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. 0:00:  Steve sings "Happy Birthday" to Hack Education, and we discuss two years of blogging here on...

Warning: I write lousy gadget reviews. It’s difficult for me to not judge devices based on my own needs and usage patterns. As someone who spends her days on the road and on a computer, those needs and usage patterns aren’t normal. That’s compounded too when reviewing educational hardware and/or...

RIP Ray Bradbury It was sadly and beautifully fitting that Ray Bradbury died on Tuesday, the day of the Venus Transit, a celestial event that will not happen again for another 105 years. The short story “All Summer in a Day,” about a class of students on Venus, was the first...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed Lately when I write about MOOCs (and I admit, I do write about MOOCs a lot lately), I feel the need to attach a bunch of adjectives to clarify what I mean by the term: the Stanford-model MOOC. New MOOCs. The OG MOOC. The ur-MOOC. The MOOCs-come-lately. VC MOOCs. Tech MOOCs. Mother of all...

I don’t like going to campus much. Even though it’s been years since I left grad school, I still fear I’ll run into a member of my committee if I'm on or near the university.  They’ll ask me how my dissertation’s coming along and when I’ll finish. (I always run...

You can learn a lot about a (education) startup if you listen to a founder tell its origin story – how she came to identify a problem, and how she devised the solution. You can ascertain a lot about mission and trajectory based on how she frames that narrative. Khan...

Two years ago today, I published my first blog post here on Hack Education. At the time, I was a technology blogger for ReadWriteWeb, feeling intensely frustrated that I was admonished for wanting to write about ed-tech. “No one cares,” the editors said. “Not enough pageviews.” So I bought this...

Facebook to Open Its Doors to Under–13-year-olds? The Wall Street Journal reported last night that Facebook is “developing technology that would allow children younger than 13 years old to use the social-networking site under parental supervision, a step that could help the company tap a new pool of users for...

Cross-posted at e-Literate Much of the mainstream media attention paid to MOOCs lately has involved the content, the credentialing, the cost, the class size. But what about the technology? It was (not surprisingly) Stephen Downes’ OLDaily that got me thinking about what can we glean about MOOCs based on their infrastructure. Last...

Edmodo hopes to make the move from "app" to "platform," with the opening today of its API to third-party Web developers. At launch, Edmodo boasts some 35 partners who have already developed apps for the new platform -- these include Mathalicious, Late Nite Labs, Desmos, BrainNook, Aviary and (30) others....