Hack Education

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed The Evolution of the LMS It seems as though the education world is still reeling from Monday's surprising news that Blackboard is acquiring Moodle support services Moodlerooms and Netstop, launching an open source initiative, and purportedly shifting its focus away from just its own LMS to support...

I was a guest on this week's Mozilla Webmaker Community call, where I talked about my research into the best way the organization can support a future generation of Web-makers. Below are my notes, and here's a link to the post Mozilla's Matt Thompson wrote, which contains some of the...

A look at GoodSemester which founder Jason Rappaport demoed for me on Monday, insisting it is not an LMS. But with Monday's big LMS hubbub, I decided to wait a day to post this story nonetheless. You can read about GoodSemester, which is a little bit Evernote, a little bit...

I'm a big fan of Kickstarter, as I love how crowdfunding platform brings fundraising for all manner of creative projects to the general public. It's the community at large that supports these endeavors -- books, films, hardware, art, what have you -- not just investors or philanthropists or banks or...

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. We actually missed our weekly podcast last week, thanks to the demands of our travel/conferences schedules.  But we were...

Blackboard has just announced its acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, two companies that help provide support and deployment services for schools that use the open-source LMS Moodle. "Wait. What?" is an acceptable, albeit mild response. This is, after all, the LMS giant -- one that once claimed the patent on...

Politics and Policies Lots of news this week about employers demanding employees hand over the keys to their Facebook accounts -- whether it's in order to be hired or remain employed. For its own part, Facebook issued a statement this week about password privacy, indicating that it might sue companies...

Ed-tech as MacGuffin... Ed-tech objects do make good MacGuffins nonetheless. The hardware, the software, the online content -- they're all very compelling. They generate plenty of that initial intrigue and interest. We want the new iPad, for example, because it's new. It's shiny. It is attractive. It is desirable. We...

I chose "data" as one of the most important ed-tech trends of 2011, and it's one that continues to gain steam this year as well. But as it does so -- as education becomes increasingly "data-driven" -- there are numerous challenges and repercussions, many of which have a lot more...

Born out of Startup Weekend EDU in Washington DC last fall, ThreeRing has been hard at work over the past few months transforming its initial idea and prototype into a working application and a brand new startup. Earlier this month, ThreeRing launched its open beta with two apps -- one...