Hack Education

Many state legislatures are looking at ways to address the skyrocketing price-tag of college at a time of shrinking budgets. To that end, earlier this year the state of Washington set aside $750,000 for a new initiative to tackle one aspect of the higher ed financial burden -- the cost...

#OccupyEDU and "Generation Debt" I've been struck by the prominence of education issues in the Occupy Wall Street movement -- people angry about reform, testing, the cost of college, and the loudest complaint, student loan debt. A sampling of stories and sites from the past week: Occupy Education. Occupy College....

News crossed the wire last night that the ed-tech startup Codecademy has raised $2.5 million, led by Union Square Ventures. That's a nice chunk of change for a very new company (it's only been in existence since August.) It's also a strong vote of confidence for the startup's vision and...

When Google launched its new social network Google Plus this summer, the service was only available to a small number of users, but it seemed clear from the outset that the service had a lot of potential for education -- more granular privacy controls, real-time communication and collaboration via Hangouts,...

I don't want to "bury the lede" here (something that, as someone with no formal training in journalism, I'm wont to do). So for those looking for a quick intro to Wander, the company I examine in this story, here you go: Wander is an iPhone app (iTunes link) that...

CIPA requires schools that receive federal E-rate funding filter their networks. But what happens when schools provide students with computers for one-to-one programs? Should that same filtering extend to students' Internet access at home? Different schools have different policies about this, so I asked the FCC for clarification on this....

Letter grades actually tell you very little about how well a student is doing in class. Nevertheless, most of us have a general understanding of what the traditional grading scale means: A for Excellent, B for Above Average, C for Average, D for Below Average, F for Fail. But when...

Earlier this fall, I received a note from Inkling's PR firm with the subject line "Inkling breaks into the consumer market," and I admit, my heart sank a little bit. I think that what the startup is doing to "re-engineer" textbooks on the iPad is pretty innovative, and I feared...

This past weekend, Startup Weekend EDU was at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Having gone from a weekend in Silicon Valley at the latest SF Startup Weekend EDU to DC Startup Weekend EDU was an interesting shift -- in terms of the participants, the judges, the cities' cultures. I could...

Politics and Policies This week marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Department of Education Organization Act, the law signed by President Jimmy Carter that created the Department of Education. GOOD's Liz Dwyer has a great post asking a question that's on a lot of people's minds: do...