Hack Education

This article first appeared last year – during Computer Science Education Week – on Educating Modern Learners. It's Computer Science Education Week, and thanks to a major industry-funded initiative, many schools will be participating in an "Hour of Code." It's nice to see a growing interest in computer science, of...

Education Politics The US House of Representatives was supposed to vote last week on ESEA reauthorization, but the vote collapsed because of conservative opposition to the proposed bill. (“How a Conservative Blogger Helped Derail the House NCLB Rewrite.”) The Department of Education severed ties with five companies it had contracted...

On March 2, 2000, Maine Governor Angus King unveiled a new program “From Lunchboxes to Laptops,” officially known as the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. As the Bangor Daily News reported the following day, Starting in 2002 and then every year into the indefinite future, the state would provide each of...

This article first appeared on Educating Modern Learners "Personalization" is certainly one of the most popular and powerful buzzwords in education technology. A lot of hope and hype has been pinned on it. But it took a bit of a hit when the National Education Policy Center released a report...

Education Law and Politics The FCC voted 3–2 that broadband Internet will be regulated as a public utility. A win for Net Neutrality and the open Internet (but let's remember, none of this is really "neutral"). The US House of Representatives is working its way through the 40-some-odd amendments tacked...

“Education is deep in Apple’s DNA,” the company’s senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller said on stage at a press event in 2012 as Apple unveiled a number of new education-oriented features for the iPad. It was the first such event following the death of Steve Jobs, and the...

Education Politics Expanding on President Obama’s plan for two years of free community college education, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing “the federal government … give $18 billion a year in dollar-for-dollar matching grants to states, which he says would allow them to slash public college tuition by 55 percent....

(This was delivered at Ryerson University's ChangSchoolTalks.) It's a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge...

For over a decade now, the New Media Consortium has issued an annual Horizon Report, detailing the six technologies that it predicts will soon impact colleges and universities. These predictions identify emerging technologies on three “horizons”: four to five years, two to three years, and one year or less. The...

This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners A “Genius Hour.” “20% Time.” “An Hour of Code.” These ideas suggest that students should be allotted time during the school week to follow their own interests. But it this really a substantive or sustainable change? Google’s “20% time” — officially known...