Hack Education

This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners in May 2015 The debate about standardized testing has hit the mainstream. Or at least, it hit HBO last weekend, when John Oliver offered a segment on the topic on his comedy news show Last Week Tonight. Oliver talked about the policies...

Education Politics “Does Online Ed Lack ‘Integrity’?” asks Inside Higher Ed, responding to a line suggesting such in Hillary Clinton’s higher ed plan. Clinton also exaggerated the student loan crisis, says “experts.” “Hillary Clinton’s student debt video misses the biggest problem with paying for college,” according to Vox’s Libby Nelson....

This talk was delivered today at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Summer Institute at UW Madison Thank you very much for inviting me here today. Once upon a time, as a graduate student, I imagined the University of Wisconsin Madison to be “a dream job.” And so I chuckle that it...

Education Politics The Republican Presidential candidates had their first debate this week, and education was actually a topic. “Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio get in a fight about Common Core,” Vox’s Libby Nelson reports. Via The Washington Post: “analysis, done by the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit liberal...

Earlier this summer, the tech blog Techcrunch pronounced that “Investors Rethink EdTech As Dealflow Declines.” No one likes tech blog gaffes more than other tech blogs, so there’s been a lot of crowing in the last few weeks as the investment figures from the first half of 2015 have been...

Education Politics The Obama administration will announce today that it will offer Pell Grants to some prisoners, “the first adult inmates to be eligible for the grants since Congress barred prisoners from receiving them more than 20 years ago,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education. More via Politico. Meanwhile, in...

This article first appeared on Educating Modern Learners in April 2015 "Learning is not a counting noun," says Dave Cormier, "so what should we count?" His question - a writing prompt, if you will - comes from Week 2 of his latest MOOC on "Rhizomatic Learning." It's an incredibly provocative...

There aren’t many ed-tech products that have developed a cult following, a phrase that appears at the foot of the Wikipedia entry for AlphaSmart, a “smart keyboard” first marketed to schools in the 1990s. Indeed, while the AlphaSmart product line was discontinued a couple of years ago, aftermarket sales of...

Education Politics Presidential candidate and clown Donald Trump “criticized the federal government for earning a profit on the federal student loan program,” Inside Higher Ed reports. (Remember that time Trump ran a for-profit “university” that got fined by New York state because it wasn’t accredited and was making false claims?...

Education Politics No Child Left Behind looks to be replaced by another set of meaningless words: “the Every Child Achieves Act,” which passed the Senate this week. The House’s version, “the Student Success Act” passed last week, so it’s on to committee. “The Senate’s plan to replace No Child Left...