Hack Education

Unless you've been fortunate enough to spend your summer holidays abroad, you might need to have your language skills refreshed before school starts. With that in mind, online language learning company Babbel is offering its courses -- which include the online learning material, iPhone app and downloadable desktop app --...

Hacker News is one of my favorite resources for finding good tech stories. It's run by Y Combinator, the premier startup incubator program, and the site allows anyone to submit tech-related stories - vote them up and down, offer comments. It may well be the site for sharing and crowdsourcing...

In April, the New York Times Magazine printed a story called "The Data-Driven Life." It's an exploration of the ways in which technologies -- mobile technologies, sensors, and the like -- have helped to privilege a quantitative over a qualitative self-evaluation. We've moved from a world of the journal to...

Despite my general fear of mathematics, I would be remiss if I did not call your attention to this Kickstarter project: Punk Mathematics. The project has already exceeded its pledge goal on Kickstarter (if you're not familiar with Kickstarter, the site allows you to "crowdfund" your projects) with almost 700...

"E-learning benefits teachers, not just students," Silicon Republic: A study from Boston College has tracked the impact of online professional development for teachers, finding it improved both their teaching methods and their knowledge of the subject itself. "Tracking Independent Reading in High School," The Thinking Stick: Jeff Utrecht details the...

Digital textbook platform Inkling announces today that it's secured a Series A round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. Inkling is available as an iPad app and hopes to demonstrate the ways in which the digital textbooks can do more than just offer electronic versions of a printed book. Inkling...

I was fond of choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid. And when my son was younger, I remember finding some of the classic titles from my childhood at a secondhand bookstore. I introduced him to the genre -- he loved it too. I'm not sure we had any illusion that these...

College students listed textbooks as one of the biggest "scams" and waste of money in a recent study about the costs of education by BookRenter. Indeed, according to eCampus News, "College students pay more than $900 annually for textbooks, according to national surveys released in 2008 and 2009, and the...

Federal prosecutors announced today that they would not be filing charges against the Pennsylvania school district that installed software on its laptops to remotely monitor students. In February, a student sued the district, claiming that his school's laptop webcam photographed him over 400 times over a two week period. Investigators...

I've cast my votes already for the panels I'd like to see at SXSW. I've got a vested interest, of course, as I'll be headed to Austin in March to cover the event. Even if you're not sure you'll be at SXSW this year, you can head over to the...