Hack Education

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is...

MOOCs Udacity, Georgia Tech, and AT&T announced this week a partnership to offer an online Master’s Degree in Computer Science. The degree will cost less than $7000 (significantly cheaper than the MS that the university currently offers, in part because of the financial support for the program from AT&T), although...

Google Play for Education Google held its annual developer conference this week, and during Wednesday’s keynote, the company touted its work in education, including the growing adoption of Google Apps for Education (some 25+ million users worldwide) and Chromebooks (engineering exec Chris Yerga highlighted its recent country-wide implementation in Malaysia). The new news: Google also...

No Comment I’ve decided to no longer have comments on this blog. It’s been something I’ve been considering for a while now. Here’s what I wrote on my personal blog back in November as I weighed the decision. I’m copying it at length because my thoughts really haven’t changed much...

There’s a lot to like about the cellphone recording of 18-year-old Duncanville High School student Jeff Bliss — particularly if you view this as a viral video that demonstrates our desperate need to recognize students’ voice and agency in education. As Bliss is (apparently) being kicked out of class (for an...

Obligatory MOOC News Coursera, textbook publishers, and Chegg are teaming up to give students access to digital course materials for some Coursera classes. Those materials will be DRM’d, content can’t be copied, pasted, or printed, and access will go away at the end of the course. Viva la ed-tech revolution. The union representing...

The online learning startup Coursera and a handful of textbook publishers announced today that they’re teaming up to make certain digital course materials available to students enrolled in Coursera’s classes. Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will offer versions of their textbooks via an e-reader provided...

George Veletsianos (an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC) and I have submitted an application for Iversity’s MOOC production fellowship program. If funded, we will co-teach a course titled “Foundations of Educational Technology.” (If not funded, we’ll figure something else out…) The course...

MOOC News Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University penned an open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, famous for his class on “Justice.” ““There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX [the edX version of the Justice class] solves, nor do we have a...

I was a keynote speaker at this week's Ed-Tech Innovation conference in Alberta, Canada, and the transcript from that talk is below. I wanted to give a talk that expressed my deep gratitude to Canadian educators and researchers -- particularly those that created MOOCs -- alongside my concerns about the...