Hack Education

In 2010, as a blogger at ReadWriteWeb, I was assigned to write the year-end post on the “Top 10 Startups.” In those days before the recent return of the tech IPO, I wanted to devise a list that wasn’t dominated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. So I...

MOOCs This is the way "Year Two of the MOOCs" ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. Hell, not even a whimper. No MOOC news this week! Education and The Law Queen Elizabeth II pardoned the computer pioneer Alan Turing on Christmas Eve. Despite his crucial role in helping...

Yesterday, I wrapped up my year-end series on the Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013. Good riddance to 2013. (Good riddance to the series.) Seriously though: It’s a project that takes me an incredibly long time to do — to review everything that’s happened in ed-tech throughout the year and to...

1. "Zombie Ideas" 2. The Politics of Education/Technology 3. Standards 4. MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs 5. Coding and "Making" 6. Hardware 7. Data vs Privacy 8. The Battle for "Open" 9. What Counts "For Credit" 10. The Business of Ed-Tech

Part 10 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2013 series “Education is broken, and someone should fix it.” It’s not a new narrative. Nor is the pressure for schools to adopt practices from the business world so as to improve outcomes and efficiency (or to outsource services to the...

Quite a busy week as everyone crams their year-end news into the final working days of the year… Education Politics This is how much your kid’s school budget has been cut. New Jersey governor Chris Christie says he will sign legislation that would allow undocumented immigrants in New Jersey to...

Part 9 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2013 series This trend is one of the few this year that I haven’t explicitly covered in years past: what’s happening to “the credit” – the credit hour, accreditation, and so on. What counts for credit? Who counts these alternatives? What are they worth? This...

Part 8 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2013 series As with the trend of “data,” “open” is something I’ve touched upon in each of my annual year-end reviews (in 2011 and 2012. Again, I recommend reading those posts to gain a sense of past, present, and future). In...

The "Hour of Code" According to Code.org, the organization that’s spearheaded this week’s push to teach more students computer science, over 13.7 million students have “learned an hour of code” this week. Chicago Public Schools says it will add computer science as a core subject, instead of an elective, in...

Part 7 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2013 series This is the third year in a row that I've chosen "data" as one of the "top trends" in ed-tech. (See 2011, 2012) If you're looking for a sunnier view of data in education, read those. 2013, in my opinion,...