Hack Education

News of cuts to the Computer Science Department at the University of Florida hit the Web this weekend. Shock and outrage ensued, particularly in tech and education circles, fueled in no small part by the headline of the Forbes story that brought this to most people’s attention: “University of Florida...

The long-awaited Google Drive is finally here. The new product, launching today and available at drive.google.com, offers users 5 GB of file storage and syncing and effectively replaces Google Docs (which has offered file storage for a couple of years.) Google Drive also replaces the editing, file-creation and file-sharing features...

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. This week' podcast was a particularly impassioned one, what with talk of robot essay graders and with...

Search/Research I remember going to the library as a kid to work on a research project for school. The first stop was typically the card catalog. From there, the stacks. Or I’d start with the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals and then check out the magazines and journals. I’d wander through...

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about two seemingly unrelated news items. The first, the research by David Shermis and Ben Hamner that found that automated essay grading software performs comparably to human graders. (See the Inside Higher Ed story.) The second, the official unveiling of Coursera, the latest online learning startup to...

Education’s Davos? Some 800 investors, entrepreneurs, and politicians met at ASU Skysong this week for the Education Innovation Summit. That Innosight Institute’s Michael Horn called it “Davos in the Desert” speaks volumes I think: the political and economic elite gather to discuss “problems” that they can resolve neatly and profitably....

Your silence will not protect you -- Audre Lorde This hasn’t been a good week for me. An air travel snafu combined with some family issues meant I missed an event where I was scheduled to speak; and now I’ve been stuck in Eugene, Oregon for far too long. A...

The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia often gets a bum rap for being a poor source of information, and many educators discourage – or even ban – their students from using the site. But Wikipedia has been making a concerted effort in recent years to build alliances with academia, aiming not just...

More MOOCs Last fall, 3 Stanford classes were offered free, online, and open to the general public: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Intro to Databases. Their popularity far exceeded the university’s initial expectations from what I can gather – hundreds of thousands of students in a class’ll do that, I suppose....

It’s hard to know where to begin in describing the iOS app Tapikeo, which just received a fairly substantial update to its iPad version (iTunes, $2.99). “Audio picturebook creator” really doesn’t do it justice. Nor does “flashcard maker.” Nor does “storyboard creation tool.” Nor does AAC app. It’s all of...