Hack Education

Kindertown: An Educational App Store

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:37:48 PST

At its education event last month, Apple made the point of touting the amount of educational content it offers via its App Store: some 20,000 apps fall under the "education" category. But we really shouldn't confuse quantity and quality when it comes to educational content. Indeed, in some ways, the abundance of educational apps makes it even tougher to locate good ones -- even with Apple's promotion of featured apps and bestseller lists and with the App Store reviews.

How do you know which apps have an educational (not just entertainment) value, which apps are developmentally appropriate, which apps teach particular content or focus on a certain subject (either in general, such as math or literacy apps, or more specifically, such as those that teach addition or phonetics)?

That's where the startup Kindertown steps in, with an (educational) App Store within the (Apple) App Store. Hoping to take advantage of the trend of parents increasingly using mobile devices (and handing those devices over to their kids), Kindertown provides a free app that curates and reviews what it believes are the best educational apps out there.

Currently the app works on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch and only offers insights into Apple's educational app content. But as such, it lets users filter apps based on type of iOS device, age range (currently the focus is on early childhood education, so that age range is 3 to 6), and free or paid. Users can also indicate if they're looking for particular subject areas -- math, language, art, social studies, or science, with the latest update to the app offering further drill-down into the specifics of a particular subject (for example, in the case of math, you can search for geometry, logic, measurement or number sense apps). From there, you can read more information about the app, read the Kindertown review, look at screenshots, and should you choose, download the app.

While it is possible for developers to submit their apps for review and inclusion in the Kindertown store, most of the legwork in identifying quality apps is done by the Kindertown team itself. I spoke with Carolina Nugent, the company's Director of Education, who explained the process that she takes -- going through different review sites, pouring through the App Store, "spending hours searching for the gems." She said that she looks for a number of things in an app -- that it offers scaffolding, for example, and effective feedback for learners. Most apps, even those earmarked as "educational" by the Apple App Store, don't make the cut for Kindertown.

As I argued last week when I reviewed Chalkable, an app store for schools, the problem of "discovery" in educational content is a substantial one. For its part, I should note here, Kindertown is aiming at parents, not schools, with its app store -- but I'm not sure that we should make too much of that distinction. EIther way, there's a lot of potential (and demand) here to make good recommendations for the grown-ups downloading the apps -- whether it's by curation from the Kindertown team, reviews from educators, or suggestions from other parent-friends.

There's also potential too -- particularly if Kindertown can establish itself as a reputable voice in the educational app world -- for it to build other services and products alongside its app reviews. This could include specific recommendations based on previous purchases, usage patterns, and so on. Some of this would require educational app developers tapping into a Kindertown SDK, and most app developers "aren't ready for that," says COO Brennan Knotts. Hopefully they'll get ready in fairly short order.

Scraping Data from College Bookstores in the Hunt for Cheaper Textbooks

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:57:47 PST

Ben Greenberg and Rui Xia, the co-founders of Textyard, are moving on to other projects, but in doing so they've open sourced the code that powers the Textyard website, asserting that "any college student with rudimentary coding skills will now be able to take on their local bookstore."

Textyard is a textbook comparison site that makes it easier for students to do a little research before buying their textbooks at their local campus bookstore. The service is meant to help counter the high price of textbooks by giving students more options and information about where to purchase their books. The website lets you enter all your classes and sections for the semester, pulls the list of required and recommended textbooks, and gives you their price on Amazon, Chegg, eBay and other online outlets.

How does Textyard know which textbooks are required? It "scrapes" the college bookstores' websites, meaning that it programmatically harvests the data about courses and textbooks. As Textyard's Greenberg notes, many colleges use one of six major online storefronts, so the team has written the code that can extract the information from each.

Greenberg also argues that this isn't illegal, although in the past some web-scraping companies have been sued for "trespass to chattels" (most famously, perhaps when eBay sought an injunction to stop Bidder's Edge from scraping its site to display auction information). In the case of Textyard, Greenberg argues that course and textbook information must be available to all students and bookstores under the Higher Education Opportunity Act. He also contends that if scraping does not disrupt a website from functioning (and typically it doesn't), there's really no way to say that the tool damages its business.

You can read the rest of the story on Inside Higher Ed.

Photo credits: Roger Wollstadt

Why You Should Care about a "Scratch for HTML5"?

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:51:54 PST

While we were recording our podcast this weekend and discussing the various stories I'd written throughout the week, Steve Hargadon counted up the number of posts I'd penned in my Mozilla research series and asked a really important question: Why should my readers care?

To recap: my research is part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts and involves researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. The research and writing I'm doing now is very very exploratory, in no small part because I've only just begun conducting interviews. Of the handful of folks I have spoken to so far, our conversations have addressed a number of issues surrounding Web-literacy, Web-building, computational thinking, community and creativity -- spiraling around the topic, perhaps, rather diving right into the specs of what a tool that could help teach Web-building might look like.

What I've written up from each of these conversations has really just been a polished version of my notes -- perhaps not terrific reading, but for me an important part of the process of thinking through the topic. It's also important -- for me and for Mozilla and hopefully for readers as well -- that I'm being as transparent as possible as I do so. (That also means if you think you are someone I should talk to or if you know someone I should talk to, feel free to drop me a line.)

But I should note here that "Scratch for HTML5" is really a short-hand to describe the sort of tool Mozilla might (or might not!) build. And it seems as though that short-hand is worth explaining:

Why Scratch?

Scratch is a development environment that introduces novices to programming. Developed by the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is easy to use and create with as it avoids one of the big obstacles to learning programming -- syntax -- and instead utilizes a drag-and-drop graphical user interface. That interface helps teach conditions, iterations, variables, and arrays (among other things) -- all foundational programming concepts. Scratch teaches computational thinking: logic, problem solving, model-building, pattern recognition, and algorithmic thinking.

That computational thinking element is just part of what makes Scratch an interesting and important model for other learning-computing efforts -- the gold standard, I'd go so far as saying. Scratch is also project-oriented -- with it you can build a game or an animation, for example. This isn't simply learning to code for the sake of learning to code. Scratch is also open source (the code has been released with a non-commercial license), and the projects that Scratch-ers themselves build are licensed CC-Share Alike. That in turn means there's an emphasis on building and remixing -- something crucial (although often unrecognized) for creativity (coding or otherwise).

And finally -- and this is incredibly important, I would argue, when we think about building for and on the Web -- Scratch has a strong and vibrant community of users, learners, teachers, and builders alike.

Why HTML5?

The argument for building a Web-building tool modeled on Scratch is an easy one to make (in education circles, at least, and I really do hope in tech circles too although, frankly, I'm not so confident on that accord).

"Why HTML5?" is a lot more complicated, I think, in part because we're still answering the question "What is HTML5?" A partial answer: HTML5 is the latest version -- the fifth, go figure -- of the HTML standard. But HTML5 isn't just a shinier version of Web mark-up. HTML5 is an incredibly powerful and complex Web-building specification, with features that include audio, visual, and canvas elements; Web storage and offline capabilities; Math markup; a rethinking of the DOM and APIs, and as such an emphasis on scripting.

That's quite different than plain ol' HTML, which as plenty of techies will be quick to tell you, is "just" Web mark-up and not "real" programming. But that distinction is blurred when it comes to HTML5.

That's not to say that HTML-as-mark-up doesn't matter. It's not to say that thinking about Web building for novices shouldn't start at the very basics (versus, say, starting with an Intro to JavaScript). But it does mean that when we think about a tool to introduce Web-building and HTML5, that rabbit hole goes pretty deep: HTML plus CSS plus Javascript plus...

I should add here too that the anwer to "Why HTML5?" must account for why someone would want to build for the Web (as opposed to building native apps, for example). (See: Mozilla's Mark Surman and Mozilla's Erin Knight on some definitions of Web-making)

Metaphors We Live By

Of course, once I describe this research project in terms of "Scratch for HTML5," my shorthand becomes an analogy of sorts, and as such, could limit what we could and should be talking about. I certainly don't want to restrict my exploration of the topic -- a tool to help teach Web-building and Web-thinking. When I look at the phrase "Scratch for HTML5," I think that both sides of that phrase could be problematized -- "Why Scratch?" and "Why HTML5?". Nevertheless, when I use this shorthand -- "Scratch for HTML5" -- I do so to imply that I mean the best possible educational tool in the service of the open Web, creativity, and community.

So as to Steve Hargadon's question as to why my readers should care, the answer is both simple and (clearly) complex: because I think enabling Web-literacy should involve computational thinking and community and openness and creativity. It should also involve understanding the Web in terms of its technological building blocks and in terms of its technological, educational, cultural, creative, computational, community potentials.

All that being said, when I talk to folks for this project, I'm far more interested in what you have to say on the subject...

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:42:48 PST

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.

You can listen to the latest episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on the Horizon Report, iPads in Maine, my research for Mozilla, and more) below.

You can also subscribe to the podcast feed here.

February 19, 2012 podcast

Ed-Tech Horizons

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:43:22 PST

Earlier this month, Educause and the New Media Consortium released the 2012 Horizon Report for Higher Ed. Here's my first stab at thinking about the report -- metaphorically, I admit, not technologically -- over on Inside Higher Ed.

Photo credits: Me, Manhattan Beach.

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: Library.nu Forced Offline, Kno Sues Cengage

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:56:38 PST

Law and Politics

President Obama offered his proposed 2013 budget to Congress this week, including $69.8 billion in discretionary funding for education, up 2.5% from 2012. The budget includes $1 billion for a "Race to the Top" for higher ed.

The FTC released a report entitled Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing. (Really. That's it's title.) It's a critical look at the way in which the mobile app markets handle children's personal data, questioning whether or not these apps violate COPPA. The report is particularly critical of Google and Apple's role in not better policing developers and clarifying permissions.

Mashable's Sarah Kessler has the scoop on the lawsuit between Kno and Cengage Learning. According to court documents, the digital textbook app-maker Kno is suing Cengage for breach of contract as the textbook publisher wants to pull its content out of Kno's digital bookstore. Loss of Cengage content, says Kessler, "could be disastrous" for Kno. The scuffle appears to be over the recent addition of highlights to the Kno platform, which apparently Cengage viewed as copyright infringement.

Testimony

"You know it's a good day," writes Creative Commons head Cable Green in an email, "when you testify about how OER will help more students learn; and the Committee Chair so strongly supports the idea that the American Association of Publishers and Elsevier opt not to testify." Via Stephen Downes.

Launches and Updates

Nature Education launched its digital textbook Principles of Biology this week. For $49, the textbook comes as an interactive, constantly-updated website. Techcrunch's Scott Merrill reviews the release.

The Guardian reports on Wikipedia's efforts to expand its Arabic content by working with two universities -- Ain Shams University and Cairo University -- where students will add and edit articles as part of their classwork. Wikipedia's education initiative is also active in 33 universities in the US and 7 in Canada.

Closures and Endings

E-book link site library.nu went dark this week following a cease-and-desist letter from a group of international publishers, including Oxford University Press and Elsevier. The publishers claimed that library.nu offered links to some 400,000 pirated e-books. Many of the e-books on the site were academic texts and textbooks.

From the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University will be offering a librarians over 55 early retirement as part of the library's restructuring program. There's been talk of mass layoffs at the library since earlier this year.

Research and Data

"Does Wikipedia have an accuracy problem?" asks The Atlantic's Rebecca Rosen, scrutinizing a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay by professor Timothy Messer-Kruse. Messer-Kruse's research includes a closer look at the Haymarket Bombing and trial, but he has a different story than the one commonly told: that there's no evidence that any of the 7 men convicted (and 4 hung) were involved in the attack. When Messer-Kruse tried to adjust the Wikipedia article he ran into volunteers who wouldn't let the edits go through as its policy that "articles should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views."

Research from the Girl Scouts of America looks at girls' attitudes to STEM, particularly hands-on experiments (they love it), versus their attitudes to STEM careers (they're not so thrilled).

Lots of headlines about iPads as babysitters following the release this week of some new numbers from Nielsen, which described how children in tablet-owning households played with the devices. For most, it was for games.

The education gap is growing between rich and poor, according to a study cited in The New York Times. To me, it's not terribly surprising that this is the case, but let's make this a good opportunity to point out how much poverty plays a role in education.

Funding

Memrise announced that it has raised $1.05 million for its mnemonics-meets-gamification language learning app.

Parchment announced it had raised $6 million this week, bring the company's total investment (Crunchbase) to $10.5 million. Parchment, which was founded by Blackboard co-founder Matthew Pittinsky, offers digital transcript services along with assessments and recommendations about if and where students might get accepted to college.

While ed-tech startups are turning to investors to raise capital, Houston ISD is turning to advertisers, specifically by selling ad-space on the school buses in order to raise money and make up for budget cuts.

Contests

Google announced the winners of its Code-In, its student coding competition for 13 to 17 year olds. 525 students entered, and 10 grand prize winners were chosen from all over the world.

Learning Without Context Isn't Learning: My Interview with Julie Meloni

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:04:46 PST

Julie Meloni and I go way back, back to the early days of academic blogging. We were humanities grad students then, back in the dangerous days of Ivan Tribbles when you could be harshly judged by having a blog. My, how academia has changed in the last decade. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Although working on a PhD in English when we first met, Julie was (still is) also a programmer -- something was (and still is) rather anomalous and quite awesome among comp/lit folks. Alongside the dissertating and teaching we grad students/comp instructors were all supposed to be doing, many of us were also learning how to build course websites, maintain a blog, and hack together our own digital tools. Julie's knowledge and her guidance in matters of HTML and CSS and PHP and the like were incredibly helpful to me and tons of others. I mean, she wrote the book on it.

Not surprising then, one of the first people I wanted to talk to for the research I'm doing for Mozilla ("Do we need a "Scratch for HTML5"?) is the person who taught me a lot not just about Web mark-up but about how the Web actually works. Actually this isn't an entirely new conversation for the two of us to have. See: "Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code" (2012) and "Unedited Thoughts on Students Knowing How to Code" (2009). Note also: neither of us are in academia any longer.

A brain dump of from our chat today.

Of the idea of a Scratch for HTML5: "Conceptually, maybe a fan. Technically, not a fan," Julie said at the outset. The danger, she asserted, is "teaching people to build something outside the context where you will ever build it again." What happens when you step outside your protective learning environment? If you can't take what you've learned elsewhere, what have you actually learned? Just memorization and following directions?

HTML versus HTML5: Markup versus programming. "HTML5 is different." It's "markup with more meaning plus storage and audio-visual and drawing -- things we were never able to do before." Creating websites and Web apps with HTML5 is really different than creating websites with HTML.

Teaching HTML versus Teaching HTML5: As she updates her HTML and CSS book, she's not diving into HTML5 per se. Rather it's "teaching the foundation" of HTML, but in terms of HTML5. Still the basics: how do we put stuff on the Web? How do we structure a Web page? What is DNS? You can't introduce folks to the skills needed building on the Web by jumping in to the complexities of HTML5 (neither as an introductory textbook author, nor as a teacher). It's still necessary to get people up to speed on HTML, something that's quite different than teaching novices to program.

Thoughts on "Scratch for HTML5": "Do you create an environment in which you can noodle around with questions and answers and ways to enhance your computational thinking -- setting up those logical constructs... "if this then that," -- using the tools to place things on the canvas and so on and so forth...something that takes you through the steps to do all that, and then the end result is an HTML5 app… If so, then you've not learned HTML5, you've learned Scratch. Or something that's beginning to sound a helluva lot like Flash." "Could you take that environment away and have you write something similar out in a text editor?" "And then what? Is it intended for them to then use that tool to build, or to move beyond it?"

What Need Is This Filling?: What do learners actually want? What isn't working for them now when it comes to available classes, books, tools? Is there a demand for better introductory tools for learning HTML5 specifically? Or a demand for more/better ways for learning markup? Or programming in general?

Teaching Computational Thinking versus Teaching HTML5: What are we preparing kids to do? Dangers of restricting the curriculum to a particular programming language or tool as technologies and tools change so quickly. People have to adapt quickly. Teaching about computational thinking -- something that's applicable across the board -- versus focusing specifically on teaching HTML5.

Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum: My Interview with Phil Wagner

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:57:15 PST

This interview is part of my ongoing research/writing project for Mozilla. That research involves my asking the question "Do we need Scratch for HTML5?" to a bunch of folks who are thinking about teaching, learning, writing, coding, building, computing, creating and other associated verbs.

Phil Wagner (@brokenairplane) is a science and math teacher, a curriculum developer, a programmer, and currently the Exploring Computational Thinking Curriculum Fellow in Science at Google. He's also the developer of the Physics Gizmo app in the Android App Store, a mobile device for data collection for science class. I wanted to talk to him about designing educational software, teaching computer science, and teaching computational thinking.

My notes from our conversation follow:

K-12 and CS: If programming is the new literacy, how do we incorporate computational thinking across the curriculum (as in "writing across the curriculum")? Is the goal to have students become coders? Or can it be to see how CS plays a part in the world? Do we see CS as a discipline for some, or as a principle for everyone?

Teaching and Technology: How can we help support teachers? Lack of experimentation, lack of modeling in science classes. What happens when we pair up math and science and humanities teachers? (Again, how can we help work across disciplines) Do we focus on the tools, or do we focus on instruction? We do worry too much about "knowledge" and not enough about learning and exploration?

Getting Kids Interested in Building: "How do we get kids to write their own poetry, code, paint." How do we motivate and empower them? Emphasize creation not just consumption. What's great about Scratch: less about "teaching the tool" than recognizing that computing is a "means to an end."

Barriers to CS: CS books not exciting, not student-friendly. Why have robotics and Marker Movement been successful? Don't need to emphasize badges, contests, points, but rather project-based learning -- "show people why in the world they should care?" Are we perpetuating bad practices in teaching (CS)? CS is, of course, a new discipline -- is it just a matter of "catching up" and going through the stages of development like other disciplines have?

Brainstorming What a "Scratch for HTML5" Tool Would Look Like:

1) Getting learners engaged quickly. "By the end, I should have a website."
2) Be like a puzzle.
3) "Turn the WYSIWIG on its head." "Give tools but create tools." "Create a tool that lets me do and build."
4) Should be instantly viewable, interactive. "See the Web."
5) Hosting (as an instance?)

The Spirit of Scratch: My Interview with Vanessa Gennarelli

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:14:46 PST

So when Vanessa Gennarelli left a comment on a recent blog post of mine about another Mozilla project, Hacksaurus, I knew I had to talk to her. The comment was smart (she pointed out that Hackasaurus was more Web co-construction than de-construction), and she referenced a blog post of hers on the topic of remixing, OER, and Scratch -- even smarter!

Gennarelli's a grad student at Harvard, a student and instructor at P2PU, an editor at Flat World Knowledge, and a poet. All of those things are relevant, I would argue, to questions about Web building and sharing and creation, but add to the mix that some of Gennarelli's research this term is with the Scratch community itself, and, well… you can imagine we had a great chat.

My notes and questions follow…

What is Scratch? Scratch as tool? Scratch as remix? "Scratch as a learning product" (one that teaches computational thinking?)? "Scratch as spirit"? (That spirit, argues Gennarelli is in the community.) Scratch as "a cluster of ideas that shape your attitudes." Can we think about HTML5 that way?

Importance of community: Having a safe space to create. Creating a safe space to create and, when you're ready, share it with the world. How is having the building occur offline (as currently happens with Scratch) different than building online -- on the Web and for the Web? Is there a difference between building in a "sandbox" and building on the Web?

How do we address concerns about the Web not being a safe space for "kids" to create? Is that really the case? Is this just a generational thing? (Parents and teachers concerns more than kids themselves.) Working out in the open can be terrifying. But it can also be incredible generative.

How does having an audience on the Web change the way in which we create? (We discussed the difference between academic writing versus blogging -- that's something that affects form, content, voice, fears, strengths, engagement). How do we help support other creators in "opening yourself up to other people"? Writing on the Web is like "peer review everywhere, in all aspects." Again, (how) can we transfer that same idea to Web-building?

[At this point in the conversation, we did get a little sidetracked on the subject of robot graders, a topic that often makes me feel like a bit of a Cassandra, but that in this case Gennarelli was able to agree: Yikes!]

Feedback, visualization, and engagement: How does the community around Scratch, particularly the statistics around the various activities affect learners' belonging and engagement? Does it motivate them to try something new? How can tools support feedback -- feedback in terms of code and in terms of community?

My History of E-Learning (Part 1)

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:49:58 PST

Inspired by Stephen Downes' E-Learning Generations and lots of thoughts about my own experiences with learning and technology

I dropped out of college in the spring of 1991, just two years in to my undergraduate degree. My reasons were severalfold: I hated Johns Hopkins. I hated Baltimore. I was in love, and soon after dropping out, I was pregnant. Those are all stories for another day.

Shortly after the birth of my son, I realized that I had to go back to school and finish my degree. It was a realization that came, in part, from my utter boredom being at home with a baby. I read a lot of library books, sure, but I missed intellectual engagement with other adults. I'd say that was the impetus for my returning to college -- that, along with the recognition that as a young mom I'd "need" a degree more than ever in order to be considerate "legitimate." That and -- John Hopkins aside -- I'd always really liked school.

But after leaving Baltimore and after having a baby, I had returned to Casper, Wyoming -- my hometown and where my parents lived at the time. Wyoming only has one 4-year university in Laramie, Wyoming -- a 3.5 hour drive away. With or without a baby, commuting really wasn't an option. However, the local community college in Casper offered a Bachelors Degree through its extension service. It meant compromising on the degree I'd get as there were only a handful offered. As I'd been an International Relations and then a History major at Johns Hopkins, I had more credits towards a BS in Social Sciences than anything else. So that's what I figured I'd work towards.

It's not a particularly noble or intellectually inquisitive motivation for choosing a major, but there you go.

One of the problems with pursuing a degree through a local community college's extension service was that my options for onsite classes were severely limited. But it was also an incredible opportunity too as the program recognized that and encouraged me to find courses available elsewhere in order to fulfill my graduation requirements -- via "distance learning" (which at the time meant mostly correspondence courses or conference calls).

It was actually quite wonderful as the mom of a newborn, stuck in the middle of nowhere, motivated to finish her degree, that I could piece together a schedule that worked for me, particularly with classes that were offered asynchronously. I could weigh whether or not I wanted to take certain classes face-to-face or not.

As such, I purposefully took Intro to Statistics as a correspondence course. I'd heard that the local community college instructor wasn't so great, and so I signed up for a class through Colorado State University. I received in the mail a huge box of 20 videotapes, containing all the course lectures. That, along with the textbook, was all I had to help me through the various homework exercises and tests required. There was no opportunity or avenue for me to ask the professor questions. If I was confused -- and often I was -- the best I could do was rewind and replay the video in question. Over and over and over until things finally made sense (which was rarely) or until I opted to just haphazard a guess on the homework.

At the time, I was glad to have taken the class this way. Lectures on videotapes seemed preferable to lectures live. I could move through the content at my own pace. I didn't have to worry about the baby.

But I struggled with the class, and it was the only B I got in college -- and if B really means "above average," I don't think I deserved that grade. I felt my understanding of statistics was fuzzy at best, although it was good enough to fulfill the prerequisites for the Intro to SPSS and Political Analysis class. I did take that class in a traditional classroom, I should note, and as I did so, it became a lot clearer why I needed to know certain basic statistical concepts.

But my knowledge of statistics and statistical software packages has dwindled away to nothing nowadays. True, I haven't really been practicing or using either. But I have to wonder whether or not I ever had a strong conceptual grasp of the topic. Watching a series of video lectures served me well enough to complete class exercises and pass class exams. And for what it's worth, it was pretty helpful in my fulfilling various graduation requirements. But as far as what I learned and what I understood and what I retained, it wasn't so great.

No doubt, my experiences with this class and with other distance learning efforts colors how I think about online and blended learning today -- the opportunities and challenges and intellectual dead-ends alike.

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed; Photo credits: Jason

iPads in Auburn, Maine's Kindergartens: A First Look at Their Effect on Learning

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

By now, it might not even be newsworthy when a school district announces it's buying a bunch of iPads for students. But last spring, when the Maine's Auburn School District announced that it was implementing a one-to-one program with the devices, the news did stir some controversy, spurred in part by Superintendent Tom Morrill's comments that an iPad is "even more important than a book." The other aspect that raised eyebrows: the students getting iPads were kindergarteners -- one iPad for each of the 250+ kindergarteners in the district.

The school year is now almost halfway over, and the early results are in from the district's implementation. The results are good too: iPads increased the kindergarteners' literacy scores.

That's the money quote, I suppose, or the headline that I should have utilized -- the one piece of data that some folks are going to take and run with: iPads increased the kindergarteners' literacy scores.

Part of Maine's Ongoing Literacy and 1:1 Initiatives

But as Damian Bebell, one of the project's researchers argues, we can't just act as though the devices "arrive on parachutes" into a classroom and suddenly and magically students perform better. "It's really about pedagogy and teaching," says Bebell. The iPads are "just a tool."

They're a new tool in the arsenal of the Auburn School District's kindergarten teachers, for sure, but the district has been working for a number of years on improving its early literacy efforts. That has involved extensive training for the teachers and staff. It also means there's several years worth of data in how well kindergarteners in Auburn have read and written -- important when it comes to ascertaining how much impact these iPads actually make in the short- and long-term.

It's also noteworthy, says Bebell, that this very much was the district pushing the iPad implementation so as to boost literacy initiatives already underway. "This didn't come from Apple. This didn't come from the state commissioner of education," he says. This wasn't just a matter of implementing a one-to-one iPad program with little planning or objectives in order to tap into the latest ed-tech hardware craze.

Of course, Maine has a long history of one-to-one laptop initiatives, as the state was one of the very first to put computers into the hands of every seventh and eighth grader (way back in 2002). As such, Maine educators know what it means -- technologically and pedagogically -- to do one-to-one computing. Nevertheless, this is the nation's first public school district to give every kindergartener an iPad. And the iPad implementation in Auburn was done very carefully, with the research component built in from the start, not added as an after-thought, says Mike Muir, another researcher in the project.

Research Design from the Beginning, Measuring for the Long-Term

This fall, the district randomly selected 8 of its 16 kindergarten classes to receive iPads. There's been ongoing professional development to help the teachers incorporate the devices into literacy instruction (the PD has included all kindergarten teachers and specialists in the district, not just the ones in the first batch of classes to receive iPads). In December, iPads were rolled out to the rest of the classes. Assessments of all students' literacy were made at the beginning of the year and again in December. The initial assessments and research has focused on literacy skills, but the researchers are also looking at how iPads might affect numeracy skills as well.

Of the assessments that were made, the results all trended positive, with students in the group that received iPads at the beginning of the school year performing better on average than students in the comparison group. However, the differences between these two groups were not statistically significant, except in one area. That is, students with the iPads exhibited a substantial increase in their scores on the Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words (HWSIW) test, a test of a student's phonetical awareness, assessing their ability to make the sound and letter connection. (Research results PDF)

Systemic Change (versus "iPads Simply Change Everything!")

Was this a result of the device? The apps? The instruction? The professional development? Muir, Bebell, and fellow researcher Sue Dorris (a principal at one of the elementary schools) wouldn't say. Or rather, they insisted that the improvements were part of a systemic effort that the Auburn School District has undertaken to boost students' literacy. It's also part of a larger effort, says Muir, to create schools that motivate kids to learn. Of course, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that iPads make kids more excited to do so, but these researchers are looking for more than that and believe they've got solid research and data.

The group will continue its research throughout the school year, and as these are the Auburn School District's earliest students, it will be interesting to watch what effect, if any, iPads have on students' long-term academic performance.

Photo credits: Mike Licht

Chalkable: An App Store for Schools

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:35:49 PST

A(nother) Rant about the LMS

In other words, if I had an editor here at Hack Education they'd axe this whole introduction here as I've buried the lede...

I confess, I tend to heave a heavy sigh when pitched stories about LMS startups. (Look for my talk later this spring at the 140Conf at Syracuse where I will speak about this in more detail. Or search for stories about LMSes in this blog -- but um, don't use the search function at the bottom of the page. It's broken right now. I'll fix it this weekend, I promise.)

The questions I think we should ask are: what problem do LMSes solve, and for whom?

It's fairly clear that some of the big players in the learning management system industry are eyeing the K-12 market. As schools move to take advantage of online and blended learning opportunities and as they begin to use more digital content, the LMS industry -- not surprisingly -- wants to sell K-12 schools the same product (slightly modified, of course) that they've been selling universities for years. The irony of course is that this shuffling into the K-12 market is occurring just when many universities are taking a hard look at their LMS implementations, due to the high costs and due to the sudden flood of alternatives.

Even at the higher ed level, many of these alternatives don't look or act much like the traditional LMS. Startups like CourseKit and iversity emphasize ease-of-use, the open Web, sharing, collaboration, and social learning.

Chalkable: LMS + App Store

This is all a very long introduction to Chalkable, a new startup which pitched me with the phrase "LMS + App Store." That "plus" caught my attention. After all, if we think about what problems should be solved in K-12 digital content, the App Store piece seems a far more interesting one than the LMS.

In part that's because discovering quality digital content and integrating it into other systems (both the SIS and other online apps) is a big challenge.

GeekDad's Daniel Donahoo has an excellent look at discovery and curation in a post this week -- "Curating Children's Content: Who's Doing It and Why?" Donahoo writes that "There is now so much media out there for children that parents and educators often struggle to know what tools are most useful for supporting children’s learning, educating them while they are entertained and have a level of quality that previously has been curated for us by other professionals." Donahoo examines the various groups -- research organizations, crowdsourcers, algorithms, the Learning Registry, and so on -- that are trying to tackle the problem of helping parents and teachers identify good educational content.

Now, of course, Chalkable's creation of an App Store doesn't necessarily solve this problem for schools. After all there's already the iTunes App Store, the Google Apps Marketplace and the Android Market and so on -- indeed, more App Stores might just mean more problems. Already these stores are full of educational apps, but other than an "education" category (and maybe a few subcategories like "language learning"), it's still hard to find things let alone know if what you've found is decent. One of the challenges that Chalkable will face if it's to gain traction will be to make sure that it has a wide selection of quality apps. That's easier said than done.

The discoverability issue isn't the only one that Chalkable says it wants to address. It also wants to simplify how schools pay for these apps. How do you buy apps with a purchase order? How do you distribute apps to some, but not all accounts or devices?

Chalkable's solution then is a platform that is one part educational app store and one part suite of class management apps. The Chalkable platform contains a messaging system, a news feed, reporting, grading, attendance and calendar tools. These tools are all Web-based (accessible on multiple devices) and fairly easy to use, and the system integrates already with most of the major school information systems.

The startup -- which is still in beta -- is hoping that the ease of use, ease of implementation, low cost ($10 per student, with in turn a $5 per student app budget to start), single sign-on, app integration, and open APIs will make it something that schools and other educational app developers will want take advantage of.

But with this route of "LMS + App Store," it seems as though Chalkable's competitors are pretty sizable ones: not just the LMSes new and old but the App Stores big and small. Chalkable versus Pearson, Google, Apple, Amazon, and/or Blackboard. On one hand, that makes me say "Yikes!" But on the other hand, it's clearly a huge opportunity to do things better as neither the LMS nor the App Store currently works quite right in K-12 schools.

Disassembling the Textbook: Inkling Previews Its Semantic Publishing Platform

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:35:01 PST

At O'Reilly Media's Tools of Change for Publishing conference today in New York, the digital textbook app-maker Inkling unveiled Habitat, a platform whereby other publishers can tap into the Inkling technology and production infrastructure in order to create their own interactive e-books. Techcrunch's Rip Emerson has a good write-up of the news, something that he describes -- not surprisingly -- in light of Apple's recent textbook announcement.

As my assessment of the Apple news probably made clear, I'm not too fond of the textbook as an academic artifact. I am however quite intrigued by Inkling. Considering how I've railed against textbooks lately, I should probably explain:

Disassembling the Textbook

When I first talked to CEO and founder Matt McInnis in early 2011, it seemed clear to me that he recognized that textbooks are a compilation of resources, and when we talk about digitizing textbooks, we're really missing the boat if we simply take the static content of the textbook and repackage it in an electronic format -- a PDF with a few bells and whistles and maybe some video embeds. When McInnis explained the company's vision to me, he said Inkling's plans were to "gently disassemble the textbook, describing the process as an engineering problem not a publishing one.

When McInnis and I spoke again last week and he briefed me on Habitat, he reiterated this sensibility. "To reinvent the book, you have to reinvent the printing press," he argued. Desktop publishing was the first step in doing just that, but even the shiniest of high-end software there hasn't really addressed some of the inefficiencies in the publishing system (handwritten comments on drafts, emailing massive files back and forth, and so on). The Habitat platform, which is just open to a few early adopters and should be open to more publishers later in the year, deals with both the production and the human processes that go into book-making -- managing the production team in a better cloud-based, collaborative environment.

But this isn't a DIY, self-publishing platform like iBooks Author, it's worth pointing out (although I suppose eventually Inkling could open it up to everyone).

Semantic Publishing

What it is, says McInnis, is part of Inkling's "semantic publishing platform" and that description --along with his comments about the disassembly of the textbook -- make me excited about the possibilities of, well, disassembling the textbook. It isn't just that the parts of an Inkling e-book are marked as chapters or illustrations. There's a richer level of metadata here so that pieces can be marked up with their learning goals, for example. I think that markup and metadata could make it easier for us to disassemble textbooks -- and I don't just mean e-books built on the Inkling platform, but how we approach any number of digital learning resources.

Inkling also announced today it will have an HTML5 reader available this spring, good news for Web-based reading and non-iPad owners.

Inkling will also soon carry some of the most popular O'Reilly book titles. And here finally are the interactive e-book guides that I have been waiting for -- work on learning to code by coding right into the textbook itself. (No word on when these titles will hit the Inkling store shelves).

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:12:05 PST

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.

You can listen to last week's episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on ed-tech amnesia and ed-tech myopia -- among other things)

You can subscribe to the podcast feed here.

February 11, 2012 podcast

HTML5 for Everyone: My Interview with Prof. Glen Bull

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:34:38 PST

This post is part of my ongoing research and writing project for Mozilla, looking into the need for better tools to teach Web building and HTML5.

The notes below are from my conversation with Glen Bull, Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Virginia and someone who's been thinking about technology and education for a long time, working on ways to connect K-12 schools to the Internet since the 1980s.

On the subject of teaching HTML5

While "anyone can learn HTML," Prof. Bull noted that CSS is already a major hurdle for some people. "Most people hit the wall then."

There are lots of tools that appeal to programmers, but the trick is having an on-ramp to get people to that place. Too often learn-to-code tools are built by experts for experts and don't address some of the initial and important barriers to entry.

Ideally, the tool should make it possible for people to "do something right away."

What's the goal?

To what extent can you build a tool to "empower people to be creative"?

Is the goal of a "Scratch for HTML 5" 1) to let people create or 2) to teach programming? Those goals don't necessarily align.

Teaching/building for the open Web

Computers are increasingly black-boxed. Moreover, the Web is moving away from "open" to closed gardens such as Facebook. There's an emphasis on apps too, with tools being made to make it easier to develop native apps (although this is a pendulum which will perhaps swing back towards HTML5). As such there's a vested interest -- on the part of Apple and Google -- in app development, not in Web development.

There's also a vested interest on the part of other companies (like Adobe) to create rich development tools that are prohibitively expensive and are not open source. Even Flash, which was once fairly easy to work with, has become increasingly complex.

Universities are often working on good tools, but they lack the polish.

Why haven't we built something like this already?

What elements of the history of the Web itself have made the emphasis more on viewing than on building websites? See: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

What should a "Scratch for HTML5" do?

Is Wordpress a good model here -- something that has easy Web-building tools to get you "in the door"? But what next: a tool would have to peel back the layers (as with Hackasaurus) and encourage people to learn more -- but it would have to be in a scaffolded way.

What about Web hosting and server space? (Again, like Wordpress.com) This might be a requirement for creating a tool that would work in classrooms.

A tool ought to let you build locally too, particularly since in a lot of (school) settings there remains a lack of reliable Internet connectivity.

MITx Opens for Enrollment (and Certification - For Now - Is Free)

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:40:58 PST

MIT opens registration today for the first of its online courses offered as part of its new MITx initiative. The university announced MITx late last year as the next step not just in informal online learning but in alternative certification. Registration for MITx is free and open to anyone, and for this first "prototype" class, there is no additional charge to receive the certification upon successful completion of the class.

This first class is "6.002x: Circuits and Electronics." It will run from March 5 through June 8 and will be taught by Anant Agarwal and Chris Terman (co-directors of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Piotr Mitros (one of CSAIL's research scientists), and Gerald Sussman (a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science).

According to the course website, the class will demand approximately 10 hours a week from those enrolled. There will be video lectures and demonstrations, homework exercises and an "online interactive lab specifically designed to replicate its real-world counterpart." All of the assignments and exams will be graded by "robots," or rather artificial intelligence software. Use of this machine grading makes it possible to scale the offering to the same sort of level that Stanford experienced with its massively popular online offerings last fall. For now, verification of students' academic honesty in the MITx course will rely on the "honor code," but in the future the university says it will develop a more sophisticated system checking students' identities and curbing plagiarism and cheating.

Circuits and Electronics, as the name of the course suggests, is meant to be an introduction for electrical engineering and computer science majors. The materials for 6.002 are already available via MIT Opencourseware, but MITx clearly offers more than just the syllabus and readings.

But the connection to MIT OCW is important here, and it's something that makes MITx quite distinct from some of its online learning competitors. As MITx is situated as part of the university's broader mission, MIT isn't just offering isolated courses or content here, disaggregated from other related materials and/or catering to people who already have a fair amount of expertise in a field. Rather the MITx classes will be situated as part of the larger university curriculum and tied into its other online learning initiatives. There will be a list of all the related curriculum and courses on the MIT OCW website, for example, with the pre-requitsites available (and/or coming soon) as MIT OCW Scholar classes.

Much of the initial interest in MITx has focused on the certification part and the question of whether or not a letter from MITx will mean much on the job market. If a certificate from MITx (or Udacity or the like) is accepted, so the argument goes, "the jig is up" for higher ed. But by situating MITx as part of the larger educational mission of the school, it appears as though MIT is making a different argument here for its continuing relevancy -- not just as an issuer of diplomas and certificates, but as a source for a "world class education."

Airy Labs and Ed-Tech Startup Failures

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:10:09 PST

The news finally hit Techcrunch today: The education gaming startup Airy Labs is in trouble. Big trouble.

I've had a glimpse into some of the problems for a while now, and I opted not to write the story. I guess that makes me an awful ed-tech journalist. I'd prefer to think it makes me a good friend and counsel to those folks who are working as young (let's stress here: young) ed-tech entrepreneurs, bent on reshaping the "ed" and the "tech" and the "entrepreneurship" part of the equation.

There are plenty of sharks in the water. But I really really really try not to become one of them.

As I heard about the goings-on at Airy Labs, I thought through what I'd say and how I'd say it and what my larger thesis/analysis would be. And at the end of the day, it really just seemed like it wasn't worth my breaking the story about an education startup hitting the rocks.

In part, it's because Airy Labs was making free apps for the iPhone. No school budgets or teacher pocketbooks were harmed in the implosion of this startup. But lots of lives are.

And it is worth noting here, startup failure happens all the time. Startups burst onto the scene (and particularly now, in such "frothy" times, they burst onto the scene with substantial investor backing). They stumble. They pivot. They adapt. And often they fail and sometimes they die. They die silently with a few founders saying "well shit, that didn't really work out. Lessons learned. Let's move on." Or they die with a "hey, let's make things right. Let's pay back our investors and then get jobs or something."

Or, sometimes I guess, they die spectacularly and publicly, with stories in Techcrunch and a litany of nasty posts left on various forums around the Web.

It happens. It happens now, and it's happened in the past. The fact that we don't actually know much about our history -- as entrepreneurs or as educators -- is part of the very unfortunate (ed-)tech amnesia we all suffer from. Perhaps that's a big lesson to be drawn here.

But I don't think it's the only or most important one. Because the massive failure of management at Airy Labs is also part of this ridiculous Silicon Valley hubris we're witnessing these days, particularly in the education sector. It's one that says that technology necessarily holds "the answers" to "the problems" with education. It's one that says that the young and high-scoring-IQ and the Ivy-League-sanctioned know the best way forward. I mean, why ask someone who's spent 20 years in the trenches as a teacher how to fix education?! Let's instead ask 20 year olds to come up with a "fix" for education (and of course provide a healthy return on investment as they do so).

Years in the trenches and years alive aside, I'd argue that what's happened at Airy Labs seems less a failure on the part of genius 20-something than it is a complete and utter fuck-up on the part of the grown-ups involved. (I'm sorry for sounding age-ist here, I should add. I am, for the record, quite old.) As this particular story has played out, it seems that Andrew Hsu, the CEO and founder of Airy Labs, handed over control of his startup to his parents. And so yeah, in this case, I tend to blame a lot of the utter mismanagement that Anthony Ha describes in his Techcrunch story on Hsu's parents.

But the parents are only partially responsible. After all, Hsu was also one of the young prodigies crowned by Peter Thiel as part of his much-lauded Thiel Fellowship -- a program that paid a handful of smart kids tose under age 20 $100,000 each to drop out of college. And so, yeah. Here, I blame Peter Thiel for swooping in with a handful of cash and a laissez-faire "profit-from-you-later" sensibility.

We must ask here: what does the failure of Airy Labs say about Thiel's whole argument for dropping out? What does it mean for his argument that the best bet lies in backing young entrepreneurs and paying them very handsomely to drop out of school to start companies? And who's asking those questions? (I mean, other than me) Who's questioning Thiel's role, Thiel's mission, Thiel's philosophy? ("No comment" seems Thiel's response, according to Ha.) Who listens to Thiel? And why?

And if "no one is to blame" -- which is how the very libertarian Silicon Valley would like to situate things -- what then? I mean, if no one is to blame for the disaster at Airy Labs, what then? What happens if we buck that whole "hands-off" notion and instead scrutinize all of this in terms not so much a failure on the part of Hsu but on the part of Silicon Valley and its current mythos that young geniuses are de facto great entrepreneurs and good CEOs. Micro, macro, "investment worthy" -- I realize I'm blending a lot of trends and themes here.

As I do so, I should add that in this particular case (as far as I know) Hsu was the first (and perhaps the only?) one of the first batch of Thiel Fellows to receive more venture backing beyond Thiel's initial investment -- a nod, perhaps, from the larger investment community that Thiel can pick 'em when it comes to smart kids (Thiel was, of course, one of the first investors in the young Mark Zuckerberg's little project. You know, Facebook). Hsu's startup raised $1.5 million from Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, and Playdom's Rick Thompson. In some ways, the excitement over Airy Labs -- an untested, unprofitable gaming startup that still felt compelled to hire 20+ employees -- seems to confirm my very first reactions to the Thiel Fellowship: the whole thing seemed to me to be far less about "disrupting higher ed" than it seemed to be "buying early stock in some very bright minds."

I am not disputing here that Andrew Hsu is a very bright mind. He graduated from college with his first BS at age 16 (making the whole "I'll pay you to drop out of college" thing that Thiel promised seem more than a little silly in Hsu's case, considering the kid already had a degree).

And I should note here, in full disclosure, that it's been roughly one year since I first met and wrote about someone who eventually became another Thiel Fellowship scholar, Dale Stephens. Over the course of the past year, Dale has become a spokesperson of sorts for "dropping out" (or uncolleging) of college. Thiel must be proud (even though Dale hasn't been sanctioned by Thiel's VC buddies, he has been sanctioned by Penguin in terms of a book deal). I would argue that, as Dale travels the world and speaks about young folks questioning the expectation that they all must go to college upon high school graduation, he actually does a far better job than Thiel for making an argument about "the higher ed bubble." (Another side-note: Dale's profits in regard to such arguments are, I should add here, at a very different scale than investors looking for the next bilion-dollar-startup are probably looking for.)

Again, for the sake of clarity and openness: Dale has also become my dear friend -- one that I try very very hard not to go into "mom" mode with, considering he's roughly the same age as my own son. So take what I say here about Dale and about paying off any 19-year-old with a big chunk of cash -- whether you're Thiel or the student loan industry -- with a huge grain of salt.

But all that being said, I do think there's a big difference here between Dale Stephens and Andrew Hsu as Thiel fellows and as forward thinking education-entrepeneurs. If nothing else: if Dale fucks up, Dale just messes up his own world. He hasn't taken VC funding. He's "just" landed a book contract. He hasn't hasn't hired 20 employees. He hasn't asked his parents to mediate or moderate his new world (although I would say that there are a lot of adults that support Dale in part because he's asked us for advice, not for money).

And as we're (loosely) on the subject of parents and geniuses and entrepreneurship and the future of education, I'd say that Dale's parents must be good folks. They have an incredible son. But they also have been fairly hands-off over Dale's "career." It's not that Hsu's parents aren't good and that Hsu isn't incredible too, but part of the Airy Labs implosion seems to rest on the assertion that his parents did not operate the same way.

This too is where all this writing about Silicon Valley education startups gets weird for me. Funnily enough, of all the first year Thiel scholars, I've only met two: Dale Stephens and Andrew Hsu. Hsu, only very briefly. And admittedly, I think that's part of what made me very much not want to write about the clusterfuck at his startup. He seems like a good smart kid. And he's a kid (in my age-ist viewpoint, of course). If my kid fucked up (ha -- when my kid fucks up), I wouldn't blog about it. I wouldn't want it to hit Techmeme, let along hit the Facebook news feed. I just wouldn't, I just don't. There you go. But then again, my kid hasn't raised $1.5 million in funding. Hell, I've told my son to think seriously about his plans for college in no small part because I feel the student loan industry is a similarly sort of weird pay-off where adults bribe kids to do our bidding. It's gross. It skews kids away from independence and makes them dependent on their investors -- Thiel, Silicon Valley investors, student loan banks, what have you.

And of course, add to all of this mixed emotion on my end is the fact that Hsu's startup aimed to build smart educational games. And I really do want to see more "smart" in our sector. I liked Hsu's academic cred a lot (he has a strong background in thinking about "the brain"). Moreoever, I was particularly pleased that he'd hired Alicia Chang, a PhD in cognitive psychology, who seemed very committed to "getting things right" in terms of research and development and implementation and efficacy. Like Hsu (and like me and like Dale but not like Peter Thiel for those keeping score at home), Chang opted to leave academia for the startup world, believing her impact would be greater in the latter.

We're all looking for a big change. "We" meaning me, Dale, Andrew Hsu, Alicia Chang, Peter Thiel, investors, teachers, hackers, parents, students, drop-outs. We are all searching for the big potential and the big impact. But in this case -- in the case of Airy Labs and all the ripples it could send out in ed-tech and in investment circle etc, it all feels incredibly twisted and decidedly awful. Big change muted.

And me, I feel muted and saddened that we are still able to fuck up quite so spectacularly when it comes to "doing right" by what we do and build in education technology -- what we build and what we say and what we model and what we demand and what we want and who we are and what we fight for. Where the community of support around educators and around entrepreneurs? What happens when we turn to very young and inexperienced entrepeneurs and hand them a wad of cash and demand that they lead the way forward for the rest of us? What happens when they don't "do it right"? What happens to ed-tech when we don't help folks keep/back on track? And whose track are we even asking kids to be on? I say that, of course, meaning "kids" as students and "kids" as ed-tech entrepreneurs. And when I ask for folks to be "on track," I don't mean just "profitable" either -- another thing, I realize, that makes my expectations fall so very far outside the demands of a lot of the voices and urges in most tech circles.

And in most tech circles, I realize now that I've written all of this, that I probably sound much more shark-iike than I ever intended.

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: No More White MacBooks for Schools, No More Penguin E-Books for Libraries

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 08:39:44 PST

Politics and Policies

President Obama announced the 10 states that will receive waivers to No Child Left Behind this week: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee (New Mexico applied for a waiver but it was not granted.) The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss takes a closer look at what these waivers mean, arguing that "States are swapping one president’s education vision for another, and both involve the overuse of high-stakes standardized tests."

U.S. Representative Mike Doyle (D-PA) has introduced a bill -- The Federal Research Public Access Act -- that stands in directly opposition to the Research Works Act (RWA), a bill supported by the publishing industry and lambasted by researchers and scholars. Unlike the RWA which would put federally-funded research behind a paywall, Rep. Doyle's proposed law would mandate free and open access to it.

Legalities

The Google Books lawsuit "lurches forward." That's the headline on Paidcontent's story of the latest moves in the longstanding battle between publishers, the Authors Guild, and Google. Google is trying to remove the Authors Guild from the case, arguing that this isn't a "class action" suit. As writer Jeff Roberts notes, "ground has shifted considerably since the scanning controversy first erupted," with e-books becoming ubiquitous and Google no longer appearing to hold the monopoly over digitized content.

MindShift reports that several California universities are restricting what students can do with their class notes. The crackdown isn't entirely new (I reported on actions taken at Sacramento State back in October 2010), as schools have long held that students cannot publish or distribute their class notes for commercial purposes. The move does raise questions about the legality of many note-sharing sites, including Notehall which was acquired last year by Chegg.

What are the legal boundaries when it comes to copyright and fair use? Unfortunately, it's not always clear, and these questions tend to be resolved via lawsuits (The Authors Guild, I'm giving you one of Paddington Bear's cold hard stares over this.) But as Inside Higher Ed's Steve Kolowich reports, librarians are "going on offense — not with a lawsuit, but with a formal set of guidelines that it hopes will help libraries be more confident and less fearful of crossing ordinary copyright thresholds under the auspices of fair use." The Association of Research Libraries has released a "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries" to help clarify things.

Updates and Upgrades

MIT OCW has launched the latest class in its OCW Scholar series. (I covered the first of its 2012 courses here). This time around, it's Differential Equations that's now available as a OCW++ course -- that is, lecture videos, course notes, demonstrations, and problem-solving videos created by MIT recitation instructors.

Blackboard unveiled the latest version of its LMS this week, with a focus on the UI and UX. Inside Higher Ed's Joshua Kim has a look at what the company has dubbed "Blackboard Ocho."

If you are a teacher using Android App Inventor in your class this spring, you can get early access to the latest version, available through MIT's Mobile Learning Center.

Mozilla's Eric Knight has laid out the road map for the organization's Open Badges initiative. Included in the plans for the year: a public beta and issuer and displayer APIs.

ProfHacker's Mark Sample takes a look at the latest version of the research and citation tool Zotero, along with the first ever Zotero client for the iPad (iTunes link).

LearnBoost continues to roll out the updates to its suite of online classroom administration tools. Once upon a time, I used to describe the startup as a "grade book," but it's clearly become a whole lot more. Last week, it enabled embeddable media in its lesson plan feature; this week, it's syncing with Google Calendars.

ShowMe has released several improvements to its iPad app, including much better writing tools making it far easier (smoother and more legible) to write on its whiteboard. Another new addition: Google Image Search within the app in order to pull images into the lessons you're building there.

Downgrades and Cancellations

The white Macbook will be no more. Apple ceased selling the devices to consumers last summer, and now it's ending sales to schools as well. Many are speculating this means more of a push for iPads in schools, although it appears as though Apple plans to offer alternatives to schools, including a lower-cost 13" MacBook Air.

It appears as though the discussions between the major publishers and the ALA didn't go so well, judging by the news yesterday that Penguin will be terminating its contract with Overdrive, one of the major distributors of e-books to libraries. Starting February 10, Penguin's e-books and audiobooks will no longer be available through Overdrive for libraries to lend their patrons. Penguin is owned by the education giant Pearson, a company with "learning" in its motto but perhaps not in its mission.

Research and Data

Interesting stats from a recent Book Industry Study Group survey of over 1600 college students. It found that sales of digital textbooks actually fell between 2010 and 2011 -- from 6% to 3%. While 46% of respondents said they were interested in tablets, just 3% of students say that they currently use e-readers or tablets to read textbooks.

According to the College Board, the number of students taking and passing AP exams is up -- up from 16.9% in 2010 to 18.1%. However, the College Board also noted that many academically qualified students aren't sitting the exams, either by choice or because the courses are not offered at their schools.

The National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys has surveyed almost 900 bankruptcy lawyers, and finds that 80% are reporting a "significant" or "somewhat significant" increase in potential clients with student-loan debt, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Just how lousy are the working conditions for adjunct faculty? Josh Boldt, a writing instructor at the University of Georgia has set up a Google Doc in which he's asking instructors to share data about their pay, contracts, and benefits. The plight of the adjunct is gaining increasing attention, thanks in no small part to the new MLA president, Michael Bérubé.

Funding and Hiring

California has axed all state funding for public libraries. For once, I'm speechless.

Khan Academy continues to beef up its engineering staff with the addition of this week of Craig Silverstein, Google's very first employee. No word yet on what Silverstein's role will be at Khan Academy. "Programming," he suggested to Mike Swift from The Mercury News. But considering his role in making Google "Google-y," it will be interesting to watch how or if his move from one big tech organization to another marks a shift in culture. Also, mad props to EdSurge for breaking this story, and curses to anyone who described it as "a newsletter" without offering a link.

The Yale Daily News reports that Open Yale Courses may be in jeopardy as the grant money that funds the university's open courseware initiative runs out at the end of this year.

Classes, Conferences, and Competitions

The Irish non-profit Coder Dojo is coming stateside, launching its first Dojo in San Francisco, hosted by the social code repository Github. Coder Dojo offers classes and mentorship to help kids age 7 to 18 learn programming. The classes are free and laptops are provided to those attendees who aren't able to bring their own.

The eighth annual Google Summer of Code has launched. The program offers an opportunity for university students to work on real-world, open source projects for mentoring organizations from around the world.

The White House hosted a Science Fair this week, hosting a number of great projects, awesome young builders, scientists and makers, and resulting no doubt in the best photo of President Obama this week.

Harvard held a conference this week, focusing on teaching and learning. "In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn," writes Dan Berrett for The Chronicle. "When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop." Much of the event focused on problems with the lecture, which "fails at ... educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context."

In an email to those who took his online AI class last fall, Sebastian Thrun gave a few more details about his new startup Udacity, which has also posted a slew of new classes "coming soon" onto its site. Thrun says that "In the next months, we will offer an entire computer science curriculum through Udacity, and offer certification services so that an entire degree can be obtained online."

Things might not be going so well for Udacity's competitors back at Stanford as several of the popular classes that were supposed to be offered this spring have disappeared from the list of offerings, including the Tech Entrepreneurship and Lean Launchpad classes.

Web (De)Construction with Hackasaurus

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:18:56 PST

Tinkering with the Web

One of the very first "a-ha" moments I had when I was trying to teach myself HTML was that I could right-click and "view source." Perhaps it sounds silly and obvious to say that now, but at the time, I felt as though I had pulled back the curtain on the Great and Mighty Wizard of Oz. "So that's how they built it," I realized, scanning through what was at the time, I admit, mostly indecipherable code. But what I saw was enough for me to copy and paste and tweak that I started to get a sense of what was actually going on on a website.

Years later, I discovered Firebug, a tool to help me inspect the HTML on a given page and, even better, help me debug stuff on my own.

Hackasaurus

Mozilla's Hackasaurus taps into that same sort of discovery, that same act of peeling back the layers behind a Web page. But it does so with a fair friendlier interface than either "view source" or Firebug can provide.

Hackasaurus offers "X-Ray Goggles" for the Web through a simple browser add-on. With those x-ray goggles, users can -- as the name suggests -- peer beneath the surface to see what the Web is made of. The goggles can be activated on any Web page, enabling a view of its building blocks. By mousing over the various elements of a Web page, users are able to see the code, and by clicking they can actually manipulate it -- replacing images, for example, or adjusting fonts or alignment.

These remixes can also be published (to remixes.hackasaurus.org) and shared with others.

Hackasaurus demonstrates that the Web is tinker-able -- that's profoundly important for folks to realize.

In honor of the Valentines Day, the Hackasaurus team has created several "Love Bombs" using the tool. With it, you can hack your own message of love, such as the one that Atul Varna has written to Tim Berners-Lee. Awwww.

Disclosure: I am currently working on a research project for Mozilla regarding helping people become web-builders, asking whether there's a need for a "Scratch for HTML 5." I haven't spoken to members of the Hackasaurus team yet, but it's at the very top of my To Do list.

Questions I want to ask them: How do we get from deconstruction and remixing to construction and building? Is there a learning path (or even a difference)?

Science, Software Carpentry, and the Discipline to Hack

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:02:03 PST

I'm helping Software Carpentry think through its strategy and curriculum for a blended learning model of teaching software engineering to scientists. As I recently noted, I'm making some shifts in my work so that I can focus more on some of these questions surrounding how do we create learning environments for non-programmers to learn programming. Fair warning: what follows is a bit of a brain dump…

Discipline, Part 1 (n. a field of study)

My academic background is in literature and folklore, so no surprise, I spend a lot of time closely watching the developments in the "digital humanities" and thinking how can we help bridge what has long been viewed as two utterly separate (and perhaps even oppositional) disciplinary fields -- the humanities and computer science. Stanley Fish's handwringing aside, those bridges can be built in a number of ways and to a number of ends: helping train scholars in new tools (and, as such, in new methodologies); learning to work with technologists; coming to terms with the ways in which storage, processing, interactivity, data, and so on might enhance teaching, research, and their dissemination.

The relationship between the humanities and technology may be fraught (again, cue Stanley Fish and a weak joke about "Is there a .txt is this class? or something), and I suppose we can trace that to the various graduation requirements for humanities majors: unless students pursue the tech education themselves, they're unlikely -- or at least not required -- to come across it in the course of their degrees. You take a math class. You take a science class. And boom, you're done, allowing you to steer clear of those scary STEM-y part of campus.

But what about folks whose disciplines are science? Perhaps it's easy to assume that they 1) have had more technology instruction, 2) have a stronger background in math and engineering, and 3) have a greater need (and therefore drive) to use computer tools in the course of their work. Indeed, as Northwestern University English professor Martin Mueller writes in a recent essay on the digital humanities (and Stanley Fish), DH "is different in most other disciplines. There are no self-proclaimed digital biologists, chemists, or economists, but for many practitioners in those disciplines digital tools and methods have become essential parts of their engagement with the primary data in their fields — leaving aside the matter of writing and publishing research results, which is going digital in all fields, including the humanities, albeit at different rates."

But I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure we can say be so assured that scientists are de facto "digital" or even technical -- as tool-users let alone as tool-builders. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Software Carpentry back in 2008, 96% of the scientists who responded described themselves as "self-taught" when it came to their software engineering skills. And while the survey wasn't able to ascertain how effective or skilled these scientists were, it did uncover some anecdotal evidence that the answer may be "not very."

Discipline, Part 2 (n. training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character)

When we talk about informal learning -- like the steps that the scientists mentioned above have taken to teach themselves a sufficient amount programming -- we often assume that these are very motivated learners. In other words, if you know that you need to use a particular tool in order to move a project forward (whether it's HTML or Hadoop), you'll likely be more driven to learn.

But is that initial impetus (the motivation, the need) sufficient? Do our assumptions about motivation color our assumptions about discipline? That is, do we err on the side of the casual lessons and loosely-structured learning plans and goals? How much learning is sufficient -- just enough to muddle through?

And do we tend to view the informal learner as an isolated learner? Sure, that person can go to online forums and Q&A sites for help (e.g. Stack Overflow). Is the informal learning constructing their knowledge on their own? If so (and/or if we think that's so), how can we engage them with others? (And I can't help but return to this question of academic disciplinarity: what happens when these social learning environments cross disciplines -- particularly when there are gulfs (real or perceived) between the "how" and the "what" they know?)

Do we need CS-the-discipline? Or do we need programming-in-practice? (Is there a difference?)

Discipline, Part 3 (n. orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior)

Software Carpentry offers a two-day boot camp, followed by a six-week online course (with the expectation of between 2-5 hours per week of work on the part of students). The curriculum is listed here, and includes a fairly broad survey through the basics of the Unix shell, a brush-up on programming concepts*, through to data structures, databases, and development techniques and practices. Some of the instruction is done in a face-to-face setting, but much of it occurs in the online, follow-up lessons.

What to do during that two-day bootcamp and what to save for the follow-up, online lessons is an important question here. Also, what do participants already know (particularly with regards to their programming chops*)? What do participants need to know (in other words, what problems are they solving)? How is the learning scaffolded, particularly with participants' different goals and with their coming from a variety of academic backgrounds ("science" after all is a very, very generic term)? In the move from face-to-face to online, how do make sure there's enough "there there" -- not just the right content, but the right format and, of course, an environment where learners are both supported yet encouraged to be self-driven (cough, disciplined, cough)? After all, ideally the Software Carpentry training won't just "solve their programming problems" by equipping them with new skills (or honing pre-existing ones), but it will enable them to apply that problem-solving and design-thinking forwards and backwards in their work.

More questions: Do students work together (on- and offline)? If so, how? If they are solving their own problems (based on their own projects and disciplines), how does Software Carpentry meet those needs -- practically, philosophically? While there's a lot of thought that's gone into thinking about the format for the lessons, it seems to assume direct instruction rather than peer-to-peer learning.

Learning (Software Engineering), Undisciplined

How does "end user software engineering" different than "professional software engineering"? And how do we teach for the former, not just for the latter -- an un-disciplined computer science, if you will?

* For a subsequent post( or posts): how do we help folks who do not have a good understanding of basic programming skills reach this point so that they're ready for Software Carpentry and similar sorts of programs? That leads to another question (of course -- this write-up has way more questions than answers, eh): what are some other examples of blended learning to teach programming (either "professional software engineering" or "end user software engineering")?

Ed-Tech Amnesia

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:21:36 PST

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- George Santayana

Our short-term ed-tech memory (Inside Higher Ed)

Photo credits: Andrés Monroy-Hernández

The Power & the Problems with the New Wolfram Alpha Pro

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:25:41 PST

Wolfram Alpha unveils a "pro" version of its computational search engine today, with a new set of tools that promises to make it easier for anyone to tap into this powerful technology.

Although we've come to associate searching for information online with "Googling," Wolfram Alpha offers a different sort of "search." Rather than querying the Web for pages that might have the information you're looking for, Wolfram Alpha queries its own massive database, containing hundreds of datasets (everything from weather data to sports stats to birth records to box office records). If you ask Google "What is the meaning of life?" you'll get pages of links -- to Aristotle, to reviews for the iPhone 4S, to Zen Buddhist sites, to WikiAnswers, and so on. Ask Wolfram Alpha, and you get the correct answer, along with the source of the information.

The Power of Wolfram Alpha Pro

For $4.99 per month ($2.99 for students), Wolfram Alpha Pro will give you access to more of the computational power "under the hood" of the site, in part by allowing you to apply the technology to your own datasets. Rather than just offer an input box where you can type your queries, you'll be able to upload images and files that Wolfram Alpha will in turn analyze for you.

This includes text files (Wolfram Alpha will respond with the character and word count, an estimate on how long it would take to read aloud, most common word, average sentence length and more); spreadsheets (it will crunch the numbers and return a variety of statistics and graphs); and image files (it will analyze the image's dimensions, size, and colors as well as let you apply several different filters). Over 60 different file types can be uploaded, and you will also be able to download the analysis as well (and not just from your own uploads, but from all the data related to your particular search query).

There's also a new extended keyboard that contains the Greek alphabet and other special characters for manually entering data. (Side note: Read this post by Dan Meyer on math education and Silicon Valley, and stew on how Wolfram Alpha's tools fit in to his argument. Or at least that's what I've been doing.)

The Problems

I've been tinkering with the new tool since I got access to it earlier this week, and I confess, even before I watched Stephen Wolfram demo Wolfram Alpha Pro, I had my credit card out and ready to pay the subscription fee. Why? Well, as I've written previously (rather, as I write regularly), data is becoming increasingly important (and politicized, no doubt) in education. But data isn't valuable unless you can extract meaning from it, and many of the tools for analyzing data (particularly large datasets) remain out of the hands of non-data-scientists.

My friend Pete Warden has been at the forefront of helping create just these sorts of tools. His Data Science Toolkit offers open data sets and open source data tools. Note the adjective there: "open." That's something that the Wolfram Alpha product definitely is not (See: its CDF file format).

But that's just one problem that I have with the new tool -- and a concern that I'm not sure others share. My other beef isn't with the tool itself but with what Wolfram Alpha Pro quickly reveals: the shoddy state that a lot of datasets are in.

The first place I went to test-drive Wolfram Alpha Pro was ed.data.gov, the federal government's collection of education data. There are 110 datasets (purportedly) available there, but I struggled to find a single one that would work. There were lots of "files not found" and incompatible file formats -- quite a feat considering the tool accepts 60 different types. In some cases, to make the upload work just meant opening up the CSV files and deleting a few columns -- a good reminder of the difference between machine-readable and human-readable spreadsheets.

With the new tool, "you take the data, throw it at Wolfram Alpha Pro, and see what it has to say about it," says Stephen Wolfram. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, Wolfram Alpha Pro won't be able to say much.

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:05:13 PST

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.

You can listen to last week's episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on Educon, on another online learning startup out of Stanford, and on Mark Zuckerberg, the "Hacker Way" and the implications of the Facebook IPO) below.

You can subscribe to the podcast feed here.

February 3, 2012 podcast

How to Teach Web-Building to Anyone

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:30:02 PST

Abridged version: I'm making some big shifts in my work in the coming months (read: focusing my energies rather than what's become the scattershot of freelance writing). I'm thrilled to say that this will mean more time for Hack Education, thanks in no small part to a research and writing project I'll be undertaking for Mozilla.

It's part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts, and my piece will involve researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. Specifically (or rather, conceptually), I'm asking the question: Do we need a "'Scratch' for HTML5?" All my findings and conversations will be written up here on this blog.

How to Teach CS to Anyone

At Educon last month, I attended a session about "how to teach computer science to anyone." As someone who's trying to learn programming herself and spends a lot of time thinking about both the "teaching" and the "anyone" in the construction of that particular session title, I felt I had to attend.

Science Leadership Academy's CS teacher Mark Miles led the session, in which he described some of the challenges he faced as a new teacher offering computer science elective courses to high school students. His was an interesting story (I'm not sure how typical it is -- I'd love to hear feedback from other CS teachers on that account): a CS and math major himself, he spent time as an engineer before becoming an educator. And as he described his first year of teaching, it seemed clear that he was trying to replicate -- or perhaps the right verb is "translate" -- his undergraduate CS experiences into the high school classroom. It didn't really work out so well.

Miles has since changed the curriculum for his classes substantially, using tools like Alice to help introduce computational thinking before moving into teaching a programming language. He's also including e-textile projects with the Lilypad Arduino, and no doubt the idea of creating wearable computers likely appeals to a very different audience than the typical CS crowd. All good stuff.

Does Everyone Need CS?

One of the things that struck me as I listened to Miles and the other educators talk about the work they do to get students interested in CS was the very CS-ish-ness (as in the academic discipline) of the discussion. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I should note, nor a surprising one considering it was a room full of, well, computer science teachers.

During the session, we played a little game with binary numbers and notecards (CS as math). We discussed the eternal question of "which programming language should you start with?" (CS as engineering) We created a long list of resources and tools for helping kids learn computational thinking both online and offline (CS as theory and design), and we even came up with quite a nice bibliography of CS-related Young Adult fiction -- ok, that last bit was pretty un-CS-y. [Link to presentation]

But it felt as though even if we addressed the ways to make the CS classroom more appealing for students to join (by using friendlier introductory tools and lessons, for example), we were still operating with the assumption that CS in high school is a path to CS in college is a path to computer science as a profession. And sure, maybe it is. But I'm not sure we assume the same with every other class in high school (particularly when it comes to electives, which for the vast majority of schools, computer science remains). Yes, there are students in English class who will pursue English majors, and there are students who take high school biology who go on to become biologists. But the classes aren't viewed as (or taught as) a funnel; rather there's a certain amount of knowledge and skill that we believe every student should take away, no matter what major or career they eventually pursue.

Of course, we've been arguing for decades now whether computer science should be a requirement in school at all, or if -- as it is in most places where it's taught at all -- it should remain an elective. We've been debating too what we even mean by "teaching technology." Do we mean computer science? Do we mean "computational thinking"? Do we mean teaching how to be a software user, or do we mean teaching how to be a software engineer? (I always want to quote Kipling when we are faced with these sorts of dichotomies: "and ne'er the twain shall meet.")

What About the Web?

Interestingly, no one in the "Teaching CS" session at Educon ever mentioned building for the Web. No one mentioned HTML. No one mentioned CSS. No one mentioned JavaScript. I realize, of course, that HTML and CSS aren't programming languages -- perhaps that's why the topic never came up. As such, perhaps the trajectory of CS classes comes from and aims elsewhere. Perhaps CS class isn't the place to look for teaching and learning Web literacy -- either its "reading" or its "writing" components. But then, I think we need to ask, what is?

There are any number of tools available now for teaching kids (any non-programmers actually) to code. (Here's one list. Here's another.) And while some of these are available on the Web, they aren't really about building for the Web.

And again, let's ask: do we need a tool to help teach Web-building and HTML 5? Is building for the Web different -- conceptually, programmatically, and so on -- software engineering?

More questions: if we take Scratch as a model here -- as a tool that teaches "computational thinking" rather than programming per se -- is there something about "Web thinking" we'd also need to account for?

What skills would a "Scratch for HTML 5" need to include? How would the scaffolding of the knowledge-gain work? (i.e. where do you start, how do you "get there") How technical would it need to be? What technical knowledge would be assumed, if any?

For those who say "Yes, an "HTML 5 for Scratch" should be built!" let's also ask "Should Mozilla build it?" And if so, then what? Where do we go from there?

Where I go from here: reaching out to lots of folks to talk to them about all these questions.

Image credits: Boston Public Library

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: Chicago Public Schools Lifts Its YouTube Ban

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 10:59:37 PST

Politics and Policies

The Chicago Public Schools lifted its ban on YouTube this week, allowing teachers and staff access to the video-sharing website. Let's hope other districts follow!

As part of his State of the Union speech, President Obama talked about college affordability, blasting colleges for increasing tuition costs (and ignoring some of the reasons why that's the case -- such as the decreasing support coming from the states). At a speech at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor this week, he outlined more of his plans to address the issue, calling for a Race to the Top for Higher Ed, which means in part keeping colleges' costs in line by withholding their access to federal financial aid dollars. Sherman Dorn takes a closer look at the President's ideology as it plays out in his education policies.

Legalities

Newark must produce the documents related to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to the city's schools, reports the Associated Press. The ACLU, along with a local parents' group, had sued the city to open the records. "We don't want to make it seem that there was necessarily something nefarious going on," the ACLU said. "All we ask is for this to be transparent. The public should be aware what, if any, agreements were made prior to or as part of the grant of the money."

Apple updated the EULA for its new iBooks Author tool yesterday, clarifying the section that had made some question whether or not the company was claiming authorship to the works created with the tool. It is, however, retaining the exclusive rights to sell all files that are exported in the .ibooks. Wired's Tim Carmody takes a closer look at the new language here.

Launches

In honor of what would have been his 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox has released “The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center,” a digital download of over a dozen field recordings from folklorist and ethnomusicology Alan Lomax. The New York Times has a look at Lomax's work, legacy and this important project.

The Digital Public Library of America released the first build of some of the proposed platform infrastructure. The source code, APIs and documentation are available. Hack away, folks. This is our digital public library under construction.

Closures

The local lesson marketplace TeachStreet is closing its doors. The team has been acquired by Amazon to work on its local deals project. Geekwire has a closer look at the news. While founder Dave Schappell says this is a good outcome for the company and investors, I think it's Amazon that should consider itself lucky because Schappell and his team are really good folks.

Never paid for that Ning you created? The company announced this week that it's in the process of closing down all the Nings that haven't upgraded to a paid plan. Act now, and the ax is coming in two weeks time.

Boycotts

Some 3250 academics and researchers have signed a petition saying they're boycotting the journal publisher Elsevier, not just because of the extraordinarily high price of research journals but as a response to the company's support of SOPA and the Research Works Act. For more information, see The Cost of Knowledge.

Windfalls

The Madison (WI) School District will be buying some 1400 iPads, using money that it's received from a state settlement against Microsoft. While we can chuckle at that irony, I suppose, the Wisconsin State Journal story describing the purchase contains this rather unfortunate note: "The state doesn't track how many districts are using tablet technology or other 21st century learning tools." Well, thank goodness that iPads are magic, so they'll "just work"!

Research and Data

The Pew Internet and American Life Project is always uncovering interesting tidbits about our digital habits. In its latest study, it has found that many teens are migrating to Twitter and away from Facebook. Why? In part, it's so they can follow their favorite celebrities. But one of the major reasons: better privacy controls, the ability to use pseudonyms and restrict their accounts, and a chance to get away from their parents who are on Facebook.

Funding, Acquisitions, and Quarterly Reports

Total revenue was down 6% in 2011 for McGraw-Hill Education reports Publishers Weekly, in part a result of a 14% drop in revenue from its school group.

The University of Phoenix also released its quarterly report this week. Among the academic stats: just 34% of those seeking an Associates Degree do so within 3 years, a figure that's up from 32% in 2010. Another interesting factoid: One-third of University of Phoenix's faculty is non-white. More than 18% of University of Phoenix's faculty is African American, compared to an average of over 6% at universities nationwide.

Okay, this isn't really "acquisition" news, but it falls into this category nonetheless: GothamSchools reports that the New York City Department of Education's communication director Natalie Ravitz is leaving to become Rupert Murdoch's chief of staff. Murdoch's relationship with the DOE seems to be awfully close as former chancellor Joel Klein is also on Team News Corp. Rah rah rah.

The GE Foundation is giving $18 million to help support states' implementation of the Common Core standards. Andrew Rotherham lauds the donation in his column in TIME, arguing "forget all the rhetoric about corporate education reform, since no one can really define what it means anyway." I dunno, man. I think a $18 million donation from General Electric is a pretty good place to start.

EDUKWEST reports that Accept.ly, a startup that seeks to help students with their college decision making process has raised $500,000 from Learn Capital.

Awards

Google announced the winners of its RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) awards this week. The awards go to organizations who help support STEM education at the university and K-12 level. Google gave away $340,000 in funding this year to 13 U.S., 8 European and 5 African organizations. Among the winners, the Saturday Academy in Portland that provides STEM workshops to area 2nd to 12th grade students.

Competitions and Conferences

ProfHacker's Brian Croxall reports from the New Faculty Majority Summit, a group that highlights the extent to which non-tenure-track faculty teach (as in, "most college classes") and the labor conditions. The summit addressed a number of issues, says Croxall, including how the use of NTT faculty impacts student learning.

The finalists for the startup Launch competition at SXSWedu have been announced. (You can read the full list here) The finalists will have the opportunity to pitch their products to the educators present at the event, as well as to a panel of judges.

The Saylor Foundation announced the first round of winners for its Open Textbook Challenge, its competition to create open source textbooks. The three new titles: Elementary Linear Algebra; Linear Algebra; and Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice.

Photo credits: Jeffrey Beall

Hack Education

Kindertown: An Educational App Store

Scraping Data from College Bookstores in the Hunt for Cheaper Textbooks

Why You Should Care about a "Scratch for HTML5"?

Why Scratch?

Why HTML5?

Metaphors We Live By

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

Ed-Tech Horizons

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: Library.nu Forced Offline, Kno Sues Cengage

Law and Politics

Testimony

Launches and Updates

Closures and Endings

Research and Data

Funding

Contests

Recommended Reading

Learning Without Context Isn't Learning: My Interview with Julie Meloni

Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum: My Interview with Phil Wagner

The Spirit of Scratch: My Interview with Vanessa Gennarelli

My History of E-Learning (Part 1)

iPads in Auburn, Maine's Kindergartens: A First Look at Their Effect on Learning

Part of Maine's Ongoing Literacy and 1:1 Initiatives

Research Design from the Beginning, Measuring for the Long-Term

Systemic Change (versus "iPads Simply Change Everything!")

Chalkable: An App Store for Schools

A(nother) Rant about the LMS

Chalkable: LMS + App Store

Disassembling the Textbook: Inkling Previews Its Semantic Publishing Platform

Disassembling the Textbook

Semantic Publishing

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

HTML5 for Everyone: My Interview with Prof. Glen Bull

On the subject of teaching HTML5

What's the goal?

Teaching/building for the open Web

Why haven't we built something like this already?

What should a "Scratch for HTML5" do?

MITx Opens for Enrollment (and Certification - For Now - Is Free)

Airy Labs and Ed-Tech Startup Failures

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: No More White MacBooks for Schools, No More Penguin E-Books for Libraries

Politics and Policies

Legalities

Updates and Upgrades

Downgrades and Cancellations

Research and Data

Funding and Hiring

Classes, Conferences, and Competitions

Recommended Reading

Web (De)Construction with Hackasaurus

Tinkering with the Web

Hackasaurus

Science, Software Carpentry, and the Discipline to Hack

Discipline, Part 1 (n. a field of study)

Discipline, Part 2 (n. training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character)

Discipline, Part 3 (n. orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior)

Learning (Software Engineering), Undisciplined

Ed-Tech Amnesia

The Power & the Problems with the New Wolfram Alpha Pro

The Power of Wolfram Alpha Pro

The Problems

Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast with Steve Hargadon

How to Teach Web-Building to Anyone

How to Teach CS to Anyone

Does Everyone Need CS?

What About the Web?

Ed-Tech Weekly News Roundup: Chicago Public Schools Lifts Its YouTube Ban

Politics and Policies

Legalities

Launches

Closures

Boycotts

Windfalls

Research and Data

Funding, Acquisitions, and Quarterly Reports

Awards

Competitions and Conferences