Hack Education

To Save Everything, Click Here Since the publication of his first book, The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov has become one of the fiercest critics of the sweeping and giddy proclamations we hear about the liberatory power of Internet technologies. Morozov skewers with brilliant ferocity many of today’s best known “cyberintellectuals”...

Law and Politics Thanks to the across-the-board budget cuts resulting from the sequester, NASA has suspended its public outreach and education programs, effective immediately. Good job, Congress. Way to support STEM education. And because the U.S. legislative leaders are such smarty pants, they’re also making moves to restrict the National...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed “What has the impact been of MOOCs on MIT OCW usage?” Matthew Rascoff (@mzrascoff) tweeted earlier this week. It’s a great question. Have massive open online classes spurred more interest in MIT Open Courseware — that is, those freely available and openly licensed course materials...

It’s a story I’ve long been meaning to write: “update on edu startups I covered last year.” I’m taking a first stab at it here, prompted by some poking around in the Crunchbase (startup funding) database and by comments on a blog post where I talk about doing so. My...

Following the slew of recent startup acquisitions, pivots, closures, and resignations (along with a couple of emails from entrepreneurs hinting that their company is weighing some of these options), I thought I’d take a look back at the last few years’ worth of ed-tech startup history: Who’s been funded? How...

Education Politics Legislation was introduced in the California Senate this week that, if passed, could drastically reshape public higher education as we know it. SB520, authored by President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, will require the state’s public colleges and universities to accept credit for certain online classes if a student...

On Loving (and Leaving) LearnBoost Rafael Corrales, co-founder and CEO of one of my favorite education technology startups, LearnBoost, recently announced that he has stepped down from the helm of the company and has moved on to join a venture capital firm. I admit: I’m fairly devastated by this news....

Law and Politics Tanya McDowell, a Connecticut mother accused of fraudulently enrolling her child in a Norwalk school, plead guilty in court this week and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. (She was also charged with drug possession.) McDowell, who was homeless at the time, used a babysitter’s address...

I gave the keynote today at WebWise 2013, and I have to say, after a long week at SXSWedu, I was pretty happy to be able to be around a bunch of librarians and archivists. The theme of this year's WebWise was "Putting the Learner at the Center," and my...

“Keep Austin weird.” That’s been a long-time slogan of the Texas town, adopted by the local business and artist community. It's a slogan that has always worked well in conjunction with the annual SXSW festival. I like that weirdness, Austin’s blend of indie, counter- and subculture traditions. But when I...