read

Education Politics


Happy New Year. From US News & World Report: “For technology companies in California, ringing in the New Year will mean adjusting to a new privacy law that limits how they can collect and use student data. The data privacy legislation was originally signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014 and goes into effect Jan. 1. It prohibits the operators of education websites, online services and apps from using any student’s personal information for targeted advertising or creating a commercial profile, as well as the selling of any student’s information.”

Via The New York Times: “How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education.”

FCC Reaches $3 Million Settlement with New York City Department of Education in E-Rate Investigation.” “The consent decree is significant in several respects,” Comm Law Monitor reports. “First, this marks the first significant action handled by the USF ‘Strike Force’ established by Chairman Wheeler in 2014. It also marks the largest e-rate settlement to date, and includes many compliance plan requirements that could become de facto standards for future E-rate enforcement actions. Further, to the best we can determine, this is the first E-rate enforcement action the Commission has taken against a school or library applicant under the program.”

Via The New York Times: “Israel’s Ministry of Education has decided not to include a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man on the list of required reading for Hebrew high school literature classes, prompting a stormy debate over how Israeli society deals with its cultural divides.”

Education in the Courts


Via Inside Higher Ed: “Pennsylvania authorities have filed criminal charges of felony indecent assault against Bill Cosby in regard to an incident involving a former employee of Temple University. While many women have publicly accused the comedian of raping them, most of the allegations involve interactions for which statutes of limitations have expired.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs


The New York Times still loves MOOCs: “The Most Popular Online Course Teaches You to Learn.”

Meanwhile on Campus


“City College of S.F. splurges on administrators’ travel, meals,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Via The New York Times: “Schools Evaluate Threats, Questioning When to Shut Down.”

Via The New York Times: “As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short.”

Via The Atlantic: “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids.”

Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future.”

Go, School Sports Team!


Mississippi Valley State Is Playing 14 Straight Road Games Because It Can’t Afford Not To.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time [college football] teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.”

Via The Washington Post: “Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. Here’s the evidence.”

From the HR Department


Via Inside Higher Ed: “The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014–15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013–14.”

Curtis B. Charles, president of Tiffin University, has quit after only six months on the job.

Upgrades and Downgrades


This story is about health startups, not ed-tech ones. But the headline on this story from The Verge is still pretty applicable to ed-tech: “ Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation.”

The pushback against Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org continues – last week in India; this week in Egypt. Via The New York Times: “A program that provided more than three million Egyptians with free access to Internet services was abruptly shut down on Wednesday, according to Facebook, the social media company that provided the program in cooperation with an Egyptian cellphone company.”

Markdown has been added to Wikity (and Mike Caulfield explains why this is important).

From the press release: “Instructure Releases Beta Version of Arc, a Complete Video Platform Solution.”

LibraryBox v2.1.

Via Phil Hill: “Unizin RFP For LMS: An offering to appease the procurement gods?”

Funding and Acquisitions


Terra Dotta has raised $6 million from undisclosed investors.

Careers360 has acquired Entrancecorner.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Aspiring Minds has acquired LetsIntern.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance


“Google is tracking students as it sells more products to schools, privacy advocates warn,” The Washington Post reports.

Data and “Research”


Via the Hechinger Report: “Black students are drastically underrepresented at top public colleges, data show.”

Audrey Watters


Published

Hack Education

The History of the Future of Education Technology

Back to Archives