Hack Education

The MIT Press has agreed to publish Teaching Machines. I’m excited and thrilled and overwhelmed. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do this without the Spencer Fellowship (and without taking Sam Freedman’s book writing class at the Columbia School of Journalism). Stay tuned for more details (but probably, if I’m honest, less “Hack Education”).

Among the big news this week: Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma, the world's richest man and China's richest man, have decided to enter the world of education philanthropy. The former prompted me to actually write an article here, which I haven't done in months (since I'm working on my book)....

This was the tenth article in my "end of 2018" series. This one looks at "brain-based education" and "social emotional learning" and other plans for corporate, cognitive education policy. It's the new behaviorism. I'm not Skinner would like the emphasis on emotions. But he'd love it that we're giving up on the quaint idea of "free will."...

This talk was delivered at the NMC Summer 2017 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was the closing keynote (and I believe my last talk of 2017) so I wanted to talk about something a little different, or at least defamiliarize the stories we often tell about education by talking about baby monitors....

2017 marked the eighth year in which I reviewed the most important stories in the ed-tech industry from the previous twelve months. This isn't really a series about "trends," to be honest. It's not a list of products that schools should buy if they want to stay ahead of the innovative curve. Rather, it's a look at what we're told "innovation" will like....

The Columbia University School of Journalism awarded me a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship for the 2017–2018 academic year. I have used my time (in part) to study the networks of education technology investors and examine how they are shaping education policies (as well as our imagination about what the future of education might look like)....

This book is the latest in my “monsters of ed-tech” series – a sequel to The Monsters of Education Technology (2014) and The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology (2015) and The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology (2016). Like those books, this new one is a collection of all the keynotes and talks I delivered in 2017....

What is up with all the pigeons? The bird appears across all the various Hack Education projects as it exemplifies how education technology has viewed learning and learners. In part, it's a reference to the work of Edward Thorndike and B. F. Skinner and their development of multiple choice tests, teaching machines, and behavioral (educational) psychology....