Hack Education

RIP RIP Deah Barakat (age 23). Yusor Mohammad (age 21). Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. (age 19). Deah Barakat was a dental student at UNC. Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha had started her architecture degree at North Carolina State University. They were murdered this week by a neighbor. They were full of hope and...

February 12 marks the 25th anniversary of the first school one-to-one laptop program. That is, one computing device for each student. Contrary to a narrative that posits education technology is new and all education technology innovation originates in Cupertino, California (that is, Apple’s headquarters) or Redmond, Washington (Microsoft’s) or even...

The Rise of Programmed Instruction In the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two, a small group - a couple of academics, two of their former students and their girlfriends - visit an intentional community established by a former colleague, T. E. Frazier. The novel’s narrator, Professor Burris, a university psychology professor,...

Education Politics President Obama unveiled his budget this week. (The data is on GitHub.) Among the education-related items: an increase in $2.7 billion for Elementary and Secondary Education Act programs, including $1 billion for Title I; more details on “America’s College Promise” (that is, two years of free community college);...

Note: Kin has this very smart work-hack where he takes email inquiries – particularly those that he receives again and again and again – and turns them into blog posts. Then, instead of responding to each at length, he can respond with a link to said blog post. I received...

“For a number of years the writer has had it in mind that a simple machine for automatic testing of intelligence or information was entirely within the realm of possibility. The modern objective test, with its definite systemization of procedure and objectivity of scoring, naturally suggests such a development. Further,...

B. F. Skinner is often credited as the inventor of the “teaching machine.” While no doubt the phrase is often associated with his name and with his behaviorist theories, he was hardly the first person to design a machine for teaching. But identifying who was "the first" poses a challenge,...

When I went to write my year-in-review post in December on “The Business of Ed-Tech,” I realized that I didn’t have the numbers I needed to calculate investment levels or to identify the biggest rounds of funding and the most active investors. So I swore I’d pick up a project...

Education Politics Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (and Republican presidential candidate hopeful) announced a $300 million budget cut to the state’s higher education system, couching it in terms of “independence.” He says that the plan will make universities "do things that they have not traditionally done" – including require professors teach...

Why multiple choice? It’s a question that’s plagued me for a long time, particularly as someone who grew up with one foot in the American and one foot in the British education system. (The former involved a lot of multiple choice testing; the latter, almost none.) Where and when did...