Hack Education

Should all college students be required to take a programming class?  I say yes.  Most universities already require they take "college composition," based on the assumption that the ability to write coherently and cogently is a necessity.  How much longer until we see programming knowledge as a similar sort of...

What Is Search+? Google unveiled a major change to its search functionality today, one that Venture Beat's Jolie O'Dell describes as "the biggest change in a decade." Dubbed "Search+" Google is taking steps to make its search more "social" -- although as that + symbol indicates, "social" in this case...

At the flashy Las Vegas gathering this week, the Consumer Electronics Show, there will likely be a lot of tablets unveiled, but none are as eagerly anticipated as the OLPC XO 3.0, a tablet version of the famously inexpensive and rugged laptop from One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte. The tablet release...

A bit thanks to Seth Odell, host of Higher Ed Live for having me as his first guest of the new year.  Below is our conversation on "the State of Ed-Tech for 2012."  (Apologies for the audio issues.  I blame my hotel WiFi.)

Politics Happy 10 year anniversary, No Child Left Behind. Happy happy joy joy. Legislators have proposed a new bill -- The Research Works Act (HR 3699) -- that would end the open access efforts by the National Institutes of Health and effectively prohibit any other federal agencies from implementing similar...

Technology is often blamed for encouraging bad behavior, particularly when it comes to academic dishonesty. There’s the notion, for example, that it’s much easier to plagiarize now thanks to the ability to copy and paste information from the Web into a term paper. So at first blush, the new homework help Web...

Happy 2012. After writing a blog series outlining some of the major ed-tech trends of 2011 as well as a few obligatory posts with predictions for the new year, I figured I’d be off to the races, energized about my work as an education technology writer, excited for the potential for better teaching...

Late last year, Khan Academy announced that it would be expanding its faculty beyond just Sal himself.  The first hires, back in October, were SmartHistory's Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Today, Khan Academy adds another member to its team: mathematician and "mathemusician" Vi Hart. Hart's math videos are incredibly...

Last year I wrote a couple of prediction posts (here and here) that were awfully accurate, but only because they were terribly vague. I could do that again, I suppose, predicting that we'll see more technology integrated in the classroom, more government budget cuts, more private investment, more hand-wringing about...

What's the right price for great educational content? "Pay what you can," says Mathalicious 2012 brings about a new pricing plan for the math lesson startup Mathalicious. Of course, a new year is often a time when companies opt to revise their prices, and as inflation dictates, that often means...