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. In this week's podcast we discuss: 0:33:  One Laptop Per Child and standardized testing. How do we...

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve...

Udacity, the online learning startup that spun out of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence MOOC last year, is wrapping up its first courses, with final exams due this week and grades soon to follow. After 7 weeks in “CS101: Building a Search Engine,” I received the end-of-term email from Udacity: “Congratulations to...

The Best Learning Story of the Week The Legal and the Political The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week charging that Apple and 5 of the world’s largest publishers colluded to fix the price of e-books. (The Hachette Book Group, CBS-owned Simon & Schuster, and News Corp’s HarperCollins...

When I was a tech blogger for ReadWriteWeb and API-related news broke, we writers would often shudder. “Well, you can’t use API in the headline,” the argument in the newsroom went. It’s the page-view-kiss-of-death. That’s not because APIs aren’t super-important or super-ubiquitous on the Web (they are both). It’s because...

Crowdfunding projects through sites like Kickstarter has become incredibly popular lately. Can the same process of opening up funding to "the crowd" work for academic and scientific research? A new site called Microryza launches today to do just that. But founder Denny Luan insists that this isn't just another Kickstarter...

Nope. I did not write a story about Facebook's news today: the official announcement of a Facebook groups for .edu. The social networking giant will now "go back to its roots" as many headlines read today, offering exclusive groups for universities. I had a lot of questions about the news,...

My mom kept all my report cards. I've got them in a box, along with various diplomas, special projects, letters of recognition, and certificates. My unofficial college transcripts are in there too, along with a copy of my GRE test scores. I don't know what happened to my SAT scores....

The Department of Education released a draft report about big data and education today. It's called "Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics," a title that's unlikely to win any converts to the notion of a data-curious* view of learning. Part of what's going to get...

"25 million laptops later," Mashable announced today, "One Laptop Per Child doesn't increase test scores." "Error Message," reads the headline from The Economist: "A disappointing return from an investment in computing." The tenor of these stories feels like a grand "Gotcha!" for ed-tech: It's shiny stuff, sure, but it offers no...