Hack Education

This post first appeared on aud.life The abstract for my forthcoming chapter in Routledge's World of Learning: A myth is a culture's most sacred story, often about that culture's origins, often accepted as unassailably true. What are the myths that Silicon Valley tells about its origins? And as Silicon Valley...

In the fall of 1984, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen – then the CEO of Lego (and grandson of its founder) – happened to watch a television interview featuring MIT professor Seymour Papert. In it, Papert demonstrated how children could use the programming language he’d developed, LOGO, to control robot “turtles” –...

Education Politics Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) have negotiated a bipartisan revision to ESEA. According to The New York Times, “The bill retains the requirement for yearly tests in math and reading for every student in third through eighth grade, and once in high school, and requires...

This talk was delivered virtually today at Western Oregon University. The slide deck is available here. “Education is the civil rights issue of our time,” you’ll often hear politicians and education reform types say. Here’s US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan back in 2010, for example: Education is still the...

This post first appeared on aud.life In the ... working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other...

"I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible. The science fiction books I like tend to relate to what we're doing at Khan Academy, like Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' series and Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' series." -" Salman Khan Arguably the first work of...

This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners in January 2015 Although I spend a lot of time looking at the past and the present of education technology, I'm just not that good at predicting the future. Back in January 2012, for example, I wrote a New Year's blog post...

You can trace the history of ed-tech through many education philosophies and through many technologies. Too often we fail to trace that history at all – a pity because then we don’t think about the trajectory that our storytelling places us on. And too often, we focus simply on technologies...

I’m trying to keep better track of who’s investing in education technology startups this year – if nothing else, it’ll make it easier to write my year-in-review series, come December. Lots of other publications do the same, but their reports often cost money; and I want the data to not...

Education in the Courts 11 Atlanta educators were convicted of racketeering this week for their role in the Atlanta Public Schools’ cheating scandal. They face 20 years in prison. (Other educators charged similar crimes elsewhere have been charged with fraud and forgery, and their sentences have been nowhere near as...