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”).

This is the second-to-last Hack Education Weekly News ever. With the announcement this week that Edsurge has raised $2.5 million, I'm ready to walk away from the total shit-stain that is ed-tech. Peace out. Y'all will get what you deserve with this venture funded "future of education" crap. Privatization and personalization and no one who can remembers things any differently....

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 given to Eddie Maloney’s class at Georgetown University (specifically, its Learning and Design program) on “Technology & Innovation By Design.” This is me, trying to figure out what the introduction to Teaching Machines is going to look like – you know, why this matters…

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....