Hack Education

This Week in Ed-Tech News: Making More Makers

Fri, 25 May 2012 15:47:35 PDT

Making More Makers

The Maker Education Initiative was announced at Maker Faire this past weekend. Sponsored by Intel, Cognizant and O’Reilly Media, the Maker Education Initiative will help “create more opportunities for young people to make, and, by making, build confidence, foster creativity, and spark interest in science, technology, engineering, math, the arts—and learning as a whole. We want young people to join—and eventually lead—the growing Maker Movement.”

Mozilla unveiled Mozilla Webmaker this week, “a new program to help people everywhere make, learn and play using the open building blocks of the web. The goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web.” Mozilla Webmaker will include tools like Hackasaurus and Popcorn and community efforts like Hive.

Politics and Policies

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney laid out his education platform this week. (The Washington Post has the complete transcript of his speech.) Among the “highlights,” allowing banks to once again make student loans, loosen restrictions on for-profit schools, offer vouchers that enable more “choice.” No mention of Common Core, special ed, or pre-K education, notes Dana Goldstein.

More Race to the Top races were announced by the Department of Education this week. This time, the competition for funding will be targeted at the district, not the state level. School districts will be able to compete for some $400 million in funding by creating “plans for individualized classroom instruction aimed at closing achievement gaps and preparing each student for college and career.” (It is without a shred of irony that “personalized learning” is DOE code for more assessments.)

Legalities

Judge Berman sentenced former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi to 30 days in jail for using a webcam to spy on his roommate. That roomate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide days after Ravi saw him kissing another man. 30 days is awfully short, but Slate’s Emily Bazelon argues the light sentence is the right length.

Launches

Social test prep company Grockit launched Learnist, a "Pinterest for education." See my coverage here for more details (and for invites).

The Atlantic’s Megan Garber covers the launch of Civitas Learning, “a digital-education platform that uses predictive analytics to help guide educational decision-making” founded by former Kaplan exec Charles Thornburgh. Hmmm, folks are moving away from test prep... I don't think I'm going to get my hopes up that less test prep means less testing though.

Updates

I’m not sure how new this feature is, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless: the learn-to-program site Udacity has beefed up the profiles for its students, enabling them to add more personal information (profile pictures, location, languages, etc), as well as upload resumes and other professionally relevent details. It’s all in the service of helping tech companies identify and recruit students from the site.

Acquisitions

Macmillan New Ventures, the corporate/development arm of the publisher Macmillan, has acquired the assessment company Education Benchmarking, Inc (EBI). The financial details were not disclosed.

Well, it’s not quite news about an acquisition – not yet at least, but McGraw-Hill held a press conference this week stating that it really wants to acquire education startups. (In other news about how McGraw-Hill wants to “innovate,” see its Forbes op-edabout requiring college students to purchase digital textbooks.)

Closures

A shout-out here that's full of respect and concern for George Mason University history professor T. Mills Kelly whose website and Twitter profile “went dark” this week following the Internet’s outrage and subsequent stupid jerkiness over his Lying about the Past class (in which he has students create and try to perpetuate a hoax online.) See The Atlantic’s coverage last week about the class’s assignments.

Research and Data

Inside Higher Ed’s Steve Kolowich reports on research by Ithaka that found that students enrolled in a “hybrid-format” statistics class (where they met with instructors once a week but otherwise moved through content via AI software) “took about one-quarter less time to achieve essentially the same learning outcomes as traditional-format students.” A win for the robo-tutors, says Kolowich. OMG, says me.

From The Atlantic, this sobering statistics: for the first time, a majority of the unemployed have attended college. This isn’t the argument that college degrees are irrelevent (see Peter Thiel on this past weekend’s 60 Minutes for more on that line of thinking); rather, it’s a reflection that while lots of students enroll, far fewer actually complete their college degrees.

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) released a report titled “The Broadband Imperative: Recommendations to Address K–12 Educational Infrastructure Needs.” As the name suggests, the report stresses the importance of high-speed Internet in providing students the educational resources they need in school.

The digital textbook provider CourseSmart released the results of a study on college students’ adoption of digital tools. Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader dives into the data, highlighting some of the stats – particularly about smartphone versus laptop versus iPad ownership – that point to the importance of cross-platform support for digital content.

Classes

The P2PU School of Ed unveiled a set of free and open professional development classes for K–12 educators that it plans to offer over the summer. Classes include: PhET Simulations for Science and Math, ePortfolios for Teachers, and Making Writing and Literacy Learning Connections.

Competitions

Google announced the 90 regional finalists in its online Science Fair, selected from the thousands of entries it received for the contests. Google will announce its 15 Science Fair finalists in the next few weeks. These students will travel to Mountain View in July for the final round of competition.

Campaigns

Worldreader, a non-profit that sends Kindles and by extension digital libraries to children in the developing world has launched a new campaign to raise funds to send 1 million e-readers to sub-Saharan Africa. Worldreader has partnered with FC Barcelona, not only to raise awareness of the campaign but to send children messages from their football favorites encouraging them to read.

Mathalicious is going back to the drawing board with its Kickstarter campaign (which I wrote about here). It’s canceled its initial fundraising effort and set the goal for its new campaign much, much lower. This means fewer Math52 videos, but I've backed this one again.

Contracts

In the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google over who wins school contracts for cloud-based productivity tools, Microsoft has scored a couple of big successes in recent weeks. The company announced on Thursday that it has made an agreement with the Catholic International Education Office to deploy Office 365 to some 4.5 million students over the next 3 years. The news comes on the heels of India’s AICTE deploying the Microsoft tools to some 7.5 million students.

And in the battle among LMS providers, it was Instructure that could boast this week that it’s landed the contract for The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, whose 34 institutions will replace Blackboard with Instructure’s Canvas.

Open Education Summit, Storified

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:41:50 PDT

On Graduation Speeches and YouTube

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:34:43 PDT

I tend to avoid the graduation speeches that seem to go viral on YouTube this time of year. It's not a genre I find particularly compelling. A lot of platitudes. A lot of punchlines. That's not to say there haven't been great ones -- Steve Jobs' 2005 speech at Stanford, for example, is a must-see.

So is Neil Gaiman's from the University of the Arts, delivered just last week. (Embedded below.)

I've written some thoughts over on Inside Higher Ed on how YouTube might shape the way in which we approach -- or ignore -- these speeches. If nothing else, these speeches seem to live longer now, with more virality than when they did when it was just up to us to remember that so-and-so local dignitary or such-and-such international celebrity spoke at our own graduations.

I was also struck this weekend, in listening to Adam Savage's talk at Maker Faire, about the kinds of inspirational speeches that we don't simply deliver to graduates and how good it can be to hear this wisdom and encouragement (and yes platitudes and punchlines) even when you're not graduating, even when you're not a graduate.

Go forth and make things. That was the message of Adam Savage. It was the message of Neil Gaiman. It's the message that all of us need to hear, whether we're sitting in a cap and gown or not.

Grockit Launches Learnist, a Pinterest for Education

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:29:13 PDT

Pinterest and Education

When Pinterest exploded onto the scene this year, I noticed a lot of teacher-friends following me there (confession: I never use the service but yes I have an account). I noticed too a lot of blog posts about “Top 10 Ways to Use Pinterest in the Classroom” (or in the library as the case may be). It’s not that shocking that Pinterest has been popular in some educator circles. Although the service was initially viewed as a way to share your interior decorating tips or plans with what shoes you’d like to buy, it’s clear that the “bulletin board” model is one that many classroom teachers are pretty darn familiar with: take a topic that you want students to know about, and design a visual presentation around it. Gather a bunch of resources, and pin them up for everyone to see.

But like a lot of non-edu-oriented tools that find themselves adopted in edu-settings, there are certainly things that Pinterest doesn’t do quite right, or that it could do better – stepping back a tad from an excessive focus on consumption being the least of which, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, the interest in Pinterest makes for a great opportunity for an education company to build a better version, one that takes advantage of our fondness to pin and share online but that also recognizes that we must do more than just build a visually appealing “content delivery system” if we’re really going to make something that works for teaching and learning.

Enter Grockit… Or Rather, Enter Learnist

It’s no surprise to see a startup grab this opportunity (least of which being the $1.5 billion valuation given to Pinterest just last week). It is fascinating, however, to see which one has done so: it’s Grockit, a social learning company that up ’til now has been focused on test prep. Today, Grockit introduces Learnist which it describes as “a way for anyone to share what they know” and which I’m sure every tech blogger, myself included, will use the “Pinterest for education” comparison.

In many ways, the launch of Learnist marks a substantial pivot for Grockit, which does say it will continue to offer its test prep services but will focus primarily on the social learning aspects of its new site as it moves forward.

But Learnist isn’t really that big a pivot for Grockit if you’ve ever spent time with founder Farbood Nivi, who’s always far more interested in talking about social learning than about SAT scores. And despite the adaptive learning engine that underlies Grockit’s test prep offerings, the company has always stressed “people” over “algorithms.”

Like Pinterest, Learnist allows people to pull together various resources from the Web – blog posts, music, videos, imagese, podcasts – and assemble them into lessons. Those resources can be annotated with notes and explanations and then ordered so that the sequence makes sense to learners – remixing plus knowledge mapping. The social element – sharing and commenting – is integrated throughout; you can push “learnings” to your Facebook timeline; you can follow people as well as topics. As learners move through the resources, they can check off the “learnings” they’ve completed. And they can add and suggests new learnings, as well as suggest experts (or, well, “others”) contribute to particular boards.

iOS apps are in the works too – the iPad app will focus mostly on reading and watching while the iPhone app will be designed around recording “learnings” (taking photos, recording video, and so on).

The content of the boards created during the Learnist beta give some indication of how this tool can work for both core curricula and for lifelong learning. You can learn about where to get the best pizza in Brooklyn. You can learn about simplifying algebraic expressions. In the case of topics like the latter, Grockit practice questions are included in the boards, and Nivi says that by the time the new school year rolls around, they’ll have boards available for all the Common Core State Standards.

Learnist is still in beta, and you still need to request an invitation to join (I have a handful to hand out – leave your email address in the comments and I’ll send you one). Attracting a strong user-base to the site will be the first challenge for the site, particularly as the emphasis is on social learning. Although Learnist isn’t really a challenger to a site like Wikipedia, I think there are important lessons to be learned there about the power of volunteer editors and about the struggles to define what constitutes the “right thing” or “right information” – let alone the right learning.

Maker Faire 2012, Storified

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:04:42 PDT

LearnSprout: Breaking Down Education's Data Silos

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:42:56 PDT

Usually when I interview a startup’s founders and prepare to write a story about them and their product, I ask for screenshots. I could grab them myself, I suppose, but the ones that founders share can be pretty telling: it’s an opportunity for them to show me what they think are their most interesting or important features, their most eye-catching design, their best use-case.

The LearnSprout co-founders laughed when I said I was skipping my typical screenshot request in their case. After all, there’s not really an image that can showcase what they’ve built. “We could show off our API documentation,” joked Anthony Wu.

The lack of imagery here shouldn’t be interpreted as an inferior product. In fact, I think this startup is working on one of the most important challenges facing ed-tech, and with an incredibly sharp founding team, I’m confident they’re up to engineering a solution. (Wu is a former Googler, Franklyn Chien a former Facebooker, and Joe Woo an ex-Microsoftie.)

What LearnSprout has built is all “under the hood,” if you will – hence this screenshot-less post. It’s an API that allows other developers build education apps that are integrated with schools’ student information systems. It’s akin to a Facebook Connect so that there’s an authorization/authentication process that makes it easier to provision accounts for students (and teachers) without the old process of exporting a roster (a CSV file) and either uploading that file into another piece of software (or worse, doing the manual date try).

I’ve written before about precisely this problem: the lack of APIs in educational software, for one, but also the resulting data silos. Those silos are part and parcel of SISes. It’s how they operate by design: data is locked down and locked in.

Chien says that the team first considered building an alternative SIS, one that would rectify this problem. And while this might not have been too tough an engineering challenge, selling schools a new SIS is certainly a tough sales problem.

Of course, selling an API platform to schools might not seem that easy either, but LearnSprout has a smart way to do so. Their tool is free to schools. (That helps with sales, no doubt). But the distribution and sales is actually driven by the third party developers who want to be able to integrate their apps with SISes. LearnSprout offers its API for free to developers who bring in a new school. Subsequent users of the connection to that school are charged.

The goal, says Chien, is to be a “Twilio for education” – a reference to the popular telephony API provider which has become an integral building block in many apps. Of course, flipping the switch to turn on SMS and voice mail is arguably an easier task than integrating with an SIS. There’s a lack of standardization with the data that comes out of various school information systems and an unwillingness to offer read/write access (as such, the LearnSprout API is read-only currently), but Chien stresses that his startup is “data agnostic.”

LearnSprout is in closed beta at the moment, with plans to open soon. In the meantime, it has released a Chrome app that helps educators address login/password fatigue.

LearnSprout is one of the recent graduates of the ImagineK12 incubator program.

What Is "Ed-Tech"?

Sat, 19 May 2012 21:00:28 PDT

What is “Ed-Tech”?

What is “ed-tech”? What do we mean when we talk – or at least, what do I mean when I talk – about education technology?

I’ve been stewing about this a lot this week, in part thanks to a tweet by Bud Hunt:

Hey, y'all - "edtech" isn't a thing. It's not. It's poor shorthand for a lot of other things. Say those other things instead.
— Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher) May 17, 2012

“Ed-tech isn’t a thing,” he says. It’s merely shorthand for something else.

That could include (and I should note here that I don’t mean to put words into Bud’s mouth): research, reading, writing, collaboration, communication, creation, logic, standardization, compliance, hardware, software, money, policy, privacy, accountability, practice, theory.

“Ed-tech” is often used too as a shorthand for brands: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Pearson, Intel, HP SMART, LEGO, Discovery.

In some cases, “ed-tech” is shorthand for some very cool tech,. In some cases, “education” is just shorthand for a category within a larger app market. Sometimes all this talk about a definition of “ed-tech” prompts a great conversation about what we mean by learning in a mobile, networked world. And sometimes when we talk about “ed-tech,” we’re still talking about crappy tech and crappy education and crappy pedagogy and crappy outcomes.

And at times – particularly lately it seems – when we talk about ed-tech, we are full of an utterly uncritical “OMG WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” as though someone just now figured out that education plus technology could equal the awesome.

What is “Ed-Tech Journalism”?

I’ve been thinking about the definitions of “ed-tech” too in light of all the news I read and write and curate and analyze here. (For those who follow closely, last week I added a new feature to Hack Education that curates other ed-tech analysis and news). This question comes up for me repeatedly over the course of any given week – what should I write about? What should I link to? What should I tweet?

As a self-described “ed-tech writer” (not an “education writer” and not a “tech writer” and yet somehow both and pretty much neither) I do have to ask: what constitutes “ed-tech news”? What do my readers care to read about? What do I care to write about? What analysis should I provide? Who cares?

There were several stories this week that gave me pause as I weighed including them (or not) in my weekly round-up of ed-tech news: the hazing in Florida A&M’s marching band, for example, and the forfeiting of a state championship baseball game because the opposing team had a girl on it. On the surface, these are clearly not ed-tech stories. And yet we can’t seem to talk about hazing and bullying nowadays without talking about their online manifestations (i.e. cyberbullying); nor can we isolate the hostility to girls playing in “boys’ clubs” to just what happens during state championship baseball games. See: brogrammers. See: patriarchy. (For what it’s worth, I included neither in my “This Week in Ed-Tech News” summary.)

I did, however, include a blurb about the Facebook IPO – no doubt the biggest tech story of the week but one that might seem similarly tangential to “ed-tech.” Here’s what I wrote on Hack Education’s “Weekly Ed-Tech Roundup” (slightly edited, I confess):

This is one of those news items that you’re welcome to say “Wait, Audrey. This isn’t education technology.” And you’re right. It’s not. But it still matters: Facebook went public today. So what?

Well, certainly this story matters to Silicon Valley and to the new millionaires and billionaires (and investors and entrepreneurs) this will create. Congratulations. But as Facebook CTO Bret Taylor remarked “Stay focused. Keep shipping.”

Honestly, there are lots of reasons why the FB IPO story matters specifically to education too. It matters because learning is social, and it matters because teens (and you and your mom) use Facebook. It matters because many school districts are saying that teachers cannot use Facebook to reach teens (or, at least students).

It matters that Mark Zuckerberg is part of a larger narrative about dropping out of college as a key to entrepreneurial success. It matters too that the college he bailed on was Harvard. It matters that Harvard claimed no IP rights to what one of its student had built.

It matters that fellow Harvard student and Facebook co-founder Edward Saverin has renounced his U.S. citizenship, ostensibly to avoid paying taxes.

It matters that, when he made his first philanthropic gesture, Zuckerberg donated to the Newark City Schools. It matters that Zuck likes Cory Booker. (I mean this in a totally superhero, Avengers kind of way too.)

The Facebook IPO matters because this company has defined “social networking” and in many ways shapes how we think about our interactions with one another (and with anything you can “like”) online. The Facebook IPO matters because of what it might reveal about the company’s current business strategy now (ads) or in the future (your data).

The Facebook IPO is not an ed-tech story. But I can’t ignore it. Nor should you. Because it is an ed-tech story, for all those reasons I list above and more. It demonstrates too why Bud Hunt’s contention that “ed-tech isn’t a thing” is particularly important. We cannot simply extract the tech from education – nor from social, nor from work.

Ed-Tech Et Al

When I think about ed-tech, I think about:

technology
education
policy/politics
privacy
law
data
investment
funding
taxes
grants
outcomes
multiple choice tests
essays (essayer: to try)
failure
learning
teaching
(text)books
apps
hardware
software
open
proprietary
instruction
construction
connection
reading
writing
literacy
logic
collaboration
communication
sharing
lifelong/informal learning
credits
credentials
degrees
debt
parents
A Liberal Arts Education
cognitive development
science
STEM
local issues
state issues
national issues
global issues
factories
cubicles
entrepeneurs
problem-solvers
builders
buyers
users
makers

and stuff…

Even though my bio reads "ed-tech writer," I figure I'll cover all of this here at Hack Education as all of this is feels relevant -- not just the things we might label "ed-tech."

Photo credits: Andrés Monroy-Hernández

This Week in Ed-Tech News: Google's Knowledge Graph and Facebook's IPO

Fri, 18 May 2012 19:16:10 PDT

The Facebook IPO

This is one of those news items that you’re welcome to say “Wait, Audrey. This isn’t education technology.” And you’re right. It’s not. But it still matters: Facebook went public today. So what, you ask? Well, certainly this story matters to Silicon Valley and to the new millionaires and billionaires (and investors and entrepreneurs) this will create. And there are any number of reasons why this story matters specifically to education too. It matters because learning is social, and it matters because teens (and you and your mom) use Facebook. It matters because many school districts are saying that teachers cannot use Facebook to reach teens (or, at least students). It matters that Mark Zuckerberg is part of a larger narrative about dropping out of college as a key to entrepreneurial success. It matters too that that college was Harvard. It matters that Harvard claimed no IP rights to what one of its student had built. It matters that fellow Harvard student and Facebook co-founder Edward Saverin has renounced his U.S. citizenship, ostensibly to avoid paying taxes. It matters that, when he made his first philanthropic gesture, Zuckerberg donated to the Newark City Schools. The Facebook IPO matters because this company has defined “social networking” and in many ways shapes how we think about our interactions with one another (and with anything you can “like”) online. The Facebook IPO matters because of what it might reveal about the company’s current business strategy now (ads) or in the future (your data).

Test Scores

In the latest standardized test question whackiness, New Jersey 3rd graders were asked as part of their recent tests to write an essay about a secret they had kept. No pressure, kids.

The test scores of Florida public school students took a sharp nosedive this year after the state adjusted its scoring mechanism. But the FCAT scores dipped so low – just 27% of students passed, down from 81% the year before under the older scoring system – that the state Board of Education has opted to adjust again how what it considers a passing score. And now – presto! – 81% of Florida students are passing.

Legalities

An important (350-page!) ruling in a lawsuit by the Cambridge University Press, the Oxford University Press and Sage Publications which charged that Georgia State University had violated copyright by offering library e-reserves. The decision was mostly a win for libraries. Duke University’s Kevin Smith writes, "“In general I expect librarians to be happy about the outcome of this case. It suggests that suing libraries is an unprofitable adventure, when 95% of the challenged uses were upheld. But there will also be a good deal of hand-wringing about the uncertainties that the Judge has left us with, the places where we need information we cannot reasonably obtain, and the mechanical application of a strict percentage.”

Updates and Upgrades

On Tuesday, Google released a new feature inside Google Docs calls “Google Research,” letting you tap into Google Search from within your documents. Frankly, it seemed a tad underwhelming. But then on Wednesday, Google unveiled its new Knowledge Graph, a major enhancement to its search capabilities, and you can start to see how the new reach and integration of Google services might work. With the new Knowledge Graph feature (rolling out over to users over the next week or so), you’ll see more search results in addition to just those “10 blue links” for which Google has become famous. These can help hone results (when you search for “Conan” for example, are you looking for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie or for a red-headed late-night comedian?), summarize information and provide related links and factoids. (I’ll have a more in-depth review once the feature is turned on for me.)

The Australian government has committed to spend $11.7 million to purchase 50,000 XO laptops as pa rt of a 12-month pilot program to support indigenous learning. In other OLPC news, plans to deploy some XO devices through helicopter drops moves forward.

Research

The 2012 Horizon Report for K–12 won’t have its official release until June. But the NMC is offering a sneak peek this week into what the trends it’s tracking. On the horizon in the shortest of short term: cloud computing, apps, tablets, and collaborative environments.

According to a report released this week by the Everyone Graduates Center and the Get School Initiative, chronic absenteeism is a significant problem. Up to 15% of students miss school regularly – one day out of every 10. Chronic absenteeism ranges in the states that were studied, from 6% in Nebraska to 20% in Oregon, and as high as one quarter of students in high poverty rural areas and one third of students in high poverty urban areas.

Financial Improprieties, Dissolution, Bankruptcy, and Debt

Earlier this month, news broke that the Justice Department was investigating Princeton Review for charging the city of New York for tutoring services it never provided. Now the city’s comptroller has found that another tutoring company, the Champion Learning Center, did a similar thing, collecting some $860,000 for tutoring sessions that officials never certified had taken place.

I missed this news when it crossed the wire several weeks ago, but it’s too important to ignore: the city of Philadelphia is dissolving or “restructuring” its public schools system (pick your verb. Diane Ravitch suggests “privatizing”), closing some 64 schools. In their place: charter networks.

According to a press release this week, McGraw-Hill took “further steps” to spin out its education division into a separate company (for those keeping score at home, McGraw-Hill is the parent company of a bunch of textbooks as well as of the financial bellwether company Standard & Poor’s.)

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has filed for Chapter 11 or as the press release calls it “comprehensive financial restructuring.”

The New York Times addressed the question of student loan debt this week in a number of stories describing a “generation hobbled by the soaring cost of college.” The story profiles a student with $120,000 in debt, but it’s worth pointing out that the average debt in 2011 was $23,000.

For Sale

The e-book lending website Lendle is up for sale, reports Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader. It’s not terribly surprising since Amazon, B&N, and (I hope!) your local library have all stepped in to the e-book lending business.

Bookstore Deals

In still more e-book news, the University of Minnesota Bookstores (which serve some 70,000 students across 5 campuses) announced a deal with McGraw-Hill to offer bulk textbook sales to its students. Books will be offered at a discount to students who agree to have these fees bundled with their tuition (in other words, they must buy the books assigned for their classes). More details via Publishers Weekly. (I can’t quite reconcile this news with the recent announcement of University of Minnesota’s database of open source textbooks.)

Inkling announced that it has partnered with Follett, which will highlight the interactive textbook publisher’s app in its store and on its website. See my Inside Higher Ed story.

Hires

MIT has named its new president: L. Rafael Reif, an electrical engineer who’s served as the university’s provost for 7 years. There, he’s been the driving force behind MITx, suggests Tony Bates.

David Coleman, one of the architects of the Common Core, will become the head of the College Board this fall. He wants the SAT to reflect the Common Core, writes Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz. Dana Goldstein examines the Coleman’s arguments about what students should be reading and writing. As the Common Core reflects, it’s less reading fiction and less writing personal experience narratives.

Funding

Q&A site Quora has just raised $50 million at a $400 million valuation. The news raised some eyebrows, particularly due to Quora’s low user engagement numbers. Those numbers might be true, but the quality of the answers on the site remains high. And as GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram argues, the founders (early Facebookers Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever who really don’t need to make any more money. Ever) definitely believe they’re on to something – a “for-profit Wikipedia” perhaps.

The online learning startup Udemy released some figures this week about the spike it’s seen in usage over the past year: 700% user growth in the past 12 months. It says that the top 10 earning teachers on its platform have brought in a combined $1,654,480 over the past year. According to these figures, the most popular classes on the platform felt into the (you guessed it) learn-to-code and learn-to-startup categories.

Degreed and Un-degreed

Lots of back and forth this week about whether or not “everyone needs to learn to code.” They don’t, argues Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. Everyone chimes in.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reviews PurdueHUB-U, Purdue’s venture into online education: “modular online courses with video lectures, interactive visualizations, and tools for students to interact with their peers and the professor.” Purdue’s nanoHUB course charged students $30 for the class and certification (which in turn could be turned into continuing ed credits for a $195 – woohoo for the academic upsell!).

Peter Thiel is the guy who rages against the “higher education bubble” and offers under–20-year-olds $100K to drop out of college. But if you want to work for him, take note, you’ll need a college degree: “High GPA from top-tier university; preferably in computer science, mathematics, statistics, econometrics, physics, engineering or other highly quantitative," reads his venture firm's help wanted ad. The famed higher-ed skeptic Thiel is also teaching a class at Stanford -- ya know, that prestigious higher ed institution -- this semester. Here are the class notes. And here’s me, alternating between smirking and scowling at the whole thing.

Contests

Congratulations to the winner of the 2012 Doodle for Google contest: 2nd grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisconsin. Dylan wins a $30K scholarship, a $50K technology grant for his school, and gets his doodle featured on the Google homepage.

Crowdfunding the "Ungluing" of E-Books

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:24:17 PDT

The crowdfunding of creative projects has become incredibly popular lately (and at times, incredibly lucrative), most notably this past week when the Pebble E-Paper Watch crossed the $10 million threshold and shattered the record for most money raised via the Kickstarter platform. Most successful Kickstarter projects raise far less than that, of course only 46% of projects are successful. But there seems to be substantial power in leveraging the power of “the crowd” and the community to finance a number of creative efforts – movies, video games, theater, photography, fashion, books, and as I wrote about last month, academic research.

Here’s hoping that that bodes well for a new crowdfunding site that officially launches today. Unglue.it hopes to raise money for e-books -- but not, as is the case with platforms like Kickstarter or Unbound, to have these books written. Rather, the funds will go towards paying authors or publishers for existing works, giving them a one-time licensing fee in exchange for their releasing their e-books for free, under a Creative Commons license and without DRM.

These “unglued” e-books can then be easily accessed and read and shared by anyone, with anyone, on any device. (You know, like how it works with printed books.) As such, Unglue.it is tackling one of the main drawbacks of e-reading – we are finding books locked into a proprietary format, restricted to a specific device, only available through a particular bookseller.

Read the rest of the story over on Inside Higher Ed...

LibraryBox: A P2P, DIY Library

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:01:56 PDT

Inside NYU art professor David Darts’ black metal lunchbox, painted with a white skull and crossbones, is the PirateBox – a tiny Linux server, a wireless router, and a battery. Turn the PirateBox on and you have a self-contained mobile communications and file-sharing device, whereby those in the vicinity can upload and download files securely and anonymously. (See this 2011 Ars Technica story for photos and details.) Built with free and open source software and openly licensed itself, the PirateBox has inspired a number of other projects, including Alan Levine’s Storybox and now Jason Griffey’s LibraryBox.

The head of Library Information Technology at the University of Tenneessee at Chattanooga, Griffey has built a prototype of the LibraryBox, whose “guts” sit nestled in a carved-out book rather than in a lunchbox, and he’s looking for help in customizing the device to better suit the needs of a mobile DIY library.

As with its lunchbox ancestors, the LibraryBox generates a wireless network that anyone can join via a WiFi-enabled device. That network isn’t connected to the larger Internet, just to the box itself. But from there, people can access the contents of its file server – and they can do so anonymously as no data is tracked or stored on who they are or what they download. There's also no need for specific e-reader hardware or apps, as even the cheapest of cellphones tend to have WiFi, and e-books can be downloaded and opened in several formats (including HTML, ePUB, PDF, and QiOO Mobile).

Griffey says the LibraryBox will “take the 'pirate' out of PirateBox.” That doesn’t mean exorcising the spirit of the larger PirateBox project, which its creator Darts says was “inspired by the free culture and pirate radio movements” and serves as a “playful remixing of the title of the world’s most resilient bittorrent site, The Pirate Bay.” Rather, replacing “pirate” with “library” makes it more apparent, in Griffey’s case, that this is about open access to information and to books. As he describes some of the inquiries he’s received about the LibraryBox, it’s clear that this device could have enormous potential for boosting literacy and education and for opening access to digital educational materials.

Griffey says he has lots of plans for LibraryBox that will make it a true fork of the PirateBox project (making it easier to install for those folks unfamiliar with the Linux command line, for starters). He’s also pursuing a way to scrape Project Gutenberg for public domain content. Drop him a line to help out.

More Digital Textbooks For Sale in More College Bookstores (So What?)

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:23 PDT

Interactive textbook publisher Inkling announced today that it’s struck a distribution partnership with Follett, the largest college bookstore retailer in the industry. Follett, which operates some 900 college bookstores, says it will make “hundreds of titles” from Inkling available to its customers in the fall.

Students will be able to buy the Inkling titles online or in their local bookstores, using multiple payment methods including financial aid. They’ll also be able to take advantage of Inkling’s “Pick 3” pricing alternative whereby students can opt to just purchase 3 digital chapters rather than an entire textbook.

Follett boasts some 5 million students across the campus bookstores it serves, and that number clearly bodes well for Inkling which will now have its brand and app in front of these potential customers.

But the operative word here might be “app,” as Inkling remains iPad only. The startup does say that an HTML5 Web app is in the works, but until then, its titles all remain bundled with a rather expensive piece of hardware. That’s not to say that college students don’t have or want iPads, of course. (They do.) But nor does that iDevice desire or ownership mean they necessarily want digital textbooks either. (Students’ attitudes towards them remain lukewarm.)

Read the rest of the story on Inside Higher Ed

TeachBoost: A Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Development Tool

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:54:43 PDT

One of the cornerstones of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative has been the demand that states improve “teacher effectiveness.” In theory at least it’s hard to argue with such a thing – after all, great teachers have a lasting positive impact on their students, a major study by Harvard and Columbia professors released earlier this year contended. But in practice, it’s not so easy to say what makes a teacher “great” or what you mean by “effective.” For its part though, RTTT wants to measure this through more rigorous teacher evaluation systems, ones that are based in large part on students’ standardized test data, as well as on classroom observation.

I’ve written in detail and with great skepticism about the first part of that measurement – the emphasis on standardized test scores as the abiter of “what works” and “what matters” in the classroom. There’s no agreement that we can really ascertain a teacher’s effectiveness (or “value add”) based on this data. Great teaching is so much more complex than that.

But that complexity isn’t always apparent through classroom observation either, and that’s been one of the few other measurements we have about teacher performance.

This is all one terribly long-winded introduction – and perhaps even a caveat – to situate a new startup called TeachBoost that’s stepping right into the middle of the teacher evaluation maelstrom with its “performance management platform.” That’s a pretty bold step to take for a startup, I think, even if the RTTT rules might indicate that the market for teacher evaluation tools could be big.

But one thing that struck me as I talked to TeachBoost CEO Jason DeRoner last week was his great humility in building this (potentially) politically-charged product and a recognition that he and his engineering-heavy team (with no classroom teaching experience among the founders) were going to have to take a lot of cues from schools about what the tool would need to do.

DeRoner also repeatedly stressed the importance of trust – trust in TeachBoost, sure, but also trust among administrators and classroom educators. This isn’t about surveillance, DeRoner insisted, but about “safe feedback” and collaboration: teachers and administrators working together to set and attain professional goals.

The design and workflow of TeachBoost are geared in part towards mobile usage; the idea is to make it easier for principals to take notes and make ratings during classroom visits. (It’s the old challenge of an app replacing paper.) TeachBoost offers a mobile Web app so that principals can use any sort of device – laptop or iPad, for example – to jot down what they see during walkthroughs. As a Web app, the information is secure in the cloud and accessible via the same interface when they’re back at their desks.

TeachBoost can be customized so that it includes evaluation rubrics that are required by the state as well as additional questions and goals that teachers and principals establish together. “We don’t want any ‘gotchas’,” says DeRoner. And teachers too are encouraged to submit their own documentation and data to their TeachBoost profiles. Again, a single classroom observation can never really capture a teacher’s effectiveness.

But observations alone should not be the end-game. In other words, even if a principal does write down notes about a teacher’s performance, then what? So what? DeRoner argues that a tool should do more than just monitor performance and as such he describes TeachBoost as a “teacher development platform." He says the tool should help match teachers with mentors and help schools develop their own expertise and form their own learning networks based on teachers’ strengths.

TeachBoost offers free and paid accounts and is a member of the most recent ImagineK12 graduating class.

Hack Education Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:17:28 PDT

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 chatted about:

0:22 - My new addition to the Hack Education site, where I'm curating and commenting on some of the education blog posts I've read.

2:17 - Confusion over CIPA, and the growing reach of schools' filters that are now following students and teachers home.

11:19 - What I've learned about how I learn, thanks (in part) to being a serial MOOC dropout. (Also, I pronounce Udacity as "you-da-city." I blame the folks on the Digital Campus podcast, which I recorded earlier Friday morning.)

17:00 - Mathalicious takes to fundraising on Kickstarter, and I ask "Why?"

The link to the MP3 of the show is below, and/or you can subscribe to the podcast feed. You can also find the podcast in iTunes, as part of Steve's EdTechLive series.

May 11, 2012

Paying to Learn (to Program)

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:09:57 PDT

Why pay to learn to code?

With the explosion in the availability of free material online that can help you learn to code – Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy and the like – why pay for a computer science class?

Sometimes paying is necessary in order to earn college credits. There’s also a belief – right or wrong – that courses that charge tuition are better than ones offered for free. In part it’s the old “you get what you pay for adage”; but it’s also the presumption that formal education (and the credentials that come with it, of course) trumps the informal – not just because the education is supposedly better but because of the status afforded to and by institutions.

Many of the new learn-to-code-online resources insist that they provide a high quality, university-level education for free. In other words, their free classes are just as good as those you pay for.

But as I’ve noted based on my own experiences with several of them, the quality of the materials and the instructor is just part of what makes a class “good” (for me at least). And as such, I ask: how do these free learn-to-code sites work to support learners, individually or as a community? How do they help learners succeed? “Success” can mean lots of things, no doubt, but let’s say here it means that those who enroll will achieve their personal learning goals. Of course, it’s fair to ask how much learners are really supported when they pay for courses. But with free online classes there seems to be an expectation that the attrition rate will be high. Most won’t succeed.

What obligations do learning institutions and companies have to their students to support them? And is “support” something (or another thing) that would make paying for a course worth it?

(Pay to) Learn to Program with Bloc

I have been stewing about a lot of these questions in light of a recent pivot by the learn-to-code startup Bloc. Bloc has gone from a free browser-based guide that taught people web-development and app deployment to an eight-week online developer boot camp – one that costs $3000 and has a fairly rigorous application process.

Read the rest of the story over on Inside Higher Ed...

Edshelf: An Educational App Directory for Teachers

Sun, 13 May 2012 22:02:17 PDT

Earlier this month, the education startup incubator ImagineK12 held its second Demo Day, where its latest cohort of startups made their pitches to investors. I pointed to the write-up of Inigral’s Michael Staton in my weekly roundup of ed-tech news, but I realized this past week that I’ve done a particularly lousy job reviewing these latest startups here.

I’ve covered Hapara and Instagrok (here and here), but that’s just two out of nine. So I’m resolved to try to cover a few more of these startups over the next few days.

And for those keeping score at home, here’s the list from ImagineK12’s first graduating class last fall.

Edshelf: "Find, Buy, Use" Educational Content

Edshelf aims to address problems that I’ve covered here on Hack Education before: there’s a ton of educational content online – websites, apps and the like. But the question remains: how do you find “what works” (and what works on a particular or across multiple platforms)? How do you find high quality resources for specific subjects or specific grades?

When it comes to write-ups of education technology, whose reviews do you trust? User-generated reviews range from decidedly unhelpful to incredibly insightful (as anyone who tries to pick a restaurant in a strange city based on Yelp reviews will tell you), and the media's assessments can be equally unreliable (I count myself as part of the problem here too. I'm not a classroom teacher after all). Edshelf hopes to become a go-to site where teachers can recommend to one another what’s worked for them, and it’s building a directory of educational materials that have been reviewed for educators by educators. Apps and websites are reviewed based on student engagement and pedagogical effectiveness, as well as on how hard these tools are to learn.

The site encourages users to find and follow colleagues, tapping into the power of social recommendations and personal learning networks. As such, an integration with Twitter and the adoption of that same sort of “follow” mechanism might help teachers find one another on a new site like edshelf.

Edshelf also wants to tackle some of the other concerns around the adoption of education technology – beyond just identifying quality content or following social recommendations, that is. Namely, when these apps or websites cost money, how do teachers pay for them? How do they handle signing students up and signing students on? Edshelf plans to make it easier for teachers to buy and use apps by handling both the purchasing and sign-on processes for them.

Edshelf has a number of direct and indirect competitors. Kindertown (which I covered here) provides reviews on educational content written by educators for parents. Edsurge, a weekly newsletter that covers education entpreneurship, recently launched its own review site. I’ve also covered Chalkable, a New York City-based startup that wants to blend the app store with the LMS – part of its value proposition is easier procurement and single sign-on. That’s also what platforms like Edmodo and Google’s Chrome Web Store promise too. And then there’s Apple and iTunes.

As those last few examples suggest, there’s an increasing tendency to incorporate the app store into the platform. And while these platforms and stores do have reviews, it's clear that there's a lot of room for improvement there -- particularly when it comes to educational content. As a newly launched startup, edshelf might have an uphill battle to become a reliable site for teachers to turn to for reviews. But it hopes by relying on the teachers themelves to review products, that teachers will find it more trustworthy.

The Week in Ed-Tech News: RIP Maurice Sendak

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:28:25 PDT

RIP Maurice Sendak

Protests

Stanford University and Pearson are working on developing a new licensing procedure: teachers send the company 2 10 minute videos of themselves teacher, along with answers to a 40-page test. They pass, they’ll soon be able to get a teaching license in multiple states. Not so fast, say students in the teacher training program at the University of Massachusetts. They are refusing to participate in the pilot program, and several local schools are balking at handing videos over to Pearson as well. The New York Times covers the controversy which Pearson et al insist is restricted to the Amherst students.

The Wall Street Journal looks at pushback on the Common Core State Standards from state officials who say they’re opposed to a national curriculum.

Legalities

Four visually impaired Philadelphia residents filed a lawsuit charging that the Free Library of Philadelphia has failed to make its e-reader program accessible to them. The library’s new Nook lending program violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, they argue, as these devices do not offer text-to-speech capabilities. More over on The Digital Reader.

ProPublica uncovers the FCC’s failure to enforce the cost-savings measures that the E-Rate program was supposed to provide schools. AT&T, Verizon and others have failed to give schools discounts on their telecommunications services.

A high school principal in Missouri has resigned after she was accused to creating a fictitious character which she used to “friend” students and their parents on Facebook. Wired has the details.

Rupert Murdoch brought former New York City Schools’ Chancellor Joel Klein on board to help him lead News Corp’s education ambitions. That included the acqusition of student data tracking company Wireless Generation, a long-time NYC vendor, for $360 million in 2010. But once the phone-hacking scandal broke, Klein became Murdoch’s “trusted advisor,” focused instead on internal operations. And the News Corp education plans have been on hold since, suggests The New York Times.

Launches and Updates

Google+ finally made its best feature available for everyone: Google Hangouts on Air. We all have it now (or soon-ish. “Over the next few weeks” in Google lingo). With Google Hangouts on Air, you can broadcast and record your live hangout.

Amazon announced this week that all 7 Harry Potter titles would be available to borrow via its Kindle Lending Library, one of the perks of Amazon Prime membership. On InfoDocket (now a LibraryJournal blog), Gary Price examines what this will mean for libraries.

Math app-maker Motion Math has released its latest game for the iPad. Motion Math Wings is a free multiplication game that helps kids understand multiplication conceptually and visually (i.e. not just by memorizing their times-tables). (iTunes link)

Techcrunch’s Rip Emerson covers the launch of Pathwright, which offers “a simple, DIY content management system that lets any and all educators create, distribute, and sell online courses under the banner of their own branded, online schools.”

Ooops

Eastern Michigan University sent an email to the entire student body informing them that they’d been dismissed from the school due to their academic performance. Turns out everyone enrolled at EMU received an email from the Academic Advising office instead of just the 100 or so students who’d actually flunked out of the university. Oh well. Keeps the kids on their toes.

Suggested Fixes

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the results from a Worldreader pilot program in Ghana. (The non-profit ships Kindles and e-book libraries to villages in the developing world).) The news from Ghana was mostly good, except for reports of a lot of Kindle breakage. A story by “The Fixers” in this week’s Atlantic makes some suggestions on how to address this, including arguing that the organization needs to learn a thing or two from the One Laptop per Child initiative and utilize more durable and more repairable hardware.

Test Scores

The results are in for the NAEP Science Assessment, Grade 8. “Science test scores are slightly up, and the achievement gap is narrowing, and that’s good news,” says the Department of Education. “Most 8th graders fall short,” writes Education Week’s Sarah Sparks. “The average 8th grade score rose from 150 in 2009 to 152 last year; that’s a statistically significant increase, but still well below 170, science proficiency on the test’s 300-point scale.”

Classes, Credits, and Courseware

Washington University Law School announced this week that it would offer a law degree online. That’s still a rarity among law schools, and the degree will be offered via the 2tor platform. See Inside Higher Ed for more details.

The Saylor Foundation and Straighterline have partnered to offer students cheap college credits. Students can study with the Saylor Foundation’s free courseware and then pay Straighterline for a course/exam for credit (American Council on Education recommended credit, reports The Chronicle).

The University of Minnesota has launched an online catalog of open source textbooks. The university is paying faculty $500 to contribute books and to review them, an effort to help with discovering openly licensed content, as well as being able to gauge its quality.

Contests

Kaggle has wrapped up a couple of recent education-related data competitions. Grockit used the platform to run a contest on its adaptive learning algorithms. (See the startup’s write-up for details). The Hewlett Foundation announced the winners of its automated essay scoring contest this week too. Slate’s Dana Goldstein writes about robo-graders, arguing even with all the boasting about their accuracy and efficiency they aren’t ready to grade Common Core assessments.

Funding and Acquisitions

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Stacy Patton examines the growing number of people on federal food assistance that have master’s degrees or PhDs. About 360,000 of the 22 million people with master’s degrees (or more education) receive some federal assistance. Many of these people are employed, Patton argues, but those working as adjunct instructors can’t earn a living wage.

T.H.E. Journal reports that Wireless Generation has acquired Intel-Assess, an assessment tool provider. Testing ka-ching.

Why Is Mathalicious Raising Money on Kickstarter?

Thu, 10 May 2012 17:45:17 PDT

Why is Mathalicious raising money on Kickstarter?

When I pose that question, I do so as a fan of both startups. Let me state that right up front, dear reader: I love the idea of crowdfunding of creative projects through Kickstarter. I support as many learning-focused projects as I can. (Although my contributions are really small, I like to chip in.) And I love the real-world math lessons provided Mathalicious. (See my previous coverage of the company.) I have backed its Math52 Kickstarter project.

Mathalicious is currently raising $164,000 to create a series of math videos – 52 in all as the project name suggests. That’s one math video a week, along with a teacher’s guide on how the videos can be incorporated into lessons. The videos will follow the approach of the rest of Mathalicious mission: show students how math helps you understand the world around you. I don’t mean “two trains leave the station” kind of story problems either. I mean problems that are interesting and relevant to students and that teach basic math concepts (Common Core State Standards-aligned) as well as broader problem solving and critical thinking skills. A sample lesson on probability: Does “Bankrupt” come up more often than it should on Wheel of Fortune? Is the show rigged?

$164,000 is sizable goal for a Kickstarter project; the average project seeks under $10,000. But there have been some fairly incredible success stories with Kickstarter as of late. Musician Amanda Palmer raised her goal of $100,000 for her latest record and tour in just 6 hours (she’s now raised over $600,000 with 21 days still to go). 5 projects so far this year have raised over $1 million, and when its campaign ends on May 18, the Pebble E-Paper Watch will have set the new Kickstarter record, with over $10 million raised. The original ask: $100,000.

With 37 days left to go, the Math52 project has raised $20,000. Based on the pledges per day, will Mathalicious make its goal? There’s a math lesson there, for sure, about rates and ratios. But there are other problems and other lessons that question should prompt us to consider too.

Crowdsourcing versus Venture Capital

Namely, why Kickstarter? Why turn to crowdsourcing for funding? Why would a startup use Kickstarter when there’s so much investor interest in the education sector right now? Why not raise a seed round of funding?

Well, it could be that, much like Amanda Palmer’s decision to make music without a major record label contract and to fund her next album through her fans. Kickstarter offers creatives the ability to finance their projects outside traditional funding mechanisms and outside control of investment capital. Those who pledge to fund a Kickstarter project don’t own a stake in the company, as investors do.

But it also could be, in the case of Mathalicious in particular, that the project just isn’t something that VCs want to fund. Sure, learning management systems, education platforms, educational mobile games, education social networks, education analytics are all “hot,” and there’s a lot of capital flowing in to the ed-tech industry. But you don’t see the same sort of clamoring over teacher PD. There are marketplaces where teachers can sell their lessons (Better Lesson raised $1.6 million in a Series A round last fall, for example), but there aren’t many venture-backed companies that truly help teachers teach better lessons.

It probably doesn’t help Mathalicious’s case much either that Khan Academy has so much mindshare in Silicon Valley and in edu-investor circles when it comes to math video content. Khan Academy is free. Mathalicious is not (it instituted a “pay what you want” subscription model at the beginning of the year). Mathalicious also boasts a sharp founder, Karim Ani, whose a sharp tongue and fiery critique earlier this year of Khan Academy and Silicon Valley’s “secular faith that technology is the solution to everything” probably won him no friends in investor circles.

But that’s okay. That’s why there’s Kickstarter, right? The projects that can’t attract VCs (for any number of reasons) can turn to the community for support.

Education as a Public Good – Folks, That’s Your Kickstarter Reward

And the teacher community – particularly the math teacher community – has supported the project. Among the backers, Professor Keith Devlin, the NPR “Math Guy” (his official title), and Dan Meyer, the TED Talk “Math Guy” (not his official title).

Their support accompanies rave reviews for Mathalicious from teachers and students, and in a video update posted to the Kickstarter campaign site today, teachers speak up about why they’d like to see the Math52 project funded.

But why support Math52 if you’re not a teacher, asks founder Karim Ani in the video above. I mean, if you back the Pebble Watch campaign, you get a device you can wear on your wrist that connects via bluetooth to your iPhone or Android! (Meh) If you back Amanda Palmer's campaign, you can attend a VIP record release party with her in Berlin! (Friggin' awesome) If you back Math52, well, the reward might not seem as exciting I guess (it's just better math education, smarter kids, a better world... no big thing).

Certainly the campaign has failed thus far to "go viral" the way that either Pebble Watch or Palmer's did. And I have to wonder if it's just another indication that how we fund education (or how we fail to fund education) -- whether it's with crowdfunding or with venture capital or with property taxes or with philanthropic donations -- is so very deeply flawed. Our funding follows our values, after all.

5 Things I've Learned From MOOCs About How I Learn

Wed, 09 May 2012 19:15:57 PDT

Ideally, I suppose, I should headline this post "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs." That's likely what a course -- massive or online or open or not -- is supposed to have a student tout: what I learned. If I were being really forthright with my readers, I would headline this story "5 Things I've Learned from MOOCs as a Serial MOOC Dropout." That's certainly a warning that when I speak about my experiences with MOOCs, it's as a lurker and a dropout.

I sign up for courses, and I pop in and out. I've never felt particularly guilty about it. I sign up for the course. I read participants' blogs. I drop in to webinars. I watch the odd video, read the odd reading assignment I learn what I want to, when I can. I'm busy -- we all are, I realize.

What keeps me engaged in a class most often is the community. That's what I've learned lately from MOOCs and other online learning experiences. It's not the class or the subject matter per se, the syllabus, the curriculum, the assignments or assessments, although yes, that's what prompts me to enroll. I stay or go because of the people....

Read about the 5 things I've learned about my own learning preferences over on Inside Higher Ed. And ugh, yes. That's a "list post." But I think (I hope) it's the first one I've written this year.

Photo credits: Ian Barbour, via Flickr

Updates

Tue, 08 May 2012 22:42:48 PDT

A couple of quick updates:

I’ve been maintaining a Tumblr site for some time now, where I’d post links to various ed-tech blogs, education-related stories and videos. I had a little sidebar on the right hand side of this site where I ran the Tumblr feed. The idea was for you to click through to others’ stories. Turns out the links were broken.

Quite few things on this site were broken. The “search box,” for one. (I deleted that. Try appending “site:hackeducation.com” to the beginning of your search string if you’re looking for something.) The archives menu never worked. (So I deleted that too). The RSS feed from my Tumblr account didn’t work either apparently. Ah, the blessing and the curse of running your own website.

I didn’t fix the Tumblr RSS. In fact, I’ve opted to abandon Tumblr altogether – avoid data lock-in by avoiding Tumblr, ya dig – and bring the act of curating and commenting on other blog posts back here to this site.

To that end, I’ve added a new section to Hack Education. You’ll find it via the "Other News" tab above (scroll up!) or via hackeducation.com/news. There you’ll find me doing the same thing I did on over Tumblr – mostly posting the links to the articles I find most interesting, with a few words about why that’s so. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here. (It’s a separate feed from the Hack Education blog posts, but I’ll probably make the Hack Education Twitter account become a firehose for all of this.)

These changes to Hack Education were inspired by Stephen Downes’s OLDaily and gRSShopper. But consider all this on my site a beta. Let me know what works and doesn’t work – in terms of form and content. I’m not fully satisfied with it yet (the posts don’t include authors’ names, for example), and I’ll probably tweak things a lot over the coming days and weeks. Feedback wanted.

When Schools' Internet Filters Follow You Home

Mon, 07 May 2012 18:29:43 PDT

Protecting Children on the (Schools’) Internet

Schools and libraries that receive federal E-rate funding (a program that helps underwrite their telecommunications and Internet costs) are required by CIPA, the Children’s Internet Protection Act, to create an Internet safety policy and filter or block certain kinds of websites. The law only demands these filters address obscenity, child pornography and sites that are “harmful to minors,” but schools interpret this mandate in a variety of ways. Some ban all sorts of websites: video streaming sites (including YouTube and by extension Khan Academy), peer-to-peer networks (including Skype and Dropbox), and social media networks (Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Blogger, Tumblr). They ban these sites for students, which often means they’re unavailable to teachers as well.

CIPA was signed in to law in 2001. That’s worth highlighting, I think, when we talk about “children’s Internet protection” as the Internet and computing were very different a decade ago. For a little perspective: 2001 was the year before Maine’s historic one-to-one laptop initiative was underway. It was a year before a young Mark Zuckerberg entered Harvard. It was three years after Sergei Brin and Larry Page founded Google, but three years before the company went public. It was three years before Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0.” Apple introduced the first iPod in 2001; but it was six more years before the iPhone and nine before the iPad hit the market. Technology and society have changed substantially in the intervening years; CIPA has not.

Far more schools do have Internet access now than did in 2001. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 77% of public schools had Internet access in 2000; 100% do today. But it isn’t simply that Internet has become ubiquitous on campuses; students are increasingly going online through wireless rather than wired connetions and doing so via mobile devices.

Yet the perception that students are still in danger when doing so persists. With the advent of mobile computing, with the proliferation of cellphone ownership (student cellphone ownership specifically) and with the explosion of social networking, we’re witnessing CIPA – an eleven year old piece of legislation, remember – be invoked left and right.

Case Study: Colorado

Take this story from Colorado Springs, for example:

Manitou Springs School District 14 purchased 500 new Apple iPad 2 tablet computers for 5th through 8th grade students to use this school year. The internet allows homework to be assigned, completed and graded paperlessly. However, that connectivity also risks exposing students to harmful content on the web.

One parent, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his child’s privacy, believes it is way too easy to bypass the districts web filters and access potentially harmful sites. He demonstrated for us how students could potentially piggyback onto unsecured wifi networks without ever leaving school property.

“It’s the perfect set up to have a completely anonymous online presence that neither school officials nor parents nor law enforcement could ever really reconstruct,” he said.

That parent and about two dozen others petitioned the Manitou Springs school board to implement a stronger internet safety policy.

D–14 uses web filters that are installed on their server but not on the iPads themselves. Technically students could access the web, unfiltered, while they are away from school.

The school district insisted that it did not need to filter the devices directly and as part of its Internet safety policy, it required students to abide by these same rules when they were using the devices at home. The district also helped interested parents in installing filters on their own networks at home.

But this response was unsatisfactory to the parents and petitioners in question, who might have found a powerful ally in another Colorado Spring resident, State Senator Keith King. He has introduced legislation now pending in Colorado that would mandate schools install filters directly onto all Internet-capable devices so that a minor can be “protected,” in the bill’s language, “FROM ANY LOCATION.”

Clarifying CIPA?

What does it mean to protect children on the Internet today? Technologically and philosophically – how do we do so? What is the role of schools? What is the role of parents? Whose accounts are monitored – Teachers? Students? Parents? What happens now with the advent of one-to-one computer initiatives and BYOD (bring your own device)? Will we filter schools’ networks? Or will we install filtering software directly onto the devices? Will we control the posts and searches and online transactions that occur at school? Or will we monitor teachers and students at home as well? Where does CIPA begin and end? Where does Internet monitoring begin and end? Where do Internet safety policies begin and end? (All these questions are why you create an Internet safety policy in the first place, I should say.)

The law is clear… except, well honestly, it isn’t.

Last fall, the school district in my home town of Casper, Wyoming opted for the first time to install filtering software directly on to the laptops it has been issuing students for several years. It did so in order to block students’ access to social networking sites, and the decision to do so was made in part as a response to parental concerns about what students were doing with school-issued laptops when the kids were at home.

So I asked the FCC to weigh in. On my reading of CIPA at least, it’s the on-campus network that schools are required to filter, and as long as the schools aren’t paying for the Internet at home (say, via 3G access on school-issued devices), then CIPA doesn’t apply. But “it’s a grey area,” I was told by a spokesperson. The FCC promised that it would clarify language about how CIPA governs one-to-one initiatives. Six months later, I’m still waiting to hear news on the follow-up.

Controlling Students (and Teachers) Online

Meanwhile we’re seeing more and more schools and districts and cities and states and courts weigh in with their own interpretations of how we should monitor and control students’ access to the Web. Although this loosely falls under the purview of CIPA – that is, the requirement to craft an Internet safety policy – it’s clear that many schools opt to filter far more than is required under that law. It is their discretion to do so.

Add to that, the new pressures to create policies around social media, and the question doesn’t just become about access to the Web but about behaviors while on it. In March, a high school senior in Garrett, Indiana was expelled for tweeting a series of F-bombs (the Tweets were sent at 2:30 am from his own home, the student insists). Last week, Portland, Maine announced its school district would for the first time in the state’s decade-long one-to-one laptop program, install filters on the devices it issues students so that they’d be unable to access sites like Facebook or YouTube whether they were at school or at home.

These policies are beginning to govern teachers’ interactions online too. Last week, New York City laid out new social media guidelines curbing teachers’ ability to interact with students online, demanding teachers separate their personal and professional social media identities and ask permission from their supervisors to pursue the latter – to set up a blog, a Twitter account, and the like. Again, it’s all ostensibly about protecting the children on the Internet.

What can students and teachers read and write and watch and say online? What happens when they do these things from school networks on school devices? What happens when they do so at school with their own devices? What happens when they do so from home with school-issued devices? What happens when these interactions occur on devices and networks not controlled by schools, but occur nonetheless between the people – the students and teachers – that schools feel compelled to control?

Net Freedom / Net Surveillance

I’ve started reading Evgeny Morozov’s Net Delusion this past week. The book’s been out over a year; but its critiques are hardly out-of-date. They’ve been nagging at me all week – Morozov’s blistering dissection of our utopian desires for Net-enabled democracy and freedom, his arguments about our refusal to recognize the ways in which power actually operates – online or off. His focus is on the tensions of liberation and lockdown in global politics; but the politics of the US education system would make as interesting a study, I think.

Indeed, there’s so much rhetoric about the transformative power of technology in the classroom right now. And yet right alongside the pronouncements of "disruption" and "revolution" are arguments for putting into place all sorts of new surveillance policies – policies that monitor what school networks and school devices and school employees and students can access.

And whether the FCC bothers to clarify CIPA or not, it’s clear that many school districts are ready to extend this surveillance – all in the service of protecting children on the Internet, of course – from the classroom and the library and into the home.

Photo credits: John Manoogian

Hack Education Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:24:28 PDT

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's episode includes discussion about:

0:47: Curation versus RSS and my decision to not read tech blogs

5:32: On not sending my son to college

11:24: LAK12, the quantified self, and learning analytics

25:15: MOOC madness, now with more Harvard

The link to the MP3 of the show is below, and/or you can subscribe to the podcast feed. You can also find the podcast in iTunes, as part of Steve's EdTechLive series.

May 5, 2012

The Week in Ed-Tech News: Harvard plus MITx, Microsoft plus Barnes & Noble, and more

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 PDT

What a crazy week for US education. Unrelated: I spent the week in Canada.

History

42 years ago yesterday, National Guard troops opened fire on student anti-war protestors at Kent State University, killing four and injuring nine.

Partnerships

Harvard MOOCs are in the works, with the big news this week that Harvard and MIT are teaming up to expand on the latter’s MITx platform. The new initiative is called edX. HypeX, observes education professor Sherman Dorn. Bionic, according to Alan Levine. A fairly traditional mother if indeed this is the Mother-of-all-MOOCs, suggests Bonnie Stewart.

Michael Feldstein takes a look at the proposed merger of the open source Sakai and Jasig projects to create an Apache-like foundation for higher education.

Policies

The New York City Department of Education issued new rules this week for how school employees interact and communicate with students online. The new social media policy requires teachers separate professional and personal social media activities and identities. They cannot friend or communicate with students via their personal pages or profiles. Teachers must get their supervisors’ permission before setting up a professional online identity, where they should have no expectations about privacy. Comments should be turned off on blogs. Administrators will monitor. No word on student-teacher text-messaging, however. You can read the entire document on The Wall Street Journal.

Portland, Maine will install filtering software on the laptops it issues its high school students, in order to block access to pornography, streaming video sites, and social networks. These filters will be in effect even when students are using the laptops at home and off the school networks. This goes beyond the mandates of CIPA by most interpretations of the law.

Pineapples and Pearson

The Pineapple-gate saga continues. The New York Times reports that more questions have been thrown out from the latest Pearson-generated state standardized test in New York. Pearson insists its tests are “valid and reliable.” There’s a leaked memo – how convenient – in which Pearson claims this same Pineapple question that everyone's upset about has been used since 2004 in tons of states. See everyone?! It's fine! I’m not sure how that’s supposed to reassure New York, which gave the company a $35 million to create it some new tests, but there ya go. More digging finds this old test was “normed” over a decade ago. Some things, I guess, just don't change.

Legalities

The US Justice Department has filed a civil fraud case against the test prep company Princeton Review for charging the city of New York for millions of dollars of tutoring services that it never provided, reports GothamSchools.

The "Google Books” case continues to drag on, with the latest court appearance involving Google’s arguments that the Authors Guild portion of the lawsuit against it should be thrown out as the guild doesn’t constitute a “class” and individual authors need to come forward and file complaints against Google for infringement.

Wired reports on the case of 14-year-old Alex Boston who, along with her parents, is suing two of her classmates and their parents for cyberbullying via Facebook. Boston and her parents say they tried to get her school to intervene but the school claimed they had no power to do so since the harassment occured off campus.

Funding and Acquisitions

Microsoft invested $300 million in Barnes & Noble – specifically in a new subsidiary that will handle the Nook and the B&N College division (which operates some 600 college bookstores). Rob Reynolds takes a look at how this might impact the higher ed digital textbook market. But with the Google Books lawsuit, the Apple price collusion lawsuit, and Amazon’s e-book dominance, and the struggles of the brick and mortar (text)bookstore who knows what the future holds.

Education startup incubator ImagineK12 held its second Demo Day this week, graduating 9 startups. Inigral’s Michael Staton has a report from the front lines.

Professional social network LinkedIn announced this week that it has acquired the document-sharing site Slideshare. Techcrunch’s Leena Rao puts the price-tag at just under $119 million.

GeekDad’s Jonathan Liu profiles Reading with Pictures, a non-profit organization which is currently Kickstarter-ing its 144-page textbook/comics anthology.

Online gradebook Engrade announced it’s raised $3 million in seed funding.

Techcrunch’s Rip Emerson examines the financial success of online learning company Lynda.com, which has some $70 million in revenue without having ever taken venture funding.

Degrees

The University of Texas of the Permian Basin has introduced 5 BS degrees that’ll cost you less than $10,000, filling Governor Rick Perry’s challenge to the state’s universities to come up with a degree that cheap. Hey Texas. EdX is cheaper, for what it’s worth.

Congratulations to basketball star Shaquille O’Neal who receives his PhD in Organizational Learning and Leadership from Barry University this weekend.

Research and Data

The New York City Charter School Center has released a report on “The State of the Sector,” detailing some of the statistics about the city’s charter school population and performance.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution continues its series on test score anomalies, suggesting that a local "blue ribbon" school might have cheated in order to see great improvements in its scores (The series is getting “mixed reviews” observes The Educated Reporter).

Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries have announced their first crowdsourcing project, asking the public to help describe some 4000 piano music pieces. These have been digitized and are available online, although they’ve never been cataloged as part of the libraries’ collection, and volunteers are asked to take a listen and help write a description.

More data from the Pew Research Center on teens and digital media. The latest statistics deal with online video, and among the findings: 27% of internet-using teens 12–17 record and upload video to the internet.

A new study by Lawrence Bacow and William Bower, the former presidents of Tufts and Princeton Universities respectively, examines the “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education.” The study, funded by the Gates Foundation, found that faculty skepticism was the major barrier to adoption of automated instruction software. Those pesky faculty.

Project Tomorrow has released the results from its Speak Up 2011 report. There’s a ton of interesting information here on students’ personalized learning. Mobile access and tablet usage are up, not surprising. One fifth have used a mobile app to organize school work. One quarter have watched a video online to help with homework. “30% of middle school students and 46% of high school students have used Facebook as an impromptu collaboration tool for classroom projects.”

Launches and Updates

Google has launched a Search Education Hub, a place for teachers to find lesson plans and training on search literacy.

The safe messaging service Remind101 has released an iOS app, bringing the functionality of its website to the iPhone. The free app (iTunes link) lets teachers easily send text messages between the classroom and home.

Contests

The Doodle 4 Google contest has announced its state winners, which means it’s open voting time for the national finalists. Google says it received some 114,000 submissions.

Learning Analytics: Lots of Education Data... Now What?

Fri, 04 May 2012 18:14:21 PDT

The Formation of a New Discipline

It was a sentiment repeated several times throughout the Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012 conference: this could the beginning of a new discipline. It’s something I’ve heard at recent big data events too (namely at O’Reilly Media’s Strata conferences): we are forming a new field, one with new tools and new practices and new objects of inquiry.

Of course, neither data nor analytics are particularly new. There’s a lengthy history of scholarly and industry production here. But in the case of data science, much of that has been “business intelligence.” In the case of learning analytics, it’s “educational data mining.” But circumstances are different now, so the argument goes; what we’re doing here is new.

The newness of it all can be rather exhilarating, particularly as it means that gatherings around these topics are small (small, but in the case of LAK12, significantly larger than the previous year’s conference). That provides a certain level of intimacy and a concentration of intellectual power and expertise. It means too that the sessions and hallway conversations seem to be even weightier than usual. It’s important after all, at the beginning of a new discipline, to get things right.

That makes a question that George Siemens asked during his keynote particularly significant: “Are we at a stage where learning analytics is going to lock down and reinforce everything we don’t like about the current education system?”

What Is Learning Analytics?

What is learning analytics – as a field of study, as a practice, as a set of tools, as a way to collect and analyze educational data? What are we tracking, and to what end?

The answer, oft-repeated at the conference, was “data exhaust” – that is, all the digital traces from learners’ online activities: where they go, what they do, what they say, who they’re connected to, who they interact with, what they read, what they write, where they linger, where they bail. (Formally, that’s (social) network analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, and context analysis, for starters.)

Clearly the amount of data exhaust that all of us leave behind makes for an incredible opportunity for learning analytics, something I’ve written about repeatedly. And yet, somewhat ironically I’d say, while learning has never been confined solely to the classroom, it seems as though what many institutions (and researchers) are tracking in terms of developing learning analytics remains focused on the interactions of students and professors within their LMSes. How often do students log in? How often do they post in discussion boards? How long do they stay on the site? What do they click on?

If the focus of “what we’re tracking” is on the learning management system, the focus of “to what end” might be equally telling. In many cases, the “why we care” about learning analytics seems to focus on attempts to boost “student retention” and “course completion.” (The more often students log in to the LMS and the longer they stay there, the more likely they are to pass the class.) And while I won’t argue these metrics aren’t important and, sure, you can say that this is all connected to “learning,” it’s necessarily not the same thing. I realize that retention statistics matter to administrators; I realize it matters to the bottom line of all institutions – for-profit and not-for-profit. (Heck, it matters to students too.) And I realize too that completing a course should mean that students have learned something. But I’d hope the goal of learning analytics isn’t simply on boosting the graduation rate. I hope we can support student learning.

Even after spending much of my week with the learning analytics crowd, I still wonder: what are we talking about when we say "learning analytics"? What do we mean by the adjective “learning”?

Selling Learning Analytics

If a clear definition wasn’t really obvious at LAK12, it could be because in most cases (grad students excepted) the learner voice – or at least the student voice, I really should say – was largely absent from the conversation. That’s not that uncommon, I suppose, in many an ed-tech discussion.

But I fear (again) that data and analytics will be something we do to students, rather than do for them or do with them. I fear we’ll neglect (in the footsteps of much of the Internet) to let students dictate the conditions by which these analytics are even derived. As Sheila MacNeil asked following one of the presentations, “Do we tell students what data we collect and how we are going to use it?” Do students control and do they own their learning data?

I think that’s why the quantified self movement seems an appealing entry into learning analytics for me. It implies personal ownership and personal control. It might even require a personal definition of “learning.” It certainly requires setting personal goals. It means learning to read and build visualizations. (Here are a few tools to get you started in that regard from LAK12 keynoter Katy Börner.) It means learning analytics (verb-direct object, not adjective-noun, I mean). It means learning statistics.

The latest Horizon Report put the time-to-adoption of learning analytics at two to three years. That’s at an institutional level, mind you, not at the level of our individual readiness as learners to craft our own data dashboards and data visualizations. Frankly, I’m not sure which will move towards adoption more quickly. Nor am I certain how the new field of learning analytics will develop in light of institutional inertia, disciplinary siloes, or vendor lock-in. I'm not certain how the field will develop in terms of other disciplines either. As someone kept asking during the Q&A panel at sessions, “What’s the role of learning theory here?” I'd add, "How do we take theory in to practice?" And how do we do so with transparency – as scholars, institutions, vendors – and with reciprocity – as teachers and as learners?

Lots of questions, I realize -- all of which are ever-so-important we consider, particularly if we're hoping to build something new and transformative here with learning analytics -- something more than an expensive feature upgrade to an institution's LMS.

Disclosure: The organizers of LAK12 paid for my travel and accomodations at the event.

Photo credits: Jessica Curtin, John Manoogian

Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2012 (#LAK12), Storified

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:54:12 PDT

Disclosure: My travel and accomodations at LAK12 were covered by the conference organizers

MITx + Harvard = edX

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:18:24 PDT

This is big news: Harvard and MIT form a partnership called edX that'll build on the MITx platform. Harvard plans to start offering courses online for free (with certificates available upon completion -- for a fee). And the two universities launch a research initiative to examine how these sorts of efforts support teaching and learning online and on-campus.

With bonus points for a east coast - west coast rivalry, as well as a university-funded ($60 million)/non-profit versus venture capital funded/for-profit one.

My thoughts over on Inside Higher Ed.

Hack Education

This Week in Ed-Tech News: Making More Makers

Making More Makers

Politics and Policies

Legalities

Launches

Updates

Acquisitions

Closures

Research and Data

Classes

Competitions

Campaigns

Contracts

Recommended Reading

Open Education Summit, Storified

On Graduation Speeches and YouTube

Grockit Launches Learnist, a Pinterest for Education

Pinterest and Education

Enter Grockit… Or Rather, Enter Learnist

Maker Faire 2012, Storified

LearnSprout: Breaking Down Education's Data Silos

What Is "Ed-Tech"?

What is “Ed-Tech”?

What is “Ed-Tech Journalism”?

Ed-Tech Et Al

This Week in Ed-Tech News: Google's Knowledge Graph and Facebook's IPO

The Facebook IPO

Test Scores

Legalities

Updates and Upgrades

Research

Financial Improprieties, Dissolution, Bankruptcy, and Debt

For Sale

Bookstore Deals

Hires

Funding

Degreed and Un-degreed

Contests

Recommended Reading

Crowdfunding the "Ungluing" of E-Books

LibraryBox: A P2P, DIY Library

More Digital Textbooks For Sale in More College Bookstores (So What?)

TeachBoost: A Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Development Tool

Hack Education Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast

Paying to Learn (to Program)

Why pay to learn to code?

(Pay to) Learn to Program with Bloc

Edshelf: An Educational App Directory for Teachers

Edshelf: "Find, Buy, Use" Educational Content

The Week in Ed-Tech News: RIP Maurice Sendak

RIP Maurice Sendak

Protests

Legalities

Launches and Updates

Ooops

Suggested Fixes

Test Scores

Classes, Credits, and Courseware

Contests

Funding and Acquisitions

Recommended Reading

Why Is Mathalicious Raising Money on Kickstarter?

Crowdsourcing versus Venture Capital

Education as a Public Good – Folks, That’s Your Kickstarter Reward

5 Things I've Learned From MOOCs About How I Learn

Updates

When Schools' Internet Filters Follow You Home

Protecting Children on the (Schools’) Internet

Case Study: Colorado

Clarifying CIPA?

Controlling Students (and Teachers) Online

Net Freedom / Net Surveillance

Hack Education Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast

The Week in Ed-Tech News: Harvard plus MITx, Microsoft plus Barnes & Noble, and more

History

Partnerships

Policies

Pineapples and Pearson

Legalities