Hack Education

I gave my first (and probably last) TEDx talk this weekend at TEDxNYED on the topic of ed-tech, science fiction, and ethics. Unfortunately (or fortunately -- depending on how you view things), the livestream wasn't working. I'll post a video if and when it becomes available (although I'm not sure...

Politics Maine’s Department of Education announced that Hewlett Packard has been awarded the contract for the state’s laptop program, making it the "primary technology and learning solution." Students will begin receiving their Hewlett Packard ProBook 4440s running Windows 8 in the fall (there will be some leeway to purchase others...

Politics and Pursestrings Senator Charles “Chuck” Grassley (R-Iowa) is seeking to defund the Common Core State Standards. Grassley’s asked Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to include verbiage to that end in the Department of Education’s funding measure. A bill to create a “New University of California,” an exam-centric, credit-delivery school with...

As the chorus crescendoes: “Don’t go back to school,” I’m fairly happy to sing along. I mean, I didn’t finish high school in the US (was sent to school in the UK instead), dropped out of college (then got pregnant), finished my Bachelors with my baby (then toddler) in my...

Law and Politics President Obama has put forth his 2014 budget, and the education portion proposes to wipe away all outstanding student loan debt, fund free preschool for all children, bring about an end to high stakes standardized testing and an end to Race to the Top, provide free health...

I spent last weekend at the MIT Media Lab, thanks to an invitation from P2PU’s Philipp Schmidt, for an “open learning hackathon.” When I think of “open learning,” I think about the “open Web.” And for me, it isn’t simply a matter of what’s becoming a rather tired cliché that...

Facebook and the Gates Foundation have teamed up (again) to hold education hackathons at the social networking giant’s Menlo Park and London offices this month. The name of the event: HackEd. Needless to say, nobody from this similarly named blog was invited. I’m not surprised. I fit into neither the...

Happy 30th anniversary to A Nation at Risk, and congratulations to all the reformers who’ve managed to maintain the chant that “schools are broken” with such steady determination for three decades! Law and Politics A new bill proposed in the California state legislature would create a fourth division of the...

There has been an incredible amount of hype and fear and confusion and excitement surrounding inBloom, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative to build a new data infrastructure for public schools. One such promise: better interoperability will streamline schools’ handling of data. Another promise: more access to student data will help companies...

Education Law and Politics Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Chicago this week to protest the city’s plans to close 53 elementary schools and one high school. Dozens were arrested. African American students account for 90% of those affected by school closings, even though they make up just...