Hack Education

So why are you here? It's a fair question to ask a technology journalist at an education conference. Are you here to write a story? Sure. I am always seeking and shaping stories. I am a writer. I am a folklorist. I am a journalist. That is what I do....

At the World Economic Forum today, the media giant McGraw-Hill and the IT provider Wipro annouced today they were working together to develop mConnect, an open-standard mobile learning platform designed to bridge the skills gap in emerging markets. The initial pilots of the program have been undertaken in India and...

1. I am headed to EduCon tomorrow. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to go. I have been attending ed-tech conferences since 1997, but always as staff running either the registration or the event side of things. I'm thrilled to actually attend. There will be a...

I read an amusing story today in The Oregonian. Apparently the Oregon Capital News had done some calculations on the pay and benefits for the employees of the Portland Public Schools and wrote an eye-opening piece, exposing that William Griffin, a math and economics teacher at Lincoln Public High School...

There's something about headlines stirring up fear and revulsion over children's usage of technology that really annoys me. The latest story making the rounds: an AVG study (yes, that's AVG the antivirus company, not AVG a child development research group) that finds children are learning to use computers before learning...

Don't get me wrong. I love my iPhone. I love the apps. And I think that putting powerful mobile computing device like that in the hands of as many people as possible has the power to really transform teaching and learning, in ways that 1-to-1 laptop initiatives have yet been...

It was a good week for open educational resources, with the announcement of two major investments: open content publishers Flat World Knowledge raised their Series B round, and the Department of Education and Labor announced a substantial commitment for higher ed OER. Challenging the Textbook Industry with Open Content The...

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released an update to its classification system today, a revision to one of the leading frameworks for describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education. The update finds two striking changes in higher ed: a dramatic increase in...

Back in September. I wrote a post urging educators to join the Q&A site Quora. Looking back at that post now, it's sort of funny. In it, I make a case for teachers joining a site that at the time, few people in education circles had heard of, suggesting they...

The Gates Foundation-funded Next Generation Learning Challenges program has just issued its latest round of RFPs. This initiative, aimed at boosting college preparedness among middle-schoolers, will fund up to $10 million in new grants. The Gates Foundation announced the first part of this ed-tech initiative in October last year when...