Lots of education companies were acquired or shuttered this week: Princeton Review, Blendspace, and Sifteo were acquired for example. Pearson said that it's had to lay off about 10% of its workforce over the last few years because times are tough. The University of Texas system has a new chancellor -- the guy who planned the Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden. So yeah. MIT Media Lab released ScratchJr on the iPad. And a blogger for a language school in Salt Lake City was fired because he wrote a post about homophones. I bet you didn't know grammar was so intertwined in the "gay agenda." [...]
Student Data, Privacy, Ideology, and Context-less-ness
This is one of those late-night rambles -- a follow-up to last night's late night ramble -- that I'll probably wish I never posted come morning. But I'm trying to work through issues that Tressie McMillan Cottom raised in her talk this week on identity and ideology and ed-tech. Here, I point to some recent efforts from a new parent privacy group that I fear, in trying to combat purported privacy violations in technology, reinscribe the very ideologies that feed the technological beast. Maybe. I don't know. [...]
Student Data, Algorithms, Ideology, and Identity-less-ness
Some mostly unformed thoughts on Tressie McMillan Cottom's talk yesterday at the Berkman Center. I'm trying to work through these ideas for a chapter for Teaching Machines on "the Quantified Student." There are questions here about identity, ideology, and data. I try to relate them to a tweet from Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira (who stepped into a shitstorm on Twitter and now, bless his heart, appears in this blog post). Still working through these ideas. Clearly... [...]
Hack Education Weekly News: Rand Paul Loves Khan Academy and Classrooms of 2 Million Students
In this week's education news: Knewton partners with the Sesame Workshop, because we gotta start tracking kids' data and competencies early, man. Rand Paul loves Khan Academy and classrooms with 2 million students. A new privacy coalition formed, and I think I lost almost a whole day arguing on the Internet about it. But I was cited (sorta) by Politico for my strategic use of the word "bigot," so that's a job well done for me. MOOC stuff. NCAA stuff. No ed-tech companies raised any money this week, probably because The Chronicle pointed out that they have dumb names. And so much more. [...]
Ed-Tech and the Templated Self: Thoughts from the "Reclaim Your Domain" Hackathon
This past weekend was the 2nd Annual Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon. Or at least that’s what we’re calling it, even though we're already plotting to hold another one this fall, to coincide with OpenEd. The event was a follow-up to some of the plotting that Jim Groom, Kin and I started at a “Reclaim Open" event at the MIT Media Lab last year, as well as to conversations we had earlier this year at Emory University’s Domain Incubator. I'm really interested in Amber Case's idea of the "templated self" and how these acts of reclamation can offer students more freedom in the development of themselves as learners. [...]
Hack Education Weekly News: BS, the New LMS
Well this week fucking sucked. I've included quite a few things in this week's round-up that aren't specifically focused on "education." But they're about politics, children, democracy, and sadly violence and death. Meanwhile, the big LMS companies partied on with their annual developer conference. Blackboard has a new UI, so that changes everything. And Desire2Learn has rebranded as Brightspace. BS. [...]
Author
Audrey Watters is an education writer, a recovering academic, a serial dropout, and some days, ed-tech's Kassandra.
Recommended Reading
- Against "Innovation", May 14, 2014
- Beneath the Cobblestones... A Domain of One's Own, April 25, 2014
- Student Data is the New Oil: MOOCs, Metaphor, and Money, October 17, 2013
- A Future With Only 10 Universities, October 15, 2013
- The Myth and Millennialism of "Disruptive Innovation", May 24, 2013
- Click Here to Save Education: Evgeny Morozov and Ed-Tech Solutionism, March 26, 2013
- Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall, March 3, 2013
- The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program, August 29, 2012
- "The Audrey Test": Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education?, March 17, 2012
- Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution, January 19, 2012
- Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code, October 28, 2011
- The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy, July 19, 2011
2013 Ed-Tech Trends
Previous Years' Trends
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