Hack Education

Updated 11/9: According to Microsoft's PR company, Teach.gov will now move to Teach.org I'd like to think that folks would be up in arms if suddenly the government website War.gov fell under the control of Halliburton, or if Drill.gov was run by BP. Those are pretty drastic examples, I realize...

A recent survey found that there's been no marked increase in students' usage of digital textbooks over the past 3 years. So why aren't students using digital textbooks? Well, it could be because they're so damn expensive. But I've got more to say on the recent eBrary survey and the...

Before the official release of the Steve Jobs biography, one of the leaked sections in the book revealed that Jobs was weighing the next industries for Apple to disrupt. The textbook industry was apparently one of his targets. That's hardly surprising since the iPad has helped usher in an explosion...

Legalities A fascinating research paper from danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey examines COPPA and parents' seeming willingness to help their under-13-year olds bypass the age restrictions. Let me cite the conclusion at length: "Our findings call the efficacy of COPPA into serious question. The data also...

Matt Richtel has published thelatest articlein his New York Times seriesGrading the Digital School. The series has been quite critical of education technology, questioning theamount of money schools are spending on itand doubting that those expenditures are having anyimpact on student achievement -- as evidenced by stagnant test scores, at...

Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O'Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O'Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program's learning...

A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy....

A Race to Develop a Platform for Education There are still debates about what exactly we mean when we talk about Internet "platforms" -- is it a matter of infrastructure, extensibility, code execution, content control, delivery mechanisms, and so on. And debates about which companies rise to that level --...

If you read my recent story "Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code," you'll know that I believe strongly in (at least) two things related to ed-tech: we have to talk seriously about "what works" -- you know, actual teaching and learning -- and we have to talk...

"Sooner or later,"Knewton's senior marketing associate Will Fleiss told me in a recent email, "we'll convince the world we're no longer just a test prep company." And with the company'sannouncementthat its adaptive engine would be poweringPearson's digital courseware, indeed, that day is probably here. Fleiss's email to me was a...