Hack Education

I was asked to speak at Donna Murdoch's class at Columbia Teachers College. She wanted me to talk about learning analytics. Instead, I talked about fitness trackers. I think the analogy works. (I think they're both based on some very flawed assumptions about what constitutes "well-being.")...

The awfulness of the Trump Administration continues. This week, the Department of Education announced it was hiring the CEO of a student loan company to run the federal student loan program. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Well, good thing that's all financial tech, and we ed-tech folks can just ignore it....

One might ask, what is the Omidyar Network's investment strategy? I'm more interested in its investments as ideology. And the ideology that underpins this is neoliberalism -- the dismantling of the public sphere in order to expand "the power of markets." As it also invests in journalism and research, "the power of markets" has many storytellers in its corner....

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....

The Columbia University School of Journalism has awarded me a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship for the 2017–2018 academic year. I will use my time 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). Like those two books, this new one is a collection of all the keynotes and talks I delivered in 2016....

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....