Hack Education

Some thoughts on the closure of the coding bootcamps Dev Bootcamp and The Iron Yard, owned by for-profit colleges Kaplan and Apollo Education Group respectively. I'd already labeled bootcamps "the new for-profit higher ed," and so it's interesting to see how the business of teaching programming hasn't really panned out....

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....

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists held a rally Friday night at the UVA campus, carrying torches and chanting "blood and soil." On Saturday, a counter-protester died when a white nationalist allegedly plowed his car into a crowd. Trump has refused to condemn this. I mean, he read a statement on Monday then backtracked, blaming "both sides" for violence. And it's going to get worse....

A brief history of the Speak & Spell, one of the most iconic pieces of education technology. First introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1978, the Speak & Spell is a teaching machine in the behaviorist sense. Texas Instruments' development of the device involved an important technological breakthrough in speech technology....

In 2014, Gary Stager joked that we should submit a proposal to ISTE for a panel titled "Is It Time to Give Up on Computers in Schools?" No surprise, it was rejected. But this year, he submitted again, and the very same proposal was accepted. This was a fun talk....

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 research project includes a list of novels, short stories, television, and films that explore the future of education. How do these fictions shape the ways in which we imagine and build towards a future of teaching and learning?...

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....