Hack Education

"Tell me: what motivated you?" It's a fairly boilerplate question that I'll direct at my interview subjects. It's something I ask entrepreneurs and educators alike. Why this? Why you? Why now? Eric Simons had a good response: as a high school student, he wasn't engaged in class. Recognizing this, his...

The Australian SC Magazine, along with security professionals and an unnamed Australian university, has uncovered several major security flaws in the learning management system Blackboard. The magazine reports that the security holes could allow students to change grades and download restricted materials (such as unpublished exams) and could expose them...

Free email. Free Internet access. These are some of the digital perks that college students have come to expect. But the incoming class of Information and Library Science students at the University of North Carolina is getting something a lot more valuable and a lot more permanent: free data storage...

"Angry Birds watch out," the headline reads on a story from PaidContent, because "Club Penguin Puffles is launching on an iPhone near you." As the article notes, while Angry Birds and other social games are incredibly popular on mobile devices (see Alexis Madrigal's calculations about just how devastatingly popular), there...

The Mozilla Foundation officially announced its Open Badges Infrastructure Project today. Here's how the foundation describes it: "Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve...

Just as many predicted, sales figures show that more people are opting to buy e-books rather than printed copies. Sales of e-books rose 167% in June, reports Publishers Weekly, with sales totaling $473.8 million for the first half of the year. But sales of print books � both paperbacks and...

Mozilla officially announced its Open Badges Project today at an event in Washington DC. The news conference, where Mozilla's executive director Mark Surman was joined by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others, occurred at 6am PST, so like most left coasters, I woke up to a Twitter stream discussing...

Every Thursday night, I go through all the links I've bookmarked throughout the week: all the education-related stories I've tracked. I write a massive round-up post of the ed-tech news for MindShift and for Hack Education. Some weeks are more exciting than others. The lead-up to back-to-school, no surprise, was...

Among the news and announcements about chip manufacturing and cloud and mobile computing at the Intel Developer Forum this week, the technology giant is also touting the success it's had with its Classmates PCs, its educational-focused and kid-friendly netbooks. These devices come loaded with various educational software titles, including some...

The 10 startups that just graduated from the education-focused incubator Imagine K12 are taking to the stage at Techcrunch Disrupt this morning in San Francisco. Imagine K12 held its Demo Day for investors last week, but today's the first public showcase of Imagine K12's first cohort. Imagine K12 launched in...