Many education-related organizations already have web sites, listservs, and discussion forums, but they lack the connectivity and community that social networking tools provide. By providing those new tools and combining them with the functionality of listservs and discussion forums, we enable education groups to have instantaneous, interactive communications with their membership and among their membership.

Besides all this functionality we also wanted to create a site that was fun, easy-to-use and would allow members to not only connect with their friends, but to make new professional connections that turned into friendships.

There were two final considerations for creating the edWeb: we wanted it to be private, exclusively for the use of professionals in the education field — to cut through the noise and chatter that exist on public sites and to keep it focused purely on the needs of instructors, librarians, administrators and staff members. And we wanted it to be free. (The site will be supported by advertising from educational publishers and suppliers.) Our goal is not only to keep it free, but also to provide as many tools as we can to make it an invaluable resource for our members.

Lisa Schmucki and Michael Mantell founded the edWeb in the summer of 2007 after hashing out the concepts and ideas about what the edWeb could be over numerous cups of coffee at Small World Coffee in Princeton, NJ. Small World is a great place to visit if you're ever in Princeton. Besides the great coffee, one of the interesting things about the place is what you see around you: lots of educators (well it is a college town, after all) — Princeton professors, high school teachers, librarians — actively engaged and connecting over their coffee and tea. We're hoping to make these kinds of connections possible through the edWeb for all our members.

Although we are not educators ourselves, we are both veterans of educational publishing, having worked in the field since the early 1980s. Our very talented Chief Technology Officer, Alex Oss, rounds out our management team. Alex isn't an educator either, but he is well educated and he's worked in the educational publishing field, too, for his entire adult life. We hope that the edWeb will provide a truly revolutionary tool and service for educators. We are passionate about what we're doing at the edWeb, and we hope that the site will enable our members to interact and engage with one another, make connections, exchange ideas, and learn about what's going on in the education field with people from far-flung places — with the goal of improving the process of education for all who are involved.

We look forward to hearing from you about your experiences with the edWeb.

The edWeb Team