Hack Education

One of the great things about having my own blog here is that the mission, the voice, the responsibility are entirely mine. I love it. I get to pick the stories, and I feel freer here to speak my mind. Most importantly, I get to focus on education and education...

Rumors and speculation about the second generation iPad have been bandied about since Steve Jobs announced the first iPad last year. This week, Apple finally unveiled the iPad 2, unleashing another huge around of press frenzy, fanboy adulation, and predictions that, once again, "this changes everything." As a technology blogger,...

MIT and Dow Chemical announced today the establishment of an outreach fund designed to help support science education and encourage high school students, underrepresented minorities, and women to pursue careers in science. The fund is a 5-year, $2 million commitment from Dow Chemical that will help MIT and MIT OpenCourseWare...

NASA and Make magazine are joining forces to help build and launch DIY science projects into outerspace, which, if I may say so, elevates citizen science to a whole new level of awesome. The two have just announced a new initiative, the NASA Make Challenge: Experimental Science Kits for Space....

Over at ReadWriteWeb, I've been chronicling the decision by HarperCollins -- as announced by the e-book distributor Overdrive -- to set a limit on the number of times that a library can check out a copy of an e-book. That limit: 26 times. Some math: 26 checkouts at 2 weeks...

There's nothing quite like a juicy Facebook-related story to set the blogosphere alight. We (supposedly) love Facebook stories! Me, I find them irksome oftentimes, particularly when these stories have an educational bent. Teachers fired for posting drunken photos. Students suspended for Farmville bullying. Facebook causing depression, lower grades, cheating, the...

Citizen science expands scientific inquiry and research from academics, researchers, and clinicians to include volunteers "outside the lab," if you will, many of whom do not have formal scientific training. Volunteers -- individuals and large networks of people -- aid scientific projects through observations, calculations, and other support efforts. One...

Stories I Told No Kno, as the student tablet maker is planning to abandon its manufacturing efforts This Library E-Book Will Self-Destruct After 26 Check Outs -- Sometimes publishers act like e-books are just like print books. You can lend them out to only one person at a time, for...

Comic creation website and perennial teacher favorite Chogger has just relaunched, with some big improvements to its interface and a new comic creator tool. Chogger is a free, web-based tool that lets you build and public your own comics. The creator tool works primarily as a drag-and-drop interface, and while...

A sidenote by way of introduction: The British newspaper The Guardian is doing some incredibly innovative things with data journalism, least of which being its data blog where it talks about certain newsworthy datasets and makes the data available for download. Those datasets are frequently related to education, and regardless...