Once a year, I crack open Google Analytics to see what traffic to Hack Education has looked like so that I can write another one of these year-end posts. (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010)
I don’t really/regularly pay attention to metrics like pageviews. Are writers supposed to? I dunno… I write because it helps me think. I don’t write so that people will click, although I am glad that some people do. Indeed, with the revamp of this site, I’ve ditched Google Analytics. So this time next year, I’ll just shrug and say “I guess some folks read some stuff.” This year, however, I can still be specific about what that stuff was:
This Year’s Most Clicked-On Posts
1. The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy, July 19, 2011
2. Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code, October 28, 2011
3. The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program, August 29, 2012
4. Top 10 Ed-Tech Startups of 2013, December 29, 2013
5. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: The Business of Ed-Tech, December 23, 2013
6. Who’s Investing in Ed-Tech?: Tech Investors and Their Education Portfolios, December 10, 2012
7. YesAllWomen and Ed-Tech Conferences, or Why ISTE is Unsafe, June 4, 2014
8. The Failure of One Laptop Per Child, April 9, 2012
9. Free E-Textbooks for Students: Piracy, Open Educational Content, and the Future of Academic Publishing, August 30, 2011
10. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs, November 29, 2013
11. Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech, and the Refusal to Be Silent, November 18, 2014
12. Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall, March 3, 2013
13. Ed-Tech’s Monsters, September 3, 2014
14. Beyond the LMS, September 5, 2014
15. Top 10 Ed-Tech Startups of 2012, December 21, 2012
16. Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: Education Data and Learning Analytics, December 9, 2012
17. The History of the Future of Ed-Tech, February 4, 2014
18. MinecraftEDU: Minecraft for the Classroom, March 15, 2012
19. The History of “Personalization” and Teaching Machines, July 2, 2014
20. Against “Innovation”, May 14, 2014
A Couple of Observations on the Clicking
Hate-Clicks: Once again, my stories on Khan Academy and Codecademy remain the most trafficked pieces on this site. They also generate the most hate-mail. So that’s fun.
The Business of Ed-Tech: There’s an appetite for analysis of the business of ed-tech apparently, as folks clicked on some fairly old posts about startups and investors. I guess I could look to see how quickly those readers left this site, but that would mean opening Google Analytics again.
Talk Transcripts: These sorts of lists are biased towards blog posts from previous years – that is, those old ones get a full 12 months’ worth of traffic. Just 7 out of my top 20 stories were written this year. Of those, 5 were transcripts from my talks – validation, I suppose, for posting them online. I’m not sure it proves that people will actually read long-form content about ed-tech (again, that would require looking at Google Analytics). But I am very pleased that some of the work I’m most proud of this year made the list: Men Explain Technology to Me and Ed-Tech’s Monsters.
So here’s to writing more in 2015 (and ignoring the metrics)...