Hack Education

News Timed for Release at SXSWedu This past week was the fourth annual SXSWedu event in Austin. Speakers included Diane Ravitch, Texas State Senator (and gubernatorial candidate) Wendy Davis, Michelle Rhee, the College Board's David Coleman, Sal Khan, Chuck E. Cheese founder Nolan Bushnell, and Arrested Development actor Jeffrey Tambor....

This again. I got home late last night after a 5 day stint in Austin, Texas for SXSWedu – the first time I made it through the entire event without bursting into tears. Some of those tears do come from exhaustion, to be sure – the late nights, the intensity...

Education Politics Arizona State Senator Al Melvin is terribly concerned about the Common Core State Standards. “Some of the reading material is borderline pornographic,” he said during an education committee meeting. Even worse? The math portion substitutes letters for numbers. As Wonkette writes, “Thank goodness Melvin paid attention to the...

Law and Politics Michael Dunn was convicted on three counts of attempted murder but was found not guilty of killing Jordan Davis, the 17 year old African-American who Dunn shot and killed in November 2012 over a dispute about Davis’s loud music. The shooting and the verdict, both in Florida,...

RIP Stuart Hall Cultural theorist Stuart Hall passed away this week. He was 82. His work on race, power, culture, class, gender, and identity had an immense effect on my own scholarship, but also shaped how I think of myself as a beneficiary of “Empire.” I thank him immensely for...

Education Politics As part of the restructuring of the E-Rate program, the FCC announced it will double (to $2 billion) its spending on broadband for schools and libraries. And as part of the push for more broadband in schools, President Obama also announced commitments from various technology companies, including Apple...

I gave the keynote this morning at the EdTechTeacher iPad Summit in San Diego. I wanted to talk about the history of ed-tech -- about how we ended up with technologies that are in many cases simply making old (awful) educational practices more efficient. I asked a room full of...

The State of the Union is… President Obama delivered the State of the Union address Tuesday night, and the fifth word was “teacher.” So I guess we can forgive him for all his administration’s horrid education policies now. (Here’s a closer look at the speech’s “education highlights.”) In Other Political...

I can’t really remember the particular event that prompted me to send a message to my friend José Vilson, saying “We need to propose an Educon session on ‘privilege.’” It might have been someone in a position of power in education arguing that “others” just need to learn to be...

[View the story "The Hype and the Hope of MOOCs #moocdebate" on Storify]