Hack Education

Steve Hargadon and I have been recording our weekly podcast together for about four months now, talking our way through the ed-tech news and the articles I've written over the course of a week. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all...

Pepper Sprays Student protesting a tuition hike at Santa Monica College were pepper-sprayed by campus police. The college has defended the action saying that the police offer was forced to release the spray in order to "preserve public and personal safety." The protests were in part due to a plan...

Earlier this year, I applied for the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia University. The year-long fellowship provides three education journalists with a stipend to spend the year at the school, working with professors in the education and journalism department and working on a long-form writing project on the subject...

The Promise of "Personalized Learning" When the educational publishing giant Pearson and the adaptive learning startup Knewton announced their partnership late last year, it was heralded as a watershed moment for the longstanding promise of computer-based "personalized learning." But Pearson is hardly the only textbook publisher interested in making its...

Boundless Learning can boast a bunch of features that make it sound like an incredibly promising education startup: it's focused on open educational resources. It's rethinking the textbook. It's student-focused. It's got a great set of advisors, including folks from Creative Commons, Connexions, MIT, and O'Reilly Media (disclosure: I also...

Nobody Wants to Learn to Program Last month Al Sweigart, author of Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, penned a blog post with a fairly provocative (and perhaps a bit misleading) title: "Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program." In it, he contends that people ("primarily techies," he adds)...

My look at the Minerva Project, a new online, for-profit "elite university" that announced today it's raised $25 million in seed funding from Benchmark Capital. There's a lot of interesting stuff here -- the CEO's vision for creating an "elite university" in an age of ubiquitous and free high-quality educational...

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, we spent a lot of time talking about the surprising news from Blackboard, with its...

Breaking Journalism The American Journalism Review has just published a searing condemnation by Washington Post contributor Paul Farhi of the state of education journalism, much of which, it contends, reinforces a narrative that the U.S. school system is failing -- a narrative supported by "self-styled education reformers," but refuted by...

Acquisitions Typically, I lead off my weekly news roundup with politics and legalities, as I think that those frame -- whether we like it or not -- shape the direction that the education industry takes. But this week, clearly, the big news wasn't from DC -- unless, I suppose, you...