Hack Education

Happy 3rd anniversary to DS106 Radio, a live-streaming station that grew out of the University of Mary Washington DS 106 course. Law and Politics Maryland schools will need $100 million in technology upgrades in order to be prepared for the new online testing required by the Common Core State Standards....

Announcing a new education site (and accompanying newsletter): Educating Modern Learners. In the past few years, we have seen a renewed interest in education technology — among educators, tech entrepreneurs, politicians, parents, and kids alike (and, for better or worse, in the popular media too). And yet far too often,...

RIP, “The Professor” The actor Russell Johnson passed away this week. He was best known for playing Roy Hinkley, “The Professor” on Gilligan’s Island. (TV Trivia: The Professor was a high school science teacher, not a college prof.) Politics An appeals court this week struck down the FCC’s “net neutrality”...

Oops. I forgot to post my notes from a webinar I gave last year. I was asked to speak about "The State of OER" to AMICAL, a consortium of American liberal arts universities outside the US. No big surprise, I spoke about how MOOCs were dominating a lot of the...

Oops, I forgot to post the notes from my talk in Paris in December when I spoke at API Days. I was the killjoy who said we might want to think not simply about the wonders of technology, but about the cultural and political implications of APIs -- of opening...

Brrrrrrrrrr! Polar Vortex! Brutally cold weather across much of North America closed schools for several days this week. "Yay! Snow day!" cheered teachers and students. Others grumbled. Why? According to The Atlantic, school wasn’t closed for bad weather during Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life (circa 1880s), proving “we’ve all gone soft.” Of...

Three pronouncements this week. Three lists of innovators and intellectuals in education: From Forbes, its annual “30 Under 30” list From the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess, “The 2014 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings” From Politico’s Dylan Byers, a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pronouncements about Melissa Harris-Perry and his own...

Last January, I opted to forego making ed-tech predictions for 2013. I’m sticking with that decision again this year. After all, I’ve spent the last 7 or 8 weeks writing at length about what I saw as 2013’s most important ed-tech trends. It’s not as though these will cease to...

Education and the Law Inside Higher Ed reports that a San Francisco Superior Court judge has granted a partial injunction to block the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) from revoking the accreditation of the City College of San Francisco. (As I noted in one of my year-end...

1. The Real Reason I Dropped Out of a PhD Program, August 29, 2012 2. Hacking at Education: TED, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall, March 3, 20133. Codecademy and the Future of (Not) Learning to Code, October 28, 2011 4. The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are...