Hack Education

“Adaptive learning” might be one of the latest education technology buzzwords, one that’s often uttered alongside that other popular adjective “personalized.” But, like much in ed-tech, the concept is not new. (And like much in ed-tech, the “History” section for the Wikipedia entry on “adaptive learning” is woefully incomplete.) The...

Education Politics A student privacy bill was set to be introduced in Congress this week. Sponsored by Rep. Luke Messer and Rep. Jared Polis, the bill came under fire for doing little to protect student privacy – “It’s riddled with ‘huge loopholes’ and ‘escape clauses,’” EPIC’s Khaliah Barnes told Politico....

This review, co-authored with Sara Goldrick-Rab, first appeared on Inside Higher Ed Kevin Carey has written a book called The End of College – by which he means the end of college as we know it... and he feels fine. At least we assume he does, because The End of...

(Mostly this is the sort of thing I put on my personal blog and not Hack Education, but this is too important to let slide…) News broke late last week, thanks to Bob Braun’s Ledger, that Pearson is engaged in social media monitoring of those involved in the PARCC exams....

Schools and Surveillance Former Newark Star-Ledger reporter Bob Braun posted a photo of an email sent by a school superintendent this week, revealing that Pearson was actively monitoring students’ social media during PARCC exams. Cue: panic and mayhem. I wrote about this at length here. In his original story, Braun...

I still shudder at the thought of having to choose a reading assignment from among the multi-colored tabs in the big box of reading assignments at the back of my elementary school classroom. Don Parker described his development in 1950 of what became the ubiquitous SRA cards like this (PDF):...

Last Friday, former Star-Ledger education reporter Bob Braun posted a screenshot on his blog of an email by a New Jersey superintendent detailing a “Priority 1 Alert” issued by Pearson and the state department of education, alleging that a student had tweeted about a test question on the PARCC, causing...

Education Politics The FCC released details this week on its plans for “Net Neutrality” – that is, how it will regulate broadband. President Obama announced a $100 million TechHire initiative that “aims to convince local governments, businesses, and individuals that a four-year degree is no longer the only way to...

Arguably one of the most controversial pieces of education technology to enter the classroom has been the calculator. Certainly some classrooms long ago sanctioned the use of a different sort of calculating instrument, the slide rule. But the calculator seems to evoke all sorts of fears that students’ computational abilities...

This is the transcript of my talk, delivered virtually to Leeds Beckett University today. It is based on a talk I gave last year, “Men Explain Technology to Me: On Gender, Ed-Tech, and the Refusal to Be Silent.” Late last year, I gave a similarly titled talk – “Men Explain...