Hack Education

Julie Meloni and I go way back, back to the early days of academic blogging. We were humanities grad students then, back in the dangerous days of Ivan Tribbles when you could be harshly judged by having a blog. My, how academia has changed in the last decade. Ha. Ha....

This interview is part of my ongoing research/writing project for Mozilla. That research involves my asking the question "Do we need Scratch for HTML5?" to a bunch of folks who are thinking about teaching, learning, writing, coding, building, computing, creating and other associated verbs. Phil Wagner (@brokenairplane) is a science...

Inspired by Stephen Downes' E-Learning Generations and lots of thoughts about my own experiences with learning and technology  I dropped out of college in the spring of 1991, just two years in to my undergraduate degree.  My reasons were severalfold:  I hated Johns Hopkins.  I hated Baltimore.  I was in love, and...

By now, it might not even be newsworthy when a school district announces it's buying a bunch of iPads for students. But last spring, when the Maine's Auburn School District announced that it was implementing a one-to-one program with the devices, the news did stir some controversy, spurred in part...

A(nother) Rant about the LMS In other words, if I had an editor here at Hack Education they'd axe this whole introduction here as I've buried the lede... I confess, I tend to heave a heavy sigh when pitched stories about LMS startups. (Look for my talk later this spring...

At O'Reilly Media's Tools of Change for Publishing conference today in New York, the digital textbook app-maker Inkling unveiled Habitat, a platform whereby other publishers can tap into the Inkling technology and production infrastructure in order to create their own interactive e-books. Techcrunch's Rip Emerson has a good write-up of...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. You can listen to last week's episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on ed-tech amnesia and ed-tech myopia...

This post is part of my ongoing research and writing project for Mozilla, looking into the need for better tools to teach Web building and HTML5. The notes below are from my conversation with Glen Bull, Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Virginia and someone who's been thinking...

MIT opens registration today for the first of its online courses offered as part of its new MITx initiative. The university announced MITx late last year as the next step not just in informal online learning but in alternative certification. Registration for MITx is free and open to anyone, and for...

Politics and Policies President Obama announced the 10 states that will receive waivers to No Child Left Behind this week: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee (New Mexico applied for a waiver but it was not granted.) The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss takes a...