Hack Education

RIP Aaron Swartz One week since the suicide of 26-year-old hacker-activist Aaron Swartz, we are still reeling from the loss. Early Redditer, founder of Demand Progress, and co-developer of many important Web technologies including RSS, Swartz was facing multiple federal charges for allegedly “stealing” some 4 million digital documents, downloaded...

I'm writing a book this year, and as such I'm going to blog less. But I don't think that's going to affect the podcast that Steve Hargadon and I record weekly(ish). We'll continue to record it weekly(ish) as I really do find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking...

Take note, folks. It’s here: “MOOCs” for credit. California Governor Jerry Brown, San Jose State University President Mo Qayoumi, and Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun held a press conference this morning to announce a pilot program that marks a first for the state: San Jose State will award college credits...

Today I counted the number of posts I’ve written on Hack Education since January 1: only 7. I’m on track — well, as of Week 2 of 2013, ha ha ha — to blog here half as often as I did in 2012. But that’s okay. I’m writing a book. (More...

Law and Politics Michelle Rhee’s new ed-reform lobbying effort “StudentsFirst” released a report card this week, with grades for all fifty states plus Washington DC based on their education laws and policies. The best grades went to Louisiana and Florida — they earned B-’s. No relation between these grades and...

The UC Regents will meet next week. On the agenda: a discussion of online education at the University of California. That discussion will serve as a follow-up to Governor Jerry Brown’s speech at the November meeting. Then he argued that technology was poised to “disrupt” higher education, much as it...

Again this year, I'm using Storify to gather notes and tweets and whatnot from the events I attend. Today's event: "Rebooting CA Higher Education," an event sponsored by the Twenty Million Minds Foundation on the UCLA Campus. There was a livestream of the event, but the audio and video were...

“Children learn best when they are actively engaged in constructing something that has a personal meaning to them – be it a poem, a robot, a sandcastle, or a computer program.” — Seymour Papert The Next Generation of Mindstorms LEGO Education unveils the latest generation of its Mindstorms robotics education...

Law and Politics Perhaps in the hopes of burying the news over the holiday break, Newark released emails late on Christmas Eve pertaining to the $100 million donation that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had given to it back in 2010. The ACLU had sued the city on behalf of local...

Late on Christmas Eve, the City of Newark released dozens of emails (as PDFs) relating to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to its schools back in the fall of 2010. It did so to comply with a Superior Court order, following a lawsuit by the ACLU on behalf...