Hack Education

Law and Politics In this week’s best “LOL,” New York Times’ Thomas Friedman penned an op-ed “nominating” Arne Duncan as Secretary of State. “Trust me,” he writes, “if you can cut such deals with Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, you can do them with...

Part 4 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series “Flipping the classroom” is hardly new. But with all the hype surrounding both Khan Academy and MOOCs, it’s hardly surprising that the practice became incredibly popular this year. Indeed, in his 2011 TED Talk (which has been watched over 2...

Part 3 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Code Year It was sheer marketing genius: the announcement on January 1 by the learn-to-program startup Codecademy that 2012 should be “Code Year.” With an initiative timed with the making of New Year’s resolutions (and timed too to coincide with...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. Well, almost every week. We skipped a week, which means that the podcast we recorded on Saturday runs a little long. In fact, it runs a lot long. We cover two weeks' worth of...

Law and Politics A federal appeals court deemed on Wednesday that Michigan’s ban on affirmative action as part of the college admissions process is unconstitutional. The state says it will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments last month about affirmative action and Texas universities. A high school...

Part 2 of Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Making I attend a lot of education events — ed-tech conferences, unconferences, camps, workshops, meetups, meetings. But my favorite by a long shot has always been Maker Faire. You can mark your calendars now for the 2013 flagship events (May 18–19...

Part 1 of my Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012 series Last year when I wrote about the top 10 trends in ed-tech, I saved “The Business of Ed-Tech” for the penultimate post. I’m starting my series there this time around. There’ll be plenty of opportunity throughout these year-end posts of...

Learning is not a product. It’s a process. Nevertheless, educational policies, practices, and technologies often frame it as object, as content, as “thing” — as a noun, not a verb. How we conceptualize education and learning — which part of speech is it? do we focus on the subjects or...

Online Classes, Credits, and Tests  The American Council on Education announced this week that it will review several Coursera classes to see if they’re eligible for inclusion in the its “College Credit Recommendation Service.” As The Chronicle of Higher Education writes, “That service has been around since the 1970s and focuses...

2012 has been another banner year for Internet memes. Call Me Maybe. Hey Girl. Binders Full of Women. Texts from Hillary. Recently University of Regina education professor Alec Couros made the case that memes are “an emerging information literacy and their study is important for comprehending the way in which information...