Hack Education

Hacking My Education If there were one lesson I would wish that we instilled in all students, it wouldn't be an understanding of a particular piece of intellectual content that every student should know. Rather, that lesson would be to always embrace intellectual curiosity. We need to support lifelong learning...

I've got a book idea I've been mulling over: when ed-tech fails. I realize it's not an argument that a tech journalist is supposed to make. I'm supposed to be a proponent, even if a critical one, about the use of technology for teaching and learning. Someone also told me...

Politics and Policies The Missouri legislature has passed a law revising its now infamous SB 54, a bill ostensibly aimed to protect students from sexual misconduct in school that would have also prevented students and teachers from communicating via social networking sites. Late last month, the Missouri State Teachers Association...

Facebook held its developers' conference today in San Francisco, unveiling a number of changes to the social network's UI as well as deeper integration with various applications. Facebook Apps for Education The motto for the F8 was "Read. Watch. Listen." Absent from that series of verbs was "Learn." But that...

As it prepares for the closure of Google Labs, Google is shuttering, off-loading, and graduating the experimental projects housed there. These projects include a number of interesting educational apps: NGram Viewer, for example, and Android App Inventor (whose fate I chronicled here) Another awesome educational project, Google Body Browser, had...

When Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to donate $100 million to the Newark school system, it was hard to not look upon the gesture without some cynicism. His gift came just as the biopic The Social Network was set to premiere, a film that made the Facebook founder look like...

When Google launched its new social network, Google Plus earlier this summer, there was a flurry of stories about the site's potential for education. I confess, I penned a few: Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For? Will Google Plus Replace Facebook or Twitter for...

Last month, Nathan Maton and I started a conversation here about what a "serious game" for education might look like. Serious games are designed for a specific purpose beyond just commercialism or entertainment. As the adjective suggests, serious games often tackle serious real-world problems: pollution, energy crisis, war, famine. Nathan...

Multitasking: it may be a productivity buzzword, but is it actually a valuable skill or is it a damaging distraction? There are numerous claims about whether or not the ability to juggle several projects simultaneously and switch back and forth between tasks is good or bad -- for productivity, for...

Funding and Acquiring Pearson, the world's largest education company announced this week that it had acquired Connections Education an online virtual school provider. About 40,000 students in 21 states attend the schools, which are funded by the states and districts and free to parents in places where virtual school counts...