Hack Education

I like Maine a lot. It's a beautiful place -- oh my, the blueberries! -- and my little brother and his family live there. But that's not the only thing that makes me biased in favor of the state. Maine has been at the forefront of one-to-one computing initiatives, dating...

A version of this post is available at MindShift. The Boy Scouts of America unveiled a new merit badge this week, for work in Robotics. Among the badge's requirements, Boy Scouts will have to design, build and test a robot with at least two degrees of freedom and at least...

I write week-in-review posts for several of my writing gigs, including one that was posted yesterday on Radar, one posted this morning on MindShift and one I've scheduled for tomorrow morning here. These posts tend to highlight some of the important news, reports, trends, legislation from the preceeding week. But...

I've had lots of people ask me my thoughts on this article by Techcrunch's Sarah Lacy: "Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education." And let me start by saying "thanks" -- I'm glad you think my opinion on education would be relevant, interesting,...

Cross-posted at the Huffington Post Much of the buzz around the educational benefits of Internet technology has focused on the potential for the classroom -- or perhaps, if we add to that, the boom in mobile technology, the potential to bridge the classroom and the home. But the Internet is...

The Education Writers Association just held its national conference the past few days in New Orleans. I didn't go. I didn't really consider it, honestly. I see myself as an education technology writer, not an education one. Maybe that's a distinction that's purely in my head, as it's pretty hard...

The test prep industry is massive -- multi-billion dollar massive. That's no surprise, considering the significance we place on testing. Say what you want about SATs and GREs and MCATs failing to represent a student's skills or knowledge. Say what you want about schools looking at other factors when deciding...

Project Tomorrow has just released the results of its Speak Up 2010 survey that asked over 300,000 students (and 43,000 parents, 35,000 teachers, and 3,500 administrators) about their thoughts on technology and learning in the classroom. It found, no surprise, students' ownership and use of technology is on the rise,...

It's official: the educational tablet maker Kno is officially abandoning hardware manufacturing, licensing the design to Intel, and switching its focus to its "robust software and services." If the story sounds familiar, indeed, it's confirmation of what All Things D's Kara Swisher reported in February. No more Kno tablet. I...

Ah, surveys and statistics. They are a bane and a boon to journalists, I think. You can run stories with a few numbers in the headlines, and that tends to be good for pageviews (sadly the underlying motivation for a lot of what counts as online news nowadays). So here's...