Hack Education

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. I think we managed to record this week's show without any technical difficulties -- thank you, Google...

Politics and Policies Wednesday night was the first of the 2012 Presidential Debates. I didn’t watch, but thankfully folks who did posted their running commentary onto Twitter. As the debate covered domestic issues, the topic of education did come up, and the Hechinger Report looks at what the candidates said....

Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm, announced yesterday that it was opening up its research and sharing some of its hypotheses about tech startup markets and by extension its investment-making decisions. Kudos to USV because as is the case in many, many sectors, there are plenty...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed Digital course materials were supposed to make things easier for students. Rather than purchasing photocopied packets assembled from journal articles, book excerpts and the like, students could get PDFs — downloadable and readable online across multiple platforms, printable for offline studying. Of course, students haven’t...

I have chronicled my son’s graduation from high school, his opting to not go to college, his struggles to find work with no job history and no university diploma. But the decision he’s made for “what next” — he enlisted in the U.S. Army today — feels too personal and...

Does education technology need its own Consumer Reports — that is, a publication that independently reviews products and services? That’s the argument made by two economists in a recently-released paper for the Hamilton Project (funded by the Brookings Institution) which argues that without one, teachers, parents, and schools just don’t...

In May, I decided to re-institute a new monthly feature here, something that I used to write for MindShift: a post highlighting some of the new and updated educational apps that have been released over the past 30 days or so. Clearly this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the new educational...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. Apologies (once again!) for the quality of this recording. This time, it's the fault of Google Voice and Verizon -- the former is responsible for no Internet at Steve's location; the latter for the...

Updates and Upgrades Bret Victor has responded to Khan Academy’s new computer science curriculum with an amazing essay, Learnable Programming. This is a must-read. My favorite quote: “For fuck’s sake, read ‘Mindstorms’.” Indeed. I’m really really really hoping that, having claimed to have been so inspired by Victor’s Inventing on...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed Degreed, a startup that promises to “jailbreak the transcript” launched into beta this week. Degreed asks users about their formal and informal education — what college did you attend, what major did you pursue, what badges have you earned — and calculates an equivalency score...