Hack Education

Despite a strong presence of academics and educational institutions "in world," Second Life hasn't felt too warm and welcoming to educators lately. In August of last year, Linden Lab announced it was closing the Teen Grid, and then in October, it decided to scrap the discounted land prices for educational...

A (snark-free) version of this round-up appears on MindShift The VOIP service Skype announced the launch of "Skype in the Classroom," a directory to help connect educators with others who are using the service. Skype has recognized that teachers are already using the service to connect their classrooms, and so...

As many readers know, I spend a lot of time on the road -- typically about half my time in Eugene and about half my time in Silicon Valley. For the past ten days or so, I've been in the latter -- always a great opportunity to talk with tech...

The Apollo Group released its quarterly fiscal report on Tuesday, revealing that its revenue and enrollment figures were down for the University of Phoenix. The decline, according to the company, was due to policy changes requiring for-profit universities do more to help its students succeed. Net revenue for the second...

Language learning community busuu.com has released a study about "the future of language learning." The survey was conducted among some 16,000 busuu.com users from over 150 different countries, and given that the participants were drawn from an online language-learning site, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the...

Lots of teachers use Google Forms for homework and quizzes, and a new Google Apps Script called Flubaroo makes it incredibly easy to grade and analyze them. The creator of the script, Dave Abouav, is a Google employee and also a part-time physics instructor. He created Flubaroo as a 20%...

I feel like we're stuck somedays with two very different stories about the future of digital textbooks and students. On one hand, we have the predictions from Xplana that say that e-books are at the "tipping point" and within the next few years, a quarter of textbooks will be digital....

Sometimes, this whole "journalistic objectivity" thing can be very, very difficult. Because, kids, I am clearly on Team Evernote. It's one of my most favorite, most used apps. Along with Twitter, I'd say it's an absolutely tool in my daily writer's toolbox. So it's from that position that I write...

An interesting story in Apple Insider yesterday suggests that Amazon is actively courting Apple iOS developers, encouraging them to port their apps to the Kindle platform. That's hardly a surprise, as I'd argue apps are quickly becoming one of the most important and necessary "features" of a tablet (and I...

I'm a big fan of word clouds. I think that the visualization can help highlight patterns that you wouldn't ordinarily recognize. As such, I've been excited to play around with my friend Pete Warden's new tool Wordlings. I was inspired, in part, by the data mining he did of Apple,...