Hack Education

Law and Politics An update to COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, went into effect July 1. The FTC says that the new language strengthens privacy protections, but as I noted when the update was revealed last year, it certainly reflects lobbying from the technology industry, particularly when it...

The Law In a 7–1 decision, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, sending the affirmative action case back to a lower court. More details about the decision and how it will (or won’t) change university admissions at Inside Higher Ed. The Supreme...

Happy 40th birthday to the distance learning pioneer, Open University! Policies, Politics, and Procurements The Board of Education for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the US, has approved a $30 million contract with Apple to buy iPads for students in 47 schools. As...

I’m skipping ISTE this year. And I’ll confess: for the first time since I quit working at ISTE, I’m fairly relieved to not be going. I made the decision in part because I’m working hard on my book, and traveling costs too much – too much time and too much...

My boyfriend Kin Lane, "the API Evangelist," and I gave this morning's keynote at InstructureCon. So yeah, I had to go on stage after MC Hammer opened the event last night. Tough act to follow. But I didn't cuss. Below are our slides and a rough version of what I...

MOOCs, MOOCs, MOOCs, and MOO-Clickers* Former Zynga COO Vish Makhijami will take over that role at Udacity. Some weeks, the jokes just write themselves. This is one of those weeks... Speaking of which, congratulations to DecydEd, which wins for the worst name for a MOOC startup… heck any education startup…...

Sorry for the light posting here, but I’m immersed in writing my book – Teaching Machines – which is due out late 2013/early 2014 (I hope). However, the news of this past week has been fairly distracting from that project: revelations about the US government’s massive spying programs that include...

Big Data Stories Lots of revelations this week about government data mining efforts: On Wednesday, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reported that the NSA is collecting the phone records of all Verizon customers, and on Thursday he reported on PRISM, an NSA program that gathers data from major technology companies, including...

OMG, MOOCs This week, Coursera announced a series of deals with 9 state university systems: the State University of New York, the University of Tennessee system, The Tennessee Board of Regents, the University of Colorado system, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky (The Chronicle of Higher Education...

A devastating tornado razed much of Moore, Oklahoma on Monday, killing 24 people, including 7 children who were in the elementary schools that were destroyed. You can donate to the American Red Cross’s Disaster Relief fund here. Law and Politics The Chicago Public Schools Board of Education — appointees of...