Hack Education

This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners What is “Innovation”? What is “innovation”? What do we mean by the term? Who uses it? And how? Where does this concept come from? Where is a fixation with “innovation" taking us? Does invoking the term “innovation” serve to describe practices? Or...

For the second week in a row, I am compelled to open my round-up of education-related stories with news of ongoing harassment and threats against women in technology. This week, it's a look at #Gamergate, which has been going on for months now, but this week escalated to new levels....

This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners Widespread adoption of games in education always seems to be “on the horizon” – never quite fully accepted or integrated into schooling despite the long-standing excitement about games’ educational potential. There are a number of reasons for this, least of which being...

I think it’s fair to say it’s been a particularly difficult week for women in technology. The Grace Hopper Celebration decided to invite a panel of “male allies” to talk about fixing sexism in tech. (Panel members included the CEO of GoDaddy, known best perhaps for its sexist advertising campaigns)....

Student Protests This week marks the 50th anniversary of the arrest of Jack Weinberg for distributing leaflets about the civil rights movement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Weinberg sat in the back of a police car for over 32 hours while thousands of students gathered around...

Earlier this week, the XPRIZE organization announced its latest competition: a $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE — "a five-year competition challenging teams to develop open source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.” The announcement was heralded by all...

This week was Banned Books Week, so I hope you engaged in some subversive reading. Education Law and Politics Hundreds of students from high schools in the Jefferson County (Colorado) school district have staged protests over new curriculum review committee that would “promote patriotism, respect for authority and free enterprise...

(A version of this article appeared in Knowledge Quest’s September/October issue.) Education technologies will reshape the ways in which we teach and learn, the ways in which we read and write and communicate — or that’s the promise at least. Indeed new hardware and new software are often marketed to...

The Teacher Wars: A Book Review Teaching is, according to the subtitle of education journalist Dana Goldstein’s new book, “America’s Most Embattled Profession.” “No other profession,” she argues, ”operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare...

Education Law and Politics Rolling Jubilee, a group that grew out of the Occupy Movement, announced this week that it has purchased “for about three cents on the dollar, of nearly four million dollars’ worth of private debt from Everest College, which is part of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges system....