Hack Education

As part of my Spencer Fellowship, I'm investigating the networks of investors and entrepreneurs shaping ed-tech policies and products. I've decided to focus on how "personalized learning" has come to dominate the narratives surrounding technology-based education reform. Spoiler alert: one of the organizations driving this is the Gates Foundation, which has spend some $15 billion on education grants since 1998....

How did ed-tech manage to shift from the work of early, inquiry-based pioneers like Seymour Papert to the kinds of crap we see today? That's a question that JHU doctoral student Beth Holland asked me (via email). Once one's answer is longer than 500 words, I reckon it's best to write a blog post....

US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke at the ALEC annual meeting this week, touting "school choice" (aka virtual charter schools) and blasting unions. Another coding bootcamp announced it was closing its doors. Code.org boasts that it's the reason that more students are taking AP CS exams. We all know the real reason is Gates money....

The "factory model of education" is invoked to describe our current system of schooling, one that is -- like factories, I suppose -- outmoded. But the history of the "factory model," as told by Alvin Toffler and Salman Khan, is an invented one, not so much about education's past as its future....

This talk was delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University as part of a seminar co-sponsored by the Departments of English and Sociology. It's an examination of technology forecasting. What can we learn from these predictions? Hint: we won't learn what the future will be, but we might learn what powerful people hope it to be....

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)....

What role have education technology companies played in shaping the history of ed-tech. That is, how have corporations influenced the technologies, the politics, and policies? How have founders and investors moved from company to company, from idea to idea?...

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....