Hack Education

The Gates Foundation announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative on Monday, with $20 million earmarked this year for projects to improve college graduation. The program is looking to fund projects that will expand and strengthen open courseware, learning analytics, blended learning, and engagement in online learning. See my ReadWriteWeb...

As I've watched more governments and NGOs start to release datasets and encourage developers to build tools with the information, I've wondered what sorts of projects would be best suited for a sort of grassroots education hacking. A Few Datasets: National Education Data Model World Bank Data.gov What other sorts...

I spend my time immersed in technology, and even though I call ed-tech my beat, it's fair to say that I focus much more on the tech than on the ed. Today was a welcome change. I spent the day at Sherwood High School in Tualatin, Oregon at the Google...

Archive available here from Monday's "Elevating the Education Reform Dialog" webinar. "No Paywall," MIT OpenCourseWare assures us. Google launches Google Code-in, a contest that will match students age 13 to 18 with mentoring organizations to work on open source projects. Second Life drops educational discounts for land purchases. Public schools...

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) released a report on the status of K-12 Computer Science education in the U.S. And the title, arguably, sums up their findings: Running On Empty: The Failure to Teach K-12 Computer Science in the Digital Age. According...

Sometimes, I confess, when I write the news, I want to abandon the standard rules o' journalism altogether. You know the formula - that simple who-what-when-when-whatever that involves summing up pretty much everything in the opening paragraph, then uses marks to call out what are really the take-aways from the...

One of the largest music festivals in the country that has quickly become one of the most popular technology events as well, SXSW announces today that this spring will mark the first "SXSWedu," an interactive three-day event focused on Texas K-12 education. The educational conference will be aimed at teachers...

The "Hey, Let's Not Wait for Superman and Just Get on With It" Edition I think accreditation is going to be one of the big challenges that opencourseware faces in the coming years, so this news caught my eye: the National Chiao Tung University becomes the first OCW-publishing university in...

As a folklorist and a geek, I am very interested in digital storytelling, and I think there's lots of potential for using technology to innovate how we tell stories. Two startups - both still in beta - have caught my attention recently: Storify describes itself as a content curation tool...

The Department of Education unveiled a new website on Monday, Teach.gov, aimed at helping recruit people into the teaching profession. The site offers a number of inspirational "teaching success" stories, as well as gives visitors information about college degrees, funding opportunities, and licensing regulations. It's important to recruit and good...