Hack Education

Hack Education Weekly News: A MOOC Master's Degree

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:41:47 PDT

MOOCs

Udacity, Georgia Tech, and AT&T announced this week a partnership to offer an online Master’s Degree in Computer Science. The degree will cost less than $7000 (significantly cheaper than the MS that the university currently offers, in part because of the financial support for the program from AT&T), although anyone will be able to take the Udacity classes for free via its website. Udacity will take a 40% of the revenues, according to Inside Higher Ed, which also reports that Georgia Tech only plans to hire 8 or so more instructors to handle the new program, which is expected to have as many as 10,000 enrollees in the next 3 years.

Earlier this year Yale said it didn’t plan to “rush” into a MOOC decision, but this week it made public its plans to offer four courses via Coursera. This brings the number of institutions using Coursera as a MOOC provider to 70.

The University of Edinburgh has offered six classes via Coursera and released a report this week detailing its experiences. (PDF) Lots of details in the report about the university’s planning, course completion, and learners’ demographics (note: some 70.3% of those who responded to course surveys indicated they had completed a university degree.) According to the report, “It is probably reasonable to view these MOOC learners as more akin to lifelong learning students …than to students on degree programmes, which is a common comparison being made.”

Coursera announced this week that it’s partnering with a number of translation companies and philanthropies in order to translate its courses “into many of the most popular language markets reflected by Coursera students: Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Arabic.”

Law and Politics

The Department of Education says it plans to fine Yale $165,000 for failing to report four forcible sex offenses on campus, as required under the Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act.

California Governor Jerry Brown has proposed to spend $1 billion to help the state prepare for the Common Core. The money will include training, as well as funding for the technology infrastructure to comply with CCSS’s computer-based testing.

School’s out for summer for the 400 students in the Buena Vista school district in Michigan. And, to quote more Alice Cooper, it might be out forever as the district has fired all of its teachers and closed the doors to all the schools because it has run out of money. Students will be able to attend “skills camps,” for the remainder of the school year HuffPo’s Joy Resmovits reports.

Although the state of Maine chose HP as its vendor-of-choice for its one-to-one laptop program a few weeks ago, public schools in Auburn are ditching laptops altogether and adopting iPads for kindergartners through high schoolers.

Kiera Wilmot, the Florida teen arrested for causing a small explosion in her science class, will not face criminal charges, according to the State’s Attorney General. There’s no word if the arrest will be expunged from her record or if she can return to the school that expelled her. But and her twin sister are headed to Space Camp this summer, thanks to the former astronaut Homer Hickam and a fundraising campaign by the Internet.

Former Tennessee educator Clarence Mumford was sentenced to seven years in federal prison this week for his role in a test-cheating ring. Mumford charged $3000 to arrange for people to take a certification tests on behalf of aspiring teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. More details via the AP.

The education-focused investment fund NewSchools Venture Fund has proposed the idea of a “Digital Depository,” which is says “represents a reimagining of the federal role in education.” The proposal would divide districts into consortiums managed by an “independent board of directors, some appointed by federal agencies, some by private business, and some by school districts themselves.”

Upgrades

The Saylor Foundation launched a new initiative this week, a suite of open online courses for K–12. Available courses include American Literature, Calculus, Algebra 1, Geometry, and Common Core 101. “Open” in this case means “open educational resources” for “open for business” which, let’s be honest, the “O” in MOOC certainly has become.

At its annual developer conference this week, Google announced Google Play for Education, an education-focused section of its Android App Store. My thoughts on Google’s long-awaited move into Android-for-EDU here.

Techcrunch’s Sarah Perez takes a look at a new feature launched in Kidaptive’s iPad app Leo’s Pad: “Parent’s Pad,” “an in-app, parents-only area that shows their child’s progress in reading comprehension and math skills, as well as in cognitive, emotional and social functions, meaning things like ‘being patient’ or ‘taking turns,’ for example.”

Aldebaran Robotics has made commercially available its ASK NAO ("Autism Solution for Kids") robot, which it says is able to “run educational, entertaining, and daily life assistance applications.”

Downgrades

More universities appear to have backed out of Semester Online, a consortium of schools that, through the 2U platform, would share online classes and offer credits. News broke a couple weeks ago that Duke was out; Inside Higher Ed reports that Vanderbilt University and the University of Rochester have also “quietly abandoned plan” to be part of Semester Online too.

The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools is reviewing the University of Phoenix’s accreditation, and while there were some indications it might sanction the for-profit due to a lack of autonomy from its parent corporation, a committee recommended last week that the university just be put “on notice.” A final decision comes next month.

Drones

The University of Alabama plans to use drones to provide an “eye in the sky” for police to monitor students on campus.

Funding

The kids’ book subscription service Zoobean has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Kapor Capital and others. More details about the startup on Techcrunch.

AllThingsD’s Lauren Goode covers the startup Play-i. The company is building educational robots and hasn’t launched yet, but its founding team includes former Googlers and an Apple engineer and has raised $1 million in funding from Google Ventures.

From the Human Resources Department

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted a list of the best-paid university presidents in the US (there are now three whose salaries exceed a million dollars a year), and the Pacific Standard follows up with an examination of how much these schools cost (and how much these costs have increased in recent years). Topping the list, the now fired Graham Spanier who made $2,906,271 last year as Penn State in-state tuition increased 2.7% to $31,854. Number two on the list Auburn University's Jay Gogue, who earned $2,542,865 last year, while students at his school paid 6.4% more for in-state tuition ($23,788) and 7.1% more for out-of-state tuition ($39,532).

“Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI,” reports The LA Times. “In establishing a new institute at the USC campus in Boyle Heights, they will also move substantial government and private grants that fund the lab’s $12-million annual budget as well as some of the highly sophisticated equipment used to investigate the brain’s inner workings.” Move, that is, from a public to a private university. More thoughts on the Remaking the University blog on how this demonstrates the California legislatures’s lack of attention to public universities’ research mission.

Rutgers University has hired Julie Hermann as its new athletics director, a decision that comes on the heels of the school firing its basketball coach Mike Rice after he was show in video recordings shoving and verbally abusing his players.

Competitions

The learning management system Instructure is offering a bounty to developers to build apps that utilize the LTI (learning tools interoperability) standard. This standard offers APIs and data integration so that apps can work across LMS platforms. Instructure will pay $250 bounty for each qualified app submitted, and the best apps are eligible for a $1000 prize. (Disclosure: I’m one of the judges for the latter.)

Classes and Certifications

Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler is teaching “How to Learn Math” online this summer. The free course doesn’t offer any Stanford credit (although educators might be able to count it as PD hours), but it’s a chance to work with a great professor who’s helping topple many of the myths about both teaching and learning math.

Record producers Dr. Dre and Jimmy Irvine have given $70 million to the University of Southern California to “create a degree that blends business, marketing, product development, design and liberal arts.” More details in The New York Times.

Leigh Graves Wolf has poured through every State Department of Education website in her quest to see which states offer educators certifications in ed-tech. According to her research, State Department of Education websites suck — oh, and just 19 out of 50 states (plus DC) offer some sort of endorsement. You can see the full list here.

Research and Reports

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has released data about the Spring Term 2013 college enrollments. (PDF) It’s found that enrollments are down almost across the board (with the exception of four-year private non-profits), with 2.3% fewer students on campuses than there were this time last year. The biggest drop in enrollment has occurred at for-profits, down 8.7% from last year and down 17.2% from 2011.

Just in time for graduation, the Pew Research Center has posted a collection of data about student debt. Among the figures, “The average student loan balance outstanding in 2010 was $26,682,” but, for what it's worth 38% of those who graduated from a public university with a four year degree in 2008 had no debt at all. (Just 4% of those who graduated from for-profits, however, left with no debt.)

The New America Foundation has released a report on “using student data to evaluate teachers in the early grades,” that is, preschoolers through grade 3.

Wired reports on a new study that suggests stimulating the brain with a mild electric current while learning arithmetic helped them learn faster and retain a 30 to 40% "performance edge" six months later. Over/under on the Gates Foundation opting to fund this idea?

Image credits: glasseyes view

Google Play for Education Versus...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:11:00 PDT

Google Play for Education

Google held its annual developer conference this week, and during Wednesday’s keynote, the company touted its work in education, including the growing adoption of Google Apps for Education (some 25+ million users worldwide) and Chromebooks (engineering exec Chris Yerga highlighted its recent country-wide implementation in Malaysia).

The new news: Google also unveiled plans for a new education-focused section of its Android app store, “Google Play for Education.”

The store, which will launch this fall, will allow schools to search for education apps by subject matter and by grade level. Applications are open now (that's why Google announces these sorts of things at a developer event), and Google says that the apps submitted to the store will be reviewed and recommended by educators, who will help to categorize and align them with the Common Core State Standards.

The new app store will accept purchase orders as well as other payment methods, and Google says that distribution of content onto devices will be wireless (as opposed to the still sadly commonplace hardwired syncing), sending apps, books, and YouTube videos “to individuals or groups of any size, across classrooms, schools, or even districts.” Simplified device management is a big deal, enough for Free Technology for Teachers' writer and educator Richard Byrne to suggest that the new offering "promises what we've been waiting for."

Google Versus

Cue the technology bloggers’ hyperbolic excitement: “Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools,” predicts VentureBeat. “With Google Play For Education, Google Looks to Challenge Apple’s Dominance in the Classroom,” according to Techcrunch.

It’s a predictable response, no doubt, with a twist of irony too considering that Google CEO Larry Page lamented during his Q&A session at the end of Wednesday’s keynote that these sorts of headlines have become commonplace. Page argued that the technology press always (and as he tried to insist, unnecessarily) frames Google as “versus” someone else.

Every story I read about Google is “us versus some other company” or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress. Most important things are not zero sum, there is a lot of opportunity out there.

Let’s be honest though. It is impossible not to view Google’s education products (heck, a lot of its products) as anything but a move “against” others. Google Apps for Education versus Microsoft’s Office and the (now rebranded) Live@edu, for example. And now Google Play for Education versus the Apple App Store.

The tech blogs might hail Apple as the “de facto leader in the education space” (I do believe Pearson remains the largest education company in the world, but hey, what do I know) which in turn must mean that Google is moving “against” Apple with its Play for Education; but there are lots of other products, services, policies, and companies that Google is positioned “versus” here as well:

Google Play for Education versus News Corp’s Amplify tablet, which like many non-Apple mobile devices, is running a customized version of Android.

Google Play for Education versus “Whispercast,” Amazon's recently-launched wireless (Kindle/Android) e-book and app deployment tool for schools.

[Android] Tablets versus laptops (or, heck, even Google’s own Chromebooks)

Google versus COPPA. Google versus the Web.

Google Versus the Open Web

When I attended Google IO last year, I wrote about my interpretation of the company’s education plans as a response in part to Inside Higher Ed Joshua Kim’s complaint that Google hadn’t made any education-related announcements at its developer conference, particularly as it unveiled a new Android tablet – the Nexus 7.

And while sales numbers might say one thing, it's still an open question whether tablets are really the best computing devices for students, particularly those in middle school and up, who need (if nothing else) keyboards. Yes, tablets are cheaper than laptops. Yes, there are lots of fun and exciting apps. Yes, tablets offer digital texrtbooks with touchscreen page-turning and embeeded videos. Woo. Hoo. Tablets facilitate consumption and content delivery, but they haven’t really changed the way we teach and learn. They are not the powerful computing devices as envisioned by Seymour Papert et al. And with their emphasis on app marketplaces and app ecosystems and not on openly-licensed content the World Wide Web, tablets raise all sorts of other problems for education.

To justify the absence of Android-for-edu news at Google IO in 2012, I wrote that

Google’s interest in education involves the Web. It’s centered on Google Apps for Education and, by extension, on the Web apps that are in the Chrome Web Store. (True, Google has the Chromebooks, and yes, that is a hardware play. But remember, the Chrome operating system is all about the Web.)

All the things that Kim says he wants to see in an educational Android app store – courses, transcripts, badges, coursepacks, textbooks – are already on the Web. Why do we need these in an app? Why would Google want them in an app? (Apps and their content aren’t indexable by search engines, after all.)

Clearly I was wrong.

I wasn’t just wrong about “Google’s interest in education," insofar as it’s trying now to carve out its own chunk of the volume-buying educational app market. I was wrong more generally about Google and its relationship to the (open) Web.

Indeed Google admitted at IO this year that it’s dropped the messaging standard XMPP in its newly launched Hangouts app (XMPP was once a key piece of Google Wave — remember Wave? How it was going to “change education forever”?).

Furthermore, as software engineer Laurent Eschenauer observes, “Google+ has no open RSS output, hence no PuSH support, no write API, in fact it has absolutely nothing open; Google Reader is scrapped, along with RSS support within Chrome; WebDav for Google Calendar is dropped in favor of their proprietary API." Education data analyst Tony Hirst has lots more examples to add to that list — Fusion tables, gadgets, image files — “Google Lock-In Lock-Out,” as he calls it.

Google: on the Web and indexer of the Web, but no longer really, truly of the Web.

Google Plus Education Data

At Wednesday’s Google IO keynote, Google Senior VP Amit Singhal announced “the end of search” — a shockingly provacative announcement, I guess, since this is the product that Google is still most associated with and, let’s be frank, the product through which, thanks to advertising, it still gets the bulk of its revenue.

After a dramatic pause Singhal actually announced “the end of search as we know it,” unveiling new voice-activated search interface which can purportedly “answer, converse and anticipate” users’ questions.

Of course, all this has been generated from Google’s vast data gathering and computational capabilities. Google knows who you are. Google knows where you are. Google knows your search patterns. Google's recently written Terms of Service can track this across all the Google product offerings. Google boasts it's getting better at predicting your questions and as such autocompleting your questions. (It also removes wrinkles in photographs, and thanks to image recognition and sentiment analysis, claims to know the best and happiest photographs from your family vacation albums.) "Welcome to Google Island," as Wired's Mat Honan writes in his post-4-hour-Google-IO-keynote-escape-fantasy.

How might this relate to Google's plans to “Play for Education”?

Clearly user data (aka student data) is increasingly valuable to all (education) technology companies, and Google is hardly alone here as it strives to construct walls around, extract value from, and, as I wrote last week about MOOCs and textbook publishers, "enclose" education. An app store and a mobile OS do that quite nicely.

Google has long benefited from the label of “open” and has long acted as a defender of open standards, open source, and the open Web, When Google says now that it's keen to have classrooms move towards the Android OS (versus its Web OS) and towards its curated education app store, we should be sure to consider all the things that Google's "play for education" could entail.

Image credits: Google IO logo, Google developer page, Business Insider, Flickr user Cliver Darra, Wired

The Comments Are Closed

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:08:06 PDT

No Comment

I’ve decided to no longer have comments on this blog. It’s been something I’ve been considering for a while now. Here’s what I wrote on my personal blog back in November as I weighed the decision. I’m copying it at length because my thoughts really haven’t changed much since then:

I’ve been debating lately whether I should ditch the comments on Hack Education. Just the thought makes me wince as it feels as though it’s a move that runs contrary to much of my reasoning for writing online and in this blog format: I want to engage intellectually and openly with others. To remove comments would mute that engagement, sending the signal that I’m not listening only writing.

Comments on the Internet are, of course, notoriously terrible. Exhibit A: YouTube, where even the sweetest of videos can elicit the vilest of responses.

The comments on Hack Education aren’t YouTube-level bad at all, don’t get me wrong. I do get very thoughtful responses to my articles, and these responses in turn help me clarify my own arguments — just as I’d hope they would by being part of a discourse community. Of course, commenters also point out when I’ve made spelling or HTML errors — always nice to know. But some of the posts I’ve written have resulted in some pretty awful comment threads. When I write critically about Khan Academy or Apple, I know I’ll hear an earful — and it isn’t simply an earful of disagreement. The comments get incredibly hostile, the attacks personal.

Often I dread seeing the email notifications from Disqus, the tool I use to host blog comments, informing me that someone has responded to what I’ve written. (This isn’t a fault of Disqus, I should clarify, as I do like how it handles profiles across multiple sites. I’d never use Facebook comments as I think they’re profoundly anti-privacy, unfriendly to teachers and anyone who works at a site where Facebook is blocked, and unsympathetic to anyone who wants to leave an anonymous comment.) If the email from Disqus tells me there’s a comment related to a particularly controversial post, I often delete it without reading it. I don’t visit Hack Education to read it either. And that’s hardly engagement now, is it?

When I mentioned the other day on Twitter that I find the negative comments (and the personal attacks) to be exhausting, someone said I should just write less negative blog posts.

Ha.

No Community

I’ve been blogging for a very, very long time now, and in doing so I have found incredible support online — found myself part of many intellectual, personal, and professional communities. But the “community” — that is, the commenters and my interactions with them — on my early personal blogs was quite different than what exists on most the technology blogs I’ve since worked and written for. More often, it’s not “community” at all.

And as Hack Education has gained a larger readership, the commenters have become more like the latter (like tech sites) than the former. Yet, Hack Education remains my personal (albeit education-focused) blog. It’s just me here. No other staff. No “social media editor.” No “community manager.” That makes the comments — particularly the hostile ones — harder to deal with.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that I am not building any sort of community through the comments on this site. If nothing else, I just don’t have the time (or the stomach) to moderate and respond. And moderation of comments is absolutely necessary.

That’s not to say I don’t believe in engaging with my readers and my peers and my friends and my colleagues online. That’s not to say I don’t believe in engaging with my critics. That’s not to say I’m uninterested in hearing feedback (or copy-editing) on my stories. But blog comments just aren’t the place that this is happening.

This makes me sad.

When I wrote the blurb above back in November, I decided that “the good” of keeping comments outweighed “the bad.” But I can’t maintain the argument any longer. Mostly, I can’t maintain the comments.

Of course, you can still always send me an email. You can reply when I post a link to on Google+, App.net, LinkedIn, or Facebook. You can talk to me on Twitter (@audreywatters) — frankly, that’s probably your best bet if as I’m most active and “engaged” there. And if you have something more to say than 140-characters (roughly the length of oh so many comments), you can write your own article and post it on your own domain.

Image credits: Daniel Cavalcanti, Noun Project

On 'Viral" Education Videos

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:07:25 PDT

There’s a lot to like about the cellphone recording of 18-year-old Duncanville High School student Jeff Bliss — particularly if you view this as a viral video that demonstrates our desperate need to recognize students’ voice and agency in education.

As Bliss is (apparently) being kicked out of class (for an infraction that the video never makes clear), he delivers a passionate speech about teaching, learning, care, and connection, all of which he juxtaposes to the “packets” and passivity of the classroom and his teacher.

You can only glimpse a few seconds of her in the 87 second video. But there she sits, walled off from her students, behind a fortress of a desk. She doesn’t stand up to dismiss Bliss from class, although the dismissal of him and his viewpoint can be heard in her voice. “Bye,” she repeats wearily. “Just go.”

On her desk sits a computer, a monitor, a printer, textbooks. On the students’ desks, nothing. No books. No “packets.” No projects. Just a few kids on their cellphones, with one apparently savvy enough to hit the “record” button just as Bliss erupts. The video portrays an intellectually empty space — no indication of learning or engagement.

No surprise, the video struck a nerve. An early copy posted to YouTube has over 2 million views. Another posted to WorldStarHipHop has over a million.

The Myth of the Viral Video

It’s striking that our discussions of viral videos and Internet memes are often presented in the passive voice, as in “That Psy video went viral.” The subtle suggestion of this sentence construction is that these are naturally-occurring phenomenon — without subjects of sentences, without human orchestration. Stories, videos, animated GIFs are replicated on their accord — something akin perhaps to TED’s motto “ideas worth spreading.”

And yes, of course, people spread those TED ideas (just like people watched and shared “Gangnam Style” and the Jeff Bliss videos). But let's not forget, TED events are attended by a certain demographic and the organization is a powerful media entity in its own right, actively promoting certain ideas and certain videos over others. The ideas are TED ideas; TED spreads.

And such it is with the vast majority of the videos and messages that quickly propagate online — that “go viral.” It takes a lot of clicking effort for a video to rise above “the noise” of other online content and become so meme-ishly popular and widely shared. According to the latest statistics, some 72 hours of video are upload to YouTube every minute. Most — obviously — do not “go viral.” Those that do — like certain TED videos — tend to have major media promotion. It isn't simply that they "strike a chord." Viral videos have often been designed at the outset to be “worth spreading” and are spread in turn by those who have (financial, political — vested) interests in promoting the message.

That’s even the case with the stories and videos that appear to be the most “grassroots,” as Kevin Ashton highlights in a fascinating story tracing the popularity of the video hit “Harlem Shake.” As Ashton argues, that trend “had nothing to do with community and everything to do with commerce.”

Now Jeff Bliss certainly invokes a populism in his videotaped speech, his subsequent media appearances, his newly created Twitter feed and Facebook page. But is this “viral video” really a “popular uprising”? (Or put another way, whose "popular uprising" is this?)

The Forensics of a Viral Video

The cellphone video of Jeff Bliss was, by his admission and other media reports, filmed on Monday, May 6. Bliss claims he was not aware of the recording but was shown it by a classmate on Wednesday, the day the video was uploaded to the Web. Bliss told the Dallas Morning News that “When a classmate showed it to him, he figured it would go viral. In his school.”

What happened next isn’t clear. (This is the best of my Web forensics here.) Well, except the "it went viral" beyond Bliss's school part...

Someone — it’s not clear who — uploaded the original cellphone video to YouTube. But that original YouTube copy was apparently taken down for reasons that are also unclear. (By extension, this probably means the person who recorded the video in Duncanville High School on Monday is not earning any of the ad revenue on its widespread popularity. Keep this in mind when praising "student agency" demonstrated therein.)

Another individual — not the student who filmed Bliss’s rant — James Smith, re-posted the original cellphone video to his YouTube page too. I contacted Smith, asking him if he was a classmate of Bliss or the person who originally captured the footage. He said he was not, but that he wanted to make sure that the original YouTube video, already pulled offline by Wednesday morning, was seen by others.

The video was also submitted to the popular content aggregation site WorldStarHipHop, best known for “shock” videos, by user liquidiamondz. WorldStarHipHop posted another copy in turn, watermarked with its own logo, to YouTube.

Smith’s copy of the video on YouTube received millions of videos, but yesterday was taken down due to “copyright claims.” Smith himself pulled the video (that is, YouTube did not yank it following a DMCA claim.) Other duplicates of the original remain, including the WorldStarHipHop and OnlyTheBestVideos13 accounts’ versions.

It’s the link to Smith’s copy of the video that seems to have been posted first to Reddit. After personal details about the teacher were posted to Reddit, comments to that thread were disabled, but not before gaining 19,317 up-votes and 3973 comments. (The rapid action on the part of Reddit moderators comes on the heels of the Internet vigilantism on the site after the recent Boston Marathon bombings.)

The first tweets about the video stem from roughly the same time of the post to Reddit (Wednesday, 10:30am PST - lunchtime at Duncanville High School), and these tweets link to Smith’s copy on YouTube.

For his own part, Bliss has only tweeted a link to the WorldStarHipHop version asking former Texas Representative Ron Paul, libertarian talk-show host Adam Kokesh, Louisiana Tech professor Drew McKevitt, and InfoWars.com host Alex Jones (tweet deleted) to view the video there. (YoutubePromoter.com, a site that charges money to guarantee video views, also tweeted the link to the WorldStarHipHop version.)

By Wednesday evening, many other publications and news outlets had picked up the story and embedded the video including Gawker, WFAA, and FOX Dallas-Fort Worth. And by Thursday, the school district had announced the teacher in the video had been placed on administrative leave.

What “Goes Viral”?

Unlike the story that Kevin Ashton tells about the corporate (record label) forces behind the sudden and scripted popularity of “Harlem Shake,” there is no one clear financier behind or promoter of the Jeff Bliss viral video (that’s not to say there isn’t someone making money off the online videos — such is the nature of pageviews and online advertising — but as noted above, the profiteer is probably not the student who captured the video).

The number 3 most-trafficked website in the US YouTube, the number 52 website Reddit, and the number 207 website WorldStarHipHop picked up and promoted (via both human and algorithms) this story. And the story “went viral.”

It’s hard not to see that virality in light of a number of powerful political and social narratives about the current state of education — about teachers and students and the system alike: Education is broken. Students are bored. Students are disrepectful. Students have no voice. Teachers are lazy. Teachers’ hands are tied. Teachers are tired and dispirited. No one has any agency. Standardized testing and standardized curriculum — “packets” — have destroyed curiosity and engagement. Without standards, there is no accountability. We should install video cameras in every classroom. We should ban cellphones at school. And so on.

Lots of stories. Lots of competing stories. Lots of competing stories that have been able to align themselves around a short and utterly decontextualized view into one social studies classroom in Texas.

The competing stories, along with the varying interpretations of Bliss's actions — was he heroic? disrepectful? — should probably give us some pause about any assertions we make about the meaning behind the video's popularity.

What sorts of stories hit the front page of Reddit? What are the consequences — not just in pageviews but in people’s lives when they do? What sorts of stories are popular on WorldStarHipHop, a site that charges a range of fees ($2500 for infomercials, $5000 for XXX clips, $850 for videos “dissing popular artists,” etc) to post and promote content there? What are the ideologies of these sites and their members? (For what it’s worth, these two sites do share a young male demographic — 18 to 24-ish — although those visiting the latter tends to be overwhelmingly African-American and are much more likely to access the site from school.)

What sorts of stories resonate there and why? And how do the popular stories on heavily trafficked sites (particularly on Reddit) then spin out elsewhere and get picked up by other media (and social media) outlets and spread further? How? Why? Whose stories?

As I noted at the beginning of this article, “There’s a lot to like about the cellphone recording of 18-year-old high-school student Jeff Bliss if you view this as a viral video that demonstrates our desperate need to recognize students’ voice and agency in education.” It’s just as possible to view this as a video that highlights all the worst stereotypes about the teaching profession too.

And as videos don't simply "go viral," it's worth thinking about who benefits — politically, financially, rhetorically — from promoting this story. It's worth thinking about who loses.

Hack Education Weekly News: MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:55:32 PDT

Obligatory MOOC News

Coursera, textbook publishers, and Chegg are teaming up to give students access to digital course materials for some Coursera classes. Those materials will be DRM’d, content can’t be copied, pasted, or printed, and access will go away at the end of the course. Viva la ed-tech revolution.

The union representing professors at San Jose State University (which has worked closely with both edX and Udacity) penned a letter regarding its administration’s MOOC embrace. The full letter is available on The Chronicle. Among the choice quotes: “While Anant Agarwal of edX and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom describe a stereotype of classroom teaching based on some hackneyed Hollywood script of a teacher writing on the blackboard while his students sleep in boredom…”

San Francisco State University’s Academic Senate also wrote a letter (PDF) stating their opposition to State Senator Darrel Steinberg’s SB 520 bill that would require credits be granted by online providers for “closed” classes. “First [and let me interject and editorialize here… FIRST] there is no access crisis at San Francisco State University.”

The administration at American University have issued a “moratorium on MOOCs,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “American is purposely avoiding experimentation before it decides exactly how it wants to relate to the new breed of online courses. ‘I need a policy before we jump into something,’ said Scott A. Bass, the provost, in an interview.”

The University of Pennsylvania is working on language for policy that would restrict what faculty could do vis-a-vis online freelance teaching work (aka non-sanctioned MOOCs, I guess). More details via Inside Higher Ed.

Testing Testing Testing

The ACT will move towards computer-based testing, says The New York Times. “High school students will take the ACT college admissions exam by computer starting in the spring of 2015 — but at least for a while, the paper and pencil version will be available, too.”

There are still more errors on New York City’s Gifted and Talented screening test, report GothamSchools. Last month, the city’s Department of Education admitted that test-provider Pearson had made multiple errors, resulting in 5000-ish students getting lower scores than they deserved. Today’s news adds another 300-ish students to that pile. This is Pearson’s first year administering a $5.5 million contract for the screening program. Renewal will be a) unlikely b) ridiculous c) ludicrous d) all of the above.

Law and Politics

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) has proposed a bill that would set the interest rate for federally subsidized student loans to .75%, the same rate as the Federal Reserve gives to banks.

ProPublica details some of the fallout of the US government’s sequestration, including the loss of 70,000 Head Start slots, major budgets cuts at schools on Indian reservations, and thousands of fewer NSF grants.

A group of young boys at Driver Elementary School in Virginia were suspended by district officials for pointing pencils at each other and making shooting noises. The district has a “no tolerance” policy for violence and “there has to be a consequence,” said a district spokesperson.

The Louisiana State Supreme Court ruled this week that the state’s funding for its school voucher program is unconstitutional. The program was part of Governor Bobby Jindal’s education reforms.

Launches and Upgrades

The University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab released a new version of Prism this week, “a web-based tool for ‘crowdsourcing interpretation” and a good reminder, I’d add, for the school’s Board of Visitors that if you get your news about UVA from David Brooks and not Bethany Nowviskie, then you have no idea what innovation looks like.

Educator and entrepreneur Adam Bellow had officially launched his site Educlipper, which Free Technology for Teachers’ Richard Byrne aptly describes as ‘What Teachers Want Pinterest to Be.”

One of the very best learning tools available, Scratch, invoked the 2.0 postscript this week, moving the learn-to-code software onto the Web. Finally. There are lots of new features in the updated release, including better ways to credit other users, easier cloning, and much more. Good job, Scratch Team.

The learning management system Desire2Learn launched a new “Learning Suite” this week that includes the “power of predictive analytics.” The company acquired Austin Peay State University’s “Degree Compass” earlier this year, and it says that the course recommendation engine will be part of its new “Student Success System.” End press release speak.

USA Today reports that Xerox is getting into the grading papers business with a new product called Ignite “that turns the numerous copiers/scanners/printers it has in schools across the United States into paper-grading machines.” The article invokes the phrase “game changer” so there ya go.

PBS aired a one-hour special of TED Talks on education this week, featuring Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation’s list of grants awarded to PBS is here.

Downgrades and Closures

More pushback against the Gates Foundation-funded data infrastructure inBloom? Speaking at a Republican Party breakfast, Georgia Georgia Schools Superintendent John Barge said that “while Georgia agreed to be part of the collaborative, it will not share the student data with InBloom. He also said while he’s heard that InBloom staff have asked individual school systems to share the student data, the state will not be part of that.”

And according to Reuters journalist Stephanie Simon, an inBloom spokesperson says that Phase II of the project is off; “there are no plans” to bring in Delaware, Georgia or Kentucky. And she cites Bob Swiggum, CIO for Georgia DOE, saying that “ furor over student privacy makes states wary of database: ‘I don’t know how inBloom will survive this.’” $100 million well spent, Mr. Gates. Good job, team.

Bloomberg reports that textbook publisher Cengage Learning might file for bankruptcy. “Cengage reported an operating loss of $2.77 billion for the three months ended March 3.” But hey, at least it’s partnered with Coursera to give MOOC students free textbooks, right?

Funding and Acquisitions

Okay, this isn’t VC money. It’s your tax dollars at work. But Deadspin asked a good question this week (and answered it in the headline too): “Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee a Coach? (Probably)” More details on salaries and funding of athletic versus instructional staff via Inside Higher Ed.

The organization that I was fairly convinced for most of the week had to be a joke, Black Mountain SOLE, announced that it’s raised $5 million (although the press release doesn’t say where the money actually came from.) So it's real. I guess. Black Mountain SOLE is responsible for MOOC Campus, a $15,000/year initiative that lets you live in a North Carolina YMCA while you take classes online. Because freedom. And disruptive innovation. And self directed learning. And rich white kids. And stuff.

Fidelis announced that it has raised $6 million in its Series A round. The startup, at launch, focused on military personnel’s transition into formal academic institutions, but the company has pivoted to a broader technology platform, still focused on mentorship.

JoyTunes, an app-based music education startup, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding, according to Techcrunch.

Vator News reports that Logical Choice Technologies, a company founded in 1994, has raised $5 million in funding. Logical Choice Technologies is “a technology solutions company for K12 and college that offers a wide range of products and services, from leading brands of mobile devices, projectors, and interactive whiteboards, to installation services and classroom curriculum”— as well as augmented reality Common Core curriculum. Seriously.

Prague-based CourseDirector, which provides an LMS-like layer on top of Google Apps for Education, has been acquired by LingApps, a Danish ed-tech company (and maker of the assistive tech AppWriter.

Interactive whiteboard maker Promethean World announced its first quarter results this week — “in line with expectations” reads the headline, with revenues down 22.5% from £35.9 million last quarter to £27.8 million. “Market conditions will continue to be challenging throughout 2013,” said the company. Um, yeah.

“Research”

Hispanic high school students are more likely than whites to enroll in college, according to the Pew Research Hispanic Center. 69% of Hispanic graduates from the class of 2012 and 67% of whites enrolled in college that fall. College graduation rates for Hispanics, however, remains lower.

Photo credits: Pete Toscano

Coursera, Chegg, and the Education Enclosure Movement

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:29:26 PDT

The online learning startup Coursera and a handful of textbook publishers announced today that they’re teaming up to make certain digital course materials available to students enrolled in Coursera’s classes. Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will offer versions of their textbooks via an e-reader provided by Chegg.

For certain courses, students will be able to access all or parts of textbooks for free. The materials are restricted by DRM: students will not be able to copy-paste or print, and access to the textbooks will be revoked when the course ends. As the press release reads, of course, “students will also be able to purchase full versions of e-textbooks provided by publishers for continued personal learning.”

The partnership aims to encourage professors to assign more reading in their Coursera courses. As it currently stands, many only recommend rather than require course readings. (The emphasis instead is on video lectures.) A survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education of professors who’ve taught MOOCs found that just 9% asked their students to buy a physical book and 5% asked that an e-book be purchased — and it seems likely that the lack of course readings contribute to those respondents’ reluctance to have these online classes actually count for formal credit.

Commenting in The Chronicle, Chegg CEO Dan Rosenweig said that the agreement with Coursera is “empowering students, giving educators a chance to affect more students, improving learning outcomes, and lowering costs.”

But I think it signals other things too about the rapidly changing MOOC landscape…

A Business Model — For MOOCs, For Publishers, For Professors

The Chegg/Coursera partnership isn’t the first one struck between a MOOC startup and a publishing company. Last year, Elsevier announced that it was making one of its textbooks available for free to students in the edX 6.002x Circuits and Electronics course.

That Elsevier textbook, it’s worth pointing out, was co-authored by Anant Agarwal, one of the instructors for 6.002x and now the President of edX. And while MOOC-related course recommendations could obviously drive sales for publishers, taking a cut of that certainly offers the MOOC startups like Coursera and edX a possible revenue stream too. And it also provides one for the authors of the textbooks — authors that are, in many cases, the professors of the MOOCs as well.

Super-professors. Super-textbook-authors. There's a Venn Diagram to be drawn there, I'm sure.

In a recent blog post, George Mason University history professor Mills Kelly explores this particular angle of the “what’s in it for me” lure of MOOCs for faculty — in addition, of course, to the altruistic “sharing knowledge with the world” rationale — noting that of a random selection of 8 Coursera courses he examined, "five of the eight professors recommended or suggested as optional books that they had written, ranging in price from $8 to $110.” (emphasis mine.)

Do the math: even if just a small fraction of students buy the book, it’s likely to make for a nice royalty check.

As Kelly notes, different institutions and states have different provisions on whether or not professors can require students buy the books they’ve authored; but it’s not clear if any of these would apply (legally) to MOOCs.

It is clear, however, why traditional publishers would be eager to jump on board with this partnership and find a way to have their textbooks be a part of, rather than supplanted by the MOOC hype. Indeed, as Mike Caulfield and others have pointed out, in its current form “a MOOC isn’t really as a class brought to your doorstep — it’s more a textbook with ambitions.”

A proprietary, DRM’d textbook, that is. Despite the growing number of openly-licensed textbooks and course packages that are available — via OpenStax, the Saylor Foundation, and MITOCW, along with the growing pressure for scholars to publish in open access journals — it’s notable that Coursera has partnered with traditional © publishers.

Digital Textbooks and Student Data

But what about learners, right?

In survey after survey, college students indicate that they prefer print textbooks. Why? Even though they’re notoriously expensive, print textbooks aren’t DRM’d. They don’t expire when the course ends. They can be bought used and resold at the end of the semester. They can be rented at a discount from sites like Chegg, which boasts that some 30% of US students are its customers.

Unlike its popular textbook rental service, the Chegg e-reader that Coursera will utilize has almost all of the features that students continually report that they dislike: namely, locked-down content that expires and an inability to share notes, highlights or the books themselves.

Of course, it is worth asking here if the students who enroll in Coursera students actually match those “traditional college students” (whoever those are) that are surveyed about their textbook frustrations. Will Coursera students be less apt to worry about sharing notes? Will they be less concerned if they lose their highlights and notes when access to the textbook expires? Will they be likely to purchase a book at the end of the course — particularly since access to a Coursera course also disappears at the end of a term?

While students remain indifferent (at best) about digital textbooks, publishers seem quite excited about the possibilities of gleaning interaction data from them. As a Wiley editor told The Chronicle, “Because the free versions of the books will be read through an e-reader, we’ll also get information about usage. How students use the electronic text, how they use the material, will be tracked through software." And Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller added that this data might be used by professors for “a more personalized, data-driven experience for instructors, too, allowing Coursera to improve courses in real time.”

It’s hard to know how much of the data gleaned from these and similar sorts of student textbook-tracking applications will really be terribly useful, particularly given the great variety in interactions and intentions of students enrolled in these classes. But there sure will be lots and lots of student data — MOOCs are “massive” if nothing else.

I have the increasing sense here too — as with many of other aspects of our digital world — that students aren’t simply the consumers of the MOOC product; they are the product. Or their data very well could be.

The Portal and the Anti-Platform?

At last week’s Ed-Tech Innovations conference in Calgary, Stephen Downes quipped that “Coursera is the last gasp of the standalone education application.” Even learning management systems — once the pinnacle of isolated and restricted education applications on the Web but never of the Web — have recognized the importance of becoming a platform and have opened up APIs in order to connect to third-party applications.

But not Coursera. It runs counter to the early MOOCs that Downes and others created that grew from and exemplified the theory of connectivism — learning on the Web, from the Web, of the Web. The Web was the original MOOC platform. Coursera seems to be the education anti-platform.

Coursera aims to keep the activity of its students and professors on its site, with little recognition of the other online places where interactions (Q&A, discussions, collaboration) might occur. Indeed, the Terms of Service clearly state that “You may download material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify or create derivatives works of the material.” And the Honor Code says that “I will not make solutions to homework, quizzes or exams available to anyone else. This includes both solutions written by me, as well as any official solutions provided by the course staff.” Posting code from a class to GitHub, for example, counts as “cheating.”

That makes a partnership with Chegg, one of the most well-funded education startups, a particularly interesting one. (Chegg has raised over $195 million in investment.) While the company was fairly quiet last year, 2010–2011 saw it acquire a number of other education startups — Cramster, CourseRank, Notehall, Zinch, Student of Fortune, 3D3R Software Solutions, that is a number of tutoring, note-sharing, course scheduling, and HTML development tools.

And it’s all in the service of building an education portal — a one-stop-shop, if you will, for college students to purchase or rent textbooks, identify interesting courses, buy college swag, hire tutors, find answers to homework, and so on. This isn't about opening up APIs or utilizing RSS to foster partnerships across the Web. Oh no. It's about acquisition, consolidation, enclosure. Much like Coursera, Chegg is on the Web, but not of the Web. Think Yahoo. Think AOL. “The last gasp of the standalone education application.”

The Edu-Enclosure Movement

All these things feel incredibly far afield from the original vision of MOOCs, particularly when it comes to that most contested letter in the acronym, O for Open.

While the addition of the free textbooks via Chegg can be couched in terms of keeping the costs low or zero for students, choosing proprietary content is quite different than choosing openly licensed content. The licensing is different. The access is different. The Terms of Service are different. The ability to share, remix, experiment is different. The ability to participate anonymously is different. The data collection is different.

It’s different for the student; it’s different for the professor. It's different for publishers. It's different for the Web.

What was a promise for free-range, connected, open-ended learning online, MOOCs are becoming something else altogether. Locked-down. DRM'd. Publisher and profit friendly. Offered via a closed portal, not via the open Web.

Photo credits: Elena

Foundations of Education Technology (A MOOC Proposal)

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:00:58 PDT

George Veletsianos (an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Technology at Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC) and I have submitted an application for Iversity’s MOOC production fellowship program. If funded, we will co-teach a course titled “Foundations of Educational Technology.” (If not funded, we’ll figure something else out…)

The course will tackle something that I continue to write and rant about: a lack of understanding of the history, research, practices, and debates of education technology.

It isn’t simply that, as Santayana famously said, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — it’s also that folks might misdiagnose the present and as such misdirect us in the future.

In order to improve education and ed-tech, we think it’s important to know the answers to a number of questions including

how do people learn?
how does technology/pedagogy impact learning?
why have educational technology efforts failed/succeeded in the past?

Our course will explore some of the answers to (in part by highlighting the debates surrounding) these questions. The class will draw on openly-available content and on the pedagogies and practices of cMOOCs.

The recipients of the Iversity MOOC fellowship will be chosen through a combination of peer review and public voting, and George and I would love your support for the latter. To vote for our proposal, you do have to register on the platform (ugh) first. You can also read more about the class there.

George has more details on his blog too, including an awesome list of other friends, colleagues, professors, and grad students who’ve volunteered to help.

Photo credits: Romana Klee

Hack Education Weekly News: MOOC Expansions, MOOC Refusals, and Felonious High School Science

Sat, 04 May 2013 12:01:28 PDT

MOOC News

Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University penned an open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, famous for his class on “Justice.” ““There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX [the edX version of the Justice class] solves, nor do we have a shortage of faculty capable of teaching our equivalent course,” they write. “Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Coursera launched a set of professional development courses for K–12 teachers this week. I’m struggling to reconcile PD-via-MOOCs with the increasingly popular, local and teacher-driven “edcamps.” But as The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, some of these new courses will be part of Coursera’s Signature Track (the classes that offer special certification for a fee), so I guess that explains a lot of it.

According to a Gallup poll of college presidents, only 3% surveyed believe that MOOCs will improve the learning of all students. 2% said they think MOOCs will solve universities’ financial troubles. More details via Inside Higher Ed, which worked with Gallup on the survey.

MITx announced this week that “Mechanics ReView” will offer eight Continuing Education Units through a collaboration with the American Association of Physics Teachers. The credits will be available at a cost of approximately $250. For more details on the class contents and pedagogies, see the MITOCW announcement.

Law & Politics

Lamar Smith (R-TX), the new chair of the House of Representatives science committee, has drafted a bill that would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. And because the Republican Party hates science and learning and researchers, the bill would also extend the criteria to other agencies. The bill is called the “High Quality Research Act,” because nothing says “high quality” like letting the idiots in Congress decide what scientists should pursue.

The Department of Education announced changes to the FAFSA form, the application students use for college financial aid. For the first time, starting in 2014, students whose parents are unmarried but living together, as well as those whose parents are married gay and lesbian couples, will be able to list both parents when applying for aid. The change is meant to better reflect a student’s financial need by better reflecting the way in which families actually look.

AFT President Randi Weingarten called for a moratorium this week on stakes associated with Common Core State Standards assessments. “I am proposing that states and districts work with educators,” she says, “to develop clear tasks and a clear timeline to put in place the crucial elements of Common Core implementation. And until then, the tests should be decoupled from decisions that could unfairly hurt students, schools and teachers.”

A “parent trigger” bill has failed in the Florida State Senate. Again. The bill purported to give parents more say in the fate of a “struggling school,” allowing them to gather signatures via petition, and then those signers would vote on a turnaround plan for the school.

The Edmonton Public School Board voted to shutter the district’s 40-year-old extracurricular music program due to budget cuts. Some 650 children who participate in the after school Music Enrichment Program will be affected.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed suit against the California Department of Education, alleging that the CDE is failing to provide students — an estimated 20,000 — learning English with adequate (and legally required) assistance.

WTF

A school in Oregon held a surprise “readiness drill” recently, hiring masked gunman to charge into the school and fire blanks. It was an inservice day and no students were present. As if that makes this okay…

Florida high school student Keira Wilmot was arrested and charged with a felony after she caused an explosion in her science class after experimenting with combining toilet cleaner and aluminum foil. Many scientists took to Twitter and confessed all the explosions they’d inadvertently caused — in solidarity with Wilmot and to help make clear that this is how we criminalize Black students in this country and foster a school-to-prison pipeline.

Testing

Hooray for computers in schools, right? Well, except when they’re used for standardized testing. And except when the systems used for computer-based standardized testing fail in the middle of exams. Such was the case in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Oklahoma where thousands of students have been affected by glitches in the system — postponing tests and likely impacting scores.

Launches and Upgrades

Washington State’s Open Course Library has released openly licensed course materials for 39 university courses (it released 42 others a year and a half ago). Along with the release of materials, the state’s student public interest research group says that it’s found that the “The Open Course Library has saved students $5.5 million in textbook costs to date, including $2.9 million during the 2012–2013 academic year alone.”

OpenStax College, a Rice University OER initiative, says it plans to double the number of fields that its open textbooks cover by 2015. More details via Inside Higher Ed.

P2PU announced this week that badges earned on its site are now “OBI compliant,” meaning that they can be pushed into Mozilla’s Open Badges backpack.

The study-group startup Hoot.me has launched a new initiative it’s calling a “MOOD” — a massive open online discussion. It’s a little bit like Quora and a little bit like Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything.” The first MOOD is with Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet and a professor at UT Austin.

Curious, a marketplace for online learning videos, launched this week. The site has a number of tools to help instructors make and sell their videos. More details via The New York Times.

Downgrades and Endings

Duke University has pulled out of the consortium associated with 2U and its Semester Online initiative. Semester Online, announced late last year, offers small, online, for-credit courses available for enrolled students at the partner universities. Duke’s Arts & Sciences Council voted 16–14 against plans to allow Duke students earn credits this way. More details on the decision via Inside Higher Ed.

Funding

Zynga.org (the non-profit wing of “game”-maker Zynga) and NewSchools Venture Fund are joining forces to create a “learning games” accelerator program. On stage at the NSVF annual summit, CEO Marc Pincus says that Zynga has helped farmers learn about farming via Farmville, so I’m betting this new partnership will be profoundly transformative. I mean, all the tech blogs wrote it up to make it sound that way.

As part of its annual summit, NewSchools Venture Fund also announced that it’s struck a deal with the venture capital firm Rethink Education. More details on the “innovative deal” via Edsurge (which has itself received investment from NSVF).

Edukwest reports that ResearchGate, a social network for scientists and researchers, has raised $20 million. The company has not made an official announcement about this latest investment.

The Miami-based English learning company Open English has raised $65 million in its Series D funding. (The company has raised $120 million in total.) The company targets Spanish and Portugese speakers in Latin America with online, real-time courses, and it says that the new funding will help it expand to new countries.

Michelle Rhee’s advocacy group StudentsFirst has raised $8 million from the Walton Family Foundation. Because “grassroots.” LOL.

Edsurge reports that Whipsmart Learning has raised an “undisclosed six-figure seed round” from an “eclectic chorus of angels.” The startup is building an “adaptive literacy platform focused on non-fiction content (such as news articles) and Common Core-aligned assessments, to be rolled out this June.”

Hires and Fires and HR Changes

Some changes at the Saylor Foundation, a non-profit that builds free online courses: the director Alana M. Harrington is moving to an advisory role, and Louis C. Pugliese, formerly president of Moodlerooms, will join the foundation as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.

Edsurge reports that Education Elements, a “blended learning” startup, has laid off a “significant portion” of its staff. “While the company employed 45 people a year ago, it’s now down to 23. The majority of last week’s layoffs came from the sales staff.”

Education writer Dana Goldstein chronicles the dismissal of teachers at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles — namely those who worked at the school-within-a-school there, the Social Justice and Law Academy. The layoffs include “activist teacher” Alex Caputo-Pearl, and “according to Crenshaw sources who have seen a list of dismissed teachers, 21 of the 33 are African American, and 27 have over 10 years of experience. These teachers will be placed into a candidate pool and will be allowed to apply for open positions at other schools. But for educators who have dedicated their careers to improving Crenshaw, and who have deep well-springs of support among parents and students, the dismissals are devastating.”

Survey Says…

Pearson hired Harris Interactive to conduct a survey of students about their thoughts on mobile devices and education. Among the findings, 76% of elementary students, 75% of middle school students, 61% of high school students, and 43% of college students said they’d like to use mobile devices more in class. Younger students expressed a greater interest in tablets than older students (not surprising), the latter indicating they prefer laptops.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report on “Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading” this week. The findings highlight the use and utility of libraries by families — 94% of parents say libraries are important for their children. (Full report PDF)

The Atlantic is fairly pro with the education-related pie-charts. This week’s comes with the click-worthy headline “You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American.” “Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of – we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea.”

Competitions

It’s time to vote in Google’s annual Doodle 4 Google competition. Some 130,000 entries were received by Google, and it’s picked the 50 state finalists. The winner gets her doodle featured on the Google homepage.

Image credits: Aapo Haapanen

[Expletive Deleted] Ed-Tech #Edinnovation

Sat, 04 May 2013 11:34:41 PDT

I was a keynote speaker at this week's Ed-Tech Innovation conference in Alberta, Canada, and the transcript from that talk is below.

I wanted to give a talk that expressed my deep gratitude to Canadian educators and researchers -- particularly those that created MOOCs -- alongside my concerns about the rewriting of education technology history that diminishes, if not erases altogether, their contributions. It's a larger problem too, I'd argue, with many tech entrepreneurs laying claim to education innovation with nary a reference or a nod to those who've shaped the field. It's disingenous and dishonest and deeply, deeply troubling as how we frame the past helps us think about the direction of the future. Oh and it pisses me off too. Clearly. So I cussed -- 8 times according to D'Arcy Norman's tally.

On November 4, 1979 a group of Islamist students and militants took over the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran. Six Americans escaped, eventually taking refuge in the homes of Canadian diplomats, including that of the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor.

In order to rescue the 6, a CIA agent named Tony Mendez devised a ruse that would explain their presence in Iran. They’d pretend to be Canadians — everyone loves Canadians, you know — in Iran doing some on-location scouting for a big-budget Hollywood film. With a good cover story and Canadian passports, the 6 were able to escape Iran in late January, 1980 — about a year before the 52 others held hostage at the US Embassy were freed.

Perhaps you’ve heard of this story… In fact, I’m almost certain everyone has as Argo, the 2012 film based on the “Canadian Caper” premiered at the Toronto FIlm Festival and then won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture for director and star Ben Affleck.

And I’m certain that many in this audience know too, with the politest indignation that Canadians can muster, that the film downplays and distorts the role of the Canadian government in safely rescuing the 6 Americans. Instead, the film posits that the extraction from Iran was the brainchild of and a victory for the CIA and, no surprise, a victory for Hollywood.

Now it’s easy to argue — as Ben Affleck himself has done — that “because we say the film is based on a true story rather than this is a true story, we’re allowed to take some dramatic license.” And I get that. The final scenes of Argo, while almost entirely fabricated, certainly keep viewers on the edge of their seats.

But we should be wary nonetheless of these sorts of alterations and amendments, especially when the revision of history helps further a particular narrative or ideology — history revised by an industry for an industry; whether it’s a narrative designed to keep us on the edge, to thrill and entertain us, to downplay or overplay characters’ roles, or to deliver scripts with solutions far sexier and shinier than reality has offered.

I want to talk to you today about narratives and histories and ideology and innovation. And I start with Argo for a number of probably obvious reasons, least of which being the film’s treatment of Canada. Indeed, the initial postscript to the film suggested that the Canadian ambassador was only given credit by the US government for his role “for political purposes” – something that even prompted President Jimmy Carter to balk when he viewed the film. According to Carter in a CNN interview, “90% of the contributions came from the Canadians.” “And the main hero, in my opinion,” said Carter, “was Ken Taylor, who was the Canadian ambassador who orchestrated the entire process.”

Now truth be told, I bring up Argo because of the Canadian angle, but also because I really want to invoke one of the best lines from the film — the line that first occurs at a press junket staged to help make the CIA’s fake film appear real. There a reporter asks the producer Lester Siegel, played by the wonderfully curmudgeonly Alan Arkin, “What does Argo mean?” “I don’t know,” says Arkin, as he grabs some hors d’oeuvres from the buffet and tries to walk away. “Is it the Argonauts?” the reporter continues. And Arkin replies, his mouth full of food, “It means Argo fuck yourself.”

The phrase is repeated by Arkin’s character and by Affleck’s. It’s used not just as an admonition to “go away” or “eff off” but in lieu of saying “cheers” and “thank you” — a combination of gratitude, congratulations, and insolence. I love phrases with multiple complex and yet singularly obvious meanings — take the name of my blog “Hack Education” as an example — and in this case “Argo fuck yourself” seems to be particularly relevant to the relationships among the film’s cast of characters who manipulate politics and media… but also relevant to education and technology and politics and media today. There are times for euphemisms and polite small talk, but I have to say, this ain’t one of them.

I could, I suppose, tie “Argo” to other meanings — its mythological roots as Jason’s ship. I could call this talk something like “Chasing the Golden Fleece of Ed-Tech Innovation.” Or perhaps quite aptly, I could use a little punning and word-play I could call this talk “The (Golden) Fleecing of Education.” But instead, I’m sticking with “Argo fuck yourself” as my title and chorus. I do apologize.

And I hope it’s clear why I want to start this talk with Argo too – not just for the f-bombs or the historical legacies of our countries working together, but frankly because, much like its retelling of the history of the “Canadian Caper,” we’re witnessing a concerted retelling of the history of MOOCs. It’s one that erases almost all contributions made by Canadians. Stephen Downes. George Siemens. Dave Cormier. Alec Couros. Much like Ambassador Ken Taylor, their contributions have become a postscript to a story that gives Silicon Valley in this case, not Hollywood, all the excitement and glory and agency and innovativeness.

More broadly too, we’re witnessing a retelling of the history of education and education technology that eliminates contributions from almost all educators, researchers, and theorists, particularly those outside of elite US institutions (namely Stanford, Harvard, and MIT) and outside of the US. The movie Argo, incidentally, suggests that the British embassy turned away the 6 refugees. Not true. They actually stayed with the British early on but the location was unsafe. And similarly if the roles of the Canadians in the history of online learning have been downplayed, then the role of the British — particularly at the Open University — has been almost entirely erased from the dominant narrative. But that’s an argument for another keynote I suppose…

History is, of course, always partial, always situated, always contested. There is no “official story” about the Iran hostage crisis or about MOOCs or about education technology more generally.

And just as with politics, when it comes to education and technology, our notion of history is heavily influenced by the media. Although bits of the story had already been published, the movie Argo was based largely on a 2007 article in the famous technology publication Wired Magazine “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran.”

I don’t dare predict what Hollywood blockbusters we’ll see in 5 years time that stems from the 2011 Wired article “How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education” or the 2012 story, “The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever.”

But Hollywood blockbuster-in-the-making or not, these technology stories are helping to shape and steer our conversations about the future of education. When the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia voted to fire President Teresa Sullivan last summer, for example, it was not because of something they’d read in academic research journals; it was apparently not due to conversations they’d had with the university’s education technology experts or its professors or its students. The Board were moved by the news, by the mainstream media — they cited op-eds by David Brooks and articles in The Wall Street Journal as their rationale for why the university under Sullivan’s leadership was moving far too slowly. And in doing so, the Board of Visitors ignored all the innovative digital projects that were already occurring on the UVA campus – many that might have fit their narrative about thhe necessity for radical transformation of higher education. The University of Virginia’s leadership in the digital humanities, for example. The Scholars Lab. The pending partnership with Coursera, already in the works just as Sullivan was being fired for not having brought MOOCs to campus.

“Argo fuck yourself,” indeed.

Late last year, Khan Academy’s Sal Khan sat down with Forbes writer Michael Noer and recorded a video on “The History of Education.” It’s the history of education “from 1680 to 2050” told in 11 minutes, so needless to say it’s a rather abbreviated version of events. It’s not titled “The History of Education in the United States,” and that would be much better — because contributions to education from the rest of the world are absent.

Well, except the Prussians. Sal Khan loves to talk about the Prussians.

Our current model of education, says Khan, originated at the turn of the nineteenth century: “age-based cohorts” that move through an “assembly line” with “information being delivered at every point.”

“This is the Prussian model,” the Forbes writer Noer adds, “and it’s about as inflexible as a Prussian can be.” But Khan notes that there were benefits to this as “it was the first time people said, ‘No, we want everyone to get an education for free.”

Then “Horace Mann comes along about 1840” and introduces this concept to the United States. By 1870, says Khan, public education is pretty common “but even at that point it wasn’t uniform” with different standards and curriculum in different states and cities. So in 1892, “something that tends to get lost in history,” a committee of ten — “somewhat Orwellian” adds Noer — meet to determine what the twelve years of compulsory education should look like.

“It was forward looking for 120 years ago,” says Noer, “but what’s interesting is that we’ve basically been stuck there for 120 years.” Education has been "static to the present day,” agrees Khan.

And from 1892, the story they tell jumps ahead, straight to the invention of the Internet. “The big thing here,” says Noer as the two skip over one hundred-plus years of history, “is what you’ve done” with Khan Academy. “One person with one computer can reach millions.” This revolutionizes lectures, Noer argues; it revolutionizes homework. “Class time is liberated,” adds Khan. This changes everything — Khan Academy changes everything — that has been stagnant and static since the nineteenth century.

Now history told this way certainly helps explain some elements from this week’s Canadian-free visualization in The Chronicle of Higher Education of the “Major Players in the MOOC Universe.” Of course Khan Academy has to be there — that’s where “one person” reaching “millions” with video-based instruction all began, right?

“This notion of ‘flipping the classroom’ was around before Khan Academy existed and clearly wasn’t my idea,” Khan admits in his recent book The One World Schoolhouse, but he then fails to cite or mention any of those whose idea it actually might have been. It’s the same pattern as he chronicles the insights he’s gained on learning by starting his non-profit — nary a mention of other educators, researchers, or theorists, past or present. Project-based learning, constructivism, behaviorism — all apparently discovered by Salman Khan.

This sort of ahistorical and individualistic posturing isn’t terribly uncommon among ed-tech entrepreneurs (or Americans writ large) eschewing as Silicon Valley tends to do “the past” in order to look to “the future.” And when historical antecedents are pointed out, there’s always the easy shrug that “clearly wasn’t my idea” to fall back upon, often neglecting to cite their sources along the way.

“Argo fuck yourself.”

Where do we get our stories about education and technology? From personal experience. From Hollywood. From the news — on TV, in print, online. From technology blogs. From Wired Magazine. From — god forbid — books. And yes, from Wikipedia — even Sal Khan admitted on the satirical news show Colbert Report that he uses Wikipedia as his main resource for teaching history.

In his defense, Khan did add that “I click on the footnotes” to which Colbert wittily responded “I’m responsible for some of those."

Colbert was referring, of course, to his critiques of Wikipedia and “truthiness” and the term he’s coined to describe it — “wikiality” — “truth by consensus” rather than by fact, based on the approval-by-consensus format of Wikipedia. Colbert once suggested that viewers change the entry for elephant to add that number of African elephants had tripled over the course of six months. The edits were reversed — not a surprise to anyone who’s actually tried to update a Wikipedia entry, whether based on accurate information or not — and the username “Stephencolbert” has been banned indefinitely.

So what is the “wikiality” of education’s history? What is the “wikiality” of ed-tech history and innovation? And what is the “wikiality” of the history of MOOCs?

The Wikipedia entry for Massive Open Online Course was created in July 2011. One of the earliest versions of the entry read, “A Massive open online course (MOOC) is a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large. The course is not a gathering, but rather a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse.”

The entry then proceeded to list examples: David Wiley’s Intro to Open Education and Alec Couros’ Social Media & Open Education in the Fall of 2007 (listed as “pre-MOOCs”), George Siemens and Stephen Downes’ Connectivism in 2008 as “the first MOOC,” the latter two courses offered via Canadian universities.

Needless to say, some 600-plus edits later, the MOOC article is quite different today. The first paragraph of the entry now reads, “massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and TAs. MOOCs are a recent development in distance education. Features associated with early MOOCs, such as open licensing of content, open structure and learning goals, and connectivism may not be present in all MOOC projects, in particular with the ‘openness’ of many MOOCs being called into question.” A wordier opening paragraph to be sure, but also a very different definition.

The difference between then and now, in and of itself, is hardly surprising. There have been many developments in the past 18 months surrounding MOOCs. Hardly a week goes by without some MOOC thing happening — the launch of Udacity, edX, and Coursera; more classes; more colleges joining one of the MOOC-provider platforms; countries and regions creating their own MOOC partnerships in response; learning management systems offering “open classes”; venture funding announcements; philanthropic funding announcements; proposed legislation; college credit offerings; college credit denials; class cancellations; faculty protest; Thomas Friedman and David Brooks op-eds galore; and on and on and on.

But what’s fascinating about the “wikiality” of MOOCs is not that the Wikipedia article has expanded to include all these new developments — Wikipedians are, after all, famously fast at updating entries for trending topics. Rather what’s interesting is that the article has been incredibly contentious — almost from the start — and that contentiousness has grown alongside the increasing popularity of MOOCs and has targeted the contributions of – you guessed it – Canadians.

Indeed in July 2011 shortly after it was created, the MOOC entry was flagged for deletion: “It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern: no evidence that it meets the notability criteria for websites.” A few months later, when the Stanford engineering department offered 3 courses online for free and for anyone to enroll in and when hundreds of thousands of people signed up to take them, MOOCs had clearly become Wikipedia-worthy.

But since that initial charge that the Wikipedia entry offered “insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject,” many involved in some of the early MOOCs have contributed to the article, fleshing it out with theoretical roots, the instructional design approaches, the pedagogies and practices, the experiences of participants, and the benefits and the challenges of open online learning. MOOCs, the updated and clarified article made clear, were based on connectivist principles, including the importance of remixing, sharing, and aggregation — providing “a starting points for a massive amount of content to be produced in different places online, which is later aggregated as a newsletter or a web page accessible to participants on a regularly basis. This is in contrast to traditional courses, where the content is prepared ahead of time.”

In July 2012, one year after it was marked for deletion, the Wikipedia entry for MOOCs was flagged again. The warning: “This article appears to be written like an advertisement for the works of Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Lisa Lane who created the neologism MOOC for their own purposes and link to their own content self-promotionally.”

“Argo fuck yourself.”

“Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links.”

For what it’s worth, Downes has edited the MOOC page 4 times. Siemens 3 times. And Dave Cormier twice. Perhaps the 200-some-odd others that have also edited the page are their minions. That’s the power of connectivism for you, or something.

In all seriousness: This warning highlights one of the great dilemmas of the crowdsourced encyclopedia – “wikiality” if you will – and it’s something that many, many authors and researchers have faced. Novelist Philip Roth, for example, felt compelled to publish “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” last year in The New Yorker as when he tried to propose corrections to the entry on his book The Human Stain — addressing the question of his inspiration for the novel — he was told by a Wikipedia editor “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

In the case of MOOCs, Downes and Siemens and Cormier and others are both the subjects of the entry, sources themselves, and experts in the field. So their strong presence on the MOOC page is not surprising. Indeed it is as it should be, you could argue, as the first MOOCs were theirs and not Sebastian Thrun’s. The “wikiality” of MOOCs history, however, would say otherwise.

Indeed this question of “the first MOOC” is also up-for-debate in the Wikipedia entry. In November of last year, Wikipedia user Kmasters0 wrote on the MOOC “Talk” page that “The opening paragraph of this section makes the claim that ‘David Wiley taught what ostensibly was the first MOOC, or proto-MOOC, at Utah State University in August 2007.’ There is no reference for this, and the description is simply of a free course that was open to people around the world. This, by itself, does not make it a MOOC. And, if that description is enough for it to be taken as a MOOC, then it certainly does not make it the first. (Using a meaningless concept such as “proto-MOOC” could apply to any form of web-based instruction.) For the statement to be taken seriously, far more independent information and references need to be supplied, otherwise it smacks of someone retrospectively laying claim to something, and should be removed.’”

“Argo fuck yourself.”

Later, that Wikipedia editor added “It has been three weeks since I suggested that this paragraph be removed, and there have been no arguments against it. I have removed it, but have copied here, so that, if there is a valid counter-argument, it can be restored.”

Then just last month, Downes chimed in saying “The reason the Wiley course was in the article was that it was referenced as an influence by both George Siemens and myself in our creation of the first MOOC. For example, I cite it in ‘The MOOC Guide’ which a reference of early MOOCs… I would recommend reinserting it.” As of yet, that edit has not stuck.

While the role of Wiley is contested by Wikipedia editors, it’s worth pointing out, the role of Khan Academy is not. “The short lecture format used by many MOOCs developed from “Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional videos.” — Wikipedia cites that quote from the 2012 article in The New York Times, “The Year of the MOOC,” which mentions Siemens, Downes, Cormier, Wiley, Couros et al exactly zero times.

Now perhaps this all sounds like historical minutiae. Does it matter what David Wiley gets credit for? Does it matter what Salman Khan does? Does it matter if folks know the difference between the connectivist MOOCs and the corporatist ones? Does it matter that MOOCs originated in Canada?

Yes, of course it does.

It matters for accuracy, for inquiry, for legacy. And relevant to the topic of this conference and for broader discussions about the shape of the future of education, it matters for the narratives that we adopt or resist about innovation.

As the Wikipedia entry on MOOCs reads, “MOOCs are widely seen as a major part of a larger disruptive innovation taking place in the higher education industry.”

The phrase “disruptive innovation” was coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in the mid–1990s and is invoked constantly these days — almost to the point of being utterly meaningless. Christensen has applied the concept to education in a book published in 2008, Disrupting Class, and he has fueled some of the MOOC hype himself lately with his assertion that in 15 years time, half of US universities will be bankrupt.

That’s what “disruptive innovations” purportedly do — they start at the low end of the market, often with an inferior product, but a product that is accessible to consumers who previously have not had access. In Christensen’s framework, disruptive innovations then reshape and transform the market and eventually displace existing players. Are MOOCs “disruptive innovation”? I don’t know…

I’m not sure I care. Because this process isn’t a scientific rule. Disruptive innovation doesn’t work like Newton’s Second Law. “Disruptive innovation” is a business school model. More importantly, it’s a narrative. Just because it looks like a teleology – just because a Harvard professor puts it forward – doesn’t mean that the future is preordained.

Much like the narrative in Argo that posits that it was Hollywood and the CIA who orchestrated the rescue of the six American diplomats and not the Canadian government, it’s a carefully constructed narrative — one that invokes certain events from the past and pieces together tidbits from the present, in order to make some folks appear heroic, to frame the world ideologically, and to point to and shape the future.

So what are the narratives we hear about “disruptive innovation” — or even just innovation — in education? They include things like “education is broken.” The incumbent players in the sector — teachers, schools, professors, universities, textbook publishers, and pencil manufacturers — are largely “resistant to change.” “Education has not changed” in — depending on who’s talking — decades, centuries, millennia. Someone from the outside — and this is key to this narrative — someone from the outside will provide the disruptive innovation that upsets, dare we say “revolutionizes” the entire sector. Technology — here’s another key piece of the dominant narrative — technology has changed, will change everything. Education is broken; technology – particularly from Silicon Valley, particularly proprietary and for-profit tech – will fix it.

But this is just a story — a powerful one, for sure. But one that — as we’ve seen with Argo and Khan Academy and Wikipedia — has been crafted and told in a certain way, to a certain end.

We need to get better at asking who is telling these stories. We need to ask why. We need to think about how we plan to tell our stories – our narratives and our counter-narratives. How do we make them “stick”?

Because there are other stories about the past and the future of education — ones where building human capacity trumps adding tablet capacity; ones where agency matter more than algorithms; ones where innovation comes from students, from professors, from librarians, from researchers; ones where new ideas are not driven by commercialism but by care; stories and initiatives that are local and will not scale but need not scale; and yes, stories and expertise that are Canadian.

To some of the mainstream stories we’re being fed instead, well, you know by now what I’d say to that… “Argo fuck yourself.”

Image credits: Wikipedia/US State Department

The 3 Laws of Ed-Tech Robotics #TEDxNYED

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:05:31 PDT

I gave my first (and probably last) TEDx talk this weekend at TEDxNYED on the topic of ed-tech, science fiction, and ethics. Unfortunately (or fortunately -- depending on how you view things), the livestream wasn't working. I'll post a video if and when it becomes available (although I'm not sure my talk will past TED muster). But I've posted below a rough transcript of my talk, along with a couple of the slides I showed:

The drive to create a machine that duplicates the human mind, that duplicates the human body has ancient roots. It has roots in mythology and in literature far older than humans’ ability to build this sort of machine through science, engineering, and technology.

But here we are. 2013. And there are almost daily headlines to this end — robots — designed to replicate, enhance, and automate some function of our lives, of our world.

Robots on the factory floor. Robot game show contestants. There are robots that offer medical advice, that perform surgery Robots that play heavy metal music. Lunar robots. Robots on Mars. Robot cheetahs. Robot cockroaches. Robot lawyers. Robot sparrows. Robot spies. Yes, robots in our classrooms. Robots to defend us and watch us and teach us and attack. And drones. My God, the drones.

There are robots that can debone chickens.

This is the development that’s been stuck in my head, I confess. And it is actually quite a remarkable one, as one of the things that has prevented robot chicken de-boning in the past is, as the sub-header reads here, that all chickens – even factory-farmed chickens – are slightly different. As such it’s been a challenge to engineer a robot that can make the necessary allowances and exceptions as it plucks and carves and de-bones.

The de-boning and the butchering, however, standardizes the meat.

And perhaps tying this chicken deboning robot to standardization and teaching and learning and technology requires a bit of a conceptual leap — but this is a TED Talk, so what the hell.

Here’s a link: we have reached the level where we can train robots to beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy and to recognize all the anatomical differences in chickens’ bone structures, but are we able to recognize and cultivate differences elsewhere – oh say, the cognitive differences and intellectual capacities in humans, in students?

In other words, can we build and train robots to help us – in all of our uniqueness – learn? What sort of standardization, what sort of differentiation would that entail? More testing, more data-gathering?

And this is the more important question: even if we can build automated instructional software, do we want to? Why?

Gratuitous chicken de-boning image here, my apologies, let’s agree that there might just be cause for concern when it comes to robots. Take one look at this image and you have to shout, “Oh my God. Do we really want to train robots with precise knife-wielding skills?!”

No doubt our fears about what will happen if we build automatons are as old as our drive to build them. But the word “robot” is itself quite new. It was coined in 1920. It comes, not from engineering but from theatre — “Rossum’s Universal Robots” by the Czech playwright Karel Capek. Capek credited his brother for the invention of the word, but in Czech “robota” means “forced labor.” In the play, robots take over factory work and eventually the world, leading to the extinction of the human race.

Much like Frankenstein’s monster sought to destroy his creator, many literary robots have aimed to overthrow their human masters.

But there is another possibility as science fiction fans who’ve read their Isaac Asimov will reassure us, “Of course, we can train robot chicken de-boners and remain safe as humans, as long as we maintain the 3 laws of robotics.”

Law 1: A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Law 2: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Law 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

The Zeroeth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

In other words — in Asimov’s framework, at least — robots are programmatically and thus necessarily protective of human safety, of human life. They are here to help us not harm us.

But not all robots know these rules, of course. And let’s be clear — the 3 Laws do not resolve all ethical questions regarding robots. They just reassure us that there will be fewer knife-wielding robot rebels.

Nor do all robots appear as theatening as robot chicken de-boners. The robots in education technology certainly don’t. Sure, there are the battle-bots in robotics competitions. But most of what the field of artificial intelligence has brought into the classroom is software: adaptive learning software, intelligent tutoring systems, automated assessment tools.

We have authored no “three laws of ed-tech robotics” in response — neither in science fiction nor in our district tech procurement guidelines. We rarely ask, “what are ethical implications of educational technologies?” (Mostly: “will this raise test scores?”) We rarely ask, “Are we building and adopting tools that might harm us?”

I frame this as a science fiction question in part because science fiction helps us tease out these things: the possibilities, horrors, opportunities of technology and science. I turn to science fiction because novelists and researchers and engineers and entrepreneurs construct stories using similar models and metaphors. I refer to science fiction because what our culture produces in the film studio or at the writer’s desk is never entirely separable from what happens in the scientist’s lab, what happens at the programmer’s terminal. We are bound by culture. And there are some profoundly important — and I would add, terribly problematic — views on teaching and learning that permeate both science fiction and technological pursuits.

The view of education as a “content delivery system” for example appears as readily in ed-tech companies’ press releases as it does on the big screen. Take The Matrix, for example, where Keanu Reeves utters one of his finest lines as a computer injects directly into his brainstem all the knowledge he needs:

“Whoa, I know kung fu.”

Or take the behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s “teaching machine” — a mechanical device developed in the 1950s to offer “programmed instruction” — it’s a vision that appears in many SF novels (Enders Game, for example) and one that isn’t that different from many ed-tech products on the market today.

Or take the latest craze, these massive open online courses or MOOCs — many of which have their origins in the university AI lab — Udacity and Coursera in Stanford’s AI department and the head of edX from MIT’s AI lab. Many of these rely on automated grading mechanisms alongside their video-taped lecture lessons. The leap — as a metaphor and as a model — from Google’s robotic, self-driving car to the self-driving online course is not that far — literally – it’s built by the same fellow.

The automation of teaching and learning – the development of teaching machines, robots in the classroom — is a long-running plot line in science fiction and a long-standing goal of AI itself: the creation of artificial intelligence-backed machines that claim to automate and “personalize” lesson delivery and assessment. Many remain crude, using mostly multiple choice for the latter.

But last year, the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a contest to get some of the best minds in the world of machine learning — a revealingly named subsection of AI — to design a programmatic way to automate, not the grading of multiple choice tests, but the grading of essays. They put a $100,000 bounty out for an algorithm that grades as well as humans. And it was a success; the bounty was claimed. Not only is it possible to automate essay grading, researchers contended, robots do this just as well as human essay-graders do.

Investors, big testing companies, and all those unemployed robots with degrees in rhetoric and composition, were thrilled.

Robots grade more efficiently. Robots — unlike those pesky human English instructors and graduate students — remain non-unionized. They do not demand a living wage or health care benefits.

A computer can grade 16,000 SAT essays in 20 seconds, I’ve heard cited, and if teachers don’t have to worry about reading students’ work they can assign more of it. They can also have more — massively more — students in their classes. Hundreds of thousands more.

Not everyone is sold on the idea that robot graders are the future. Many critics argue that it’s actually pretty easy to fool the software. That’s because robots don’t “read” the way we do. They do things like assess word frequency, word placement, word pairing, word length, sentence length, use of conjunctions, and punctuation.

But robot essay graders might reveal something else – as writing professor Alex Reid argues, “If computers can read like people it’s because we have trained people to read like computers.”

Let’s look closely at the human graders that these robots in the Hewlett competition were compared to. The major testing companies hire a range of people to grade essays for them. They don’t have a personal relationship with the students they’re grading, obviously. These graders are given a fairly strict rubric to follow – a rubric that computers, no surprise, follow with more precision. Human graders are discouraged from recognizing “creative” expression.

Robot graders, of course, have no idea what “creative expression” even means.

What does it means to tell our students that we’re actually not going to read their papers, but we’re going to scan them and a computer will analyze them instead? What happens when we encourage students to express themselves in such a way that appeases the robot essay graders rather than a human audience? What happens when we discourage creative expression?

Robot graders raise all sorts of questions about thinking machines and thinking humans, about self-expression and creativity, about the purpose of writing, the purpose of writing assignments, the purpose of education, and the ethics of education technology and of robots in the classroom.

And what are the implications of automating the teaching and learning process? Why does efficiency matter so much? Why do we want the messy and open-ended process of inquiry standardized, scaled, or automated? What will all of this artificial intelligence drive us to do about human intelligence?

Do robot essay graders violate the Laws of Robotics?

The promise from the proponents of these technologies — from adaptive learning companies, and AI professors, and MOOC startups and the like — is that someday we’ll have efficiency and order and standardization and scale. I find that chilling.

As the French philosopher Jacques Ellul argued in the 1960s — not too long after the creation of B. F. Skinner’s “teaching machine” or Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in fact, the drive for efficiency is all-encompassing and a dominant force in our technological age,

“The human brain must be made to conform to the much more advanced brain of the machine. And education will no longer be an unpredictable and exciting adventure in human enlightenment but an exercise in conformity and an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world.”

What “use” will our technical world have for us, for our students?

And I think this is why I like the Laws of Robotics very much — not for answering these questions in form of a simple plot device or character restraint, but for prompting us to ask questions. The Zeroeth Law in particular reminds us about the potential of harm to humanity.

This isn’t simply about “the survival of the human race” with or versus the machine – it’s about our humanity. Indeed humanity and learning are deeply intertwined – intertwined with love, not with algorithms.

I’m not sure we need to devise laws of ed-tech robotics — not exactly. But I do think we need to deliberate far more vigorously about the ethics and the consequences of the technologies we are adopting.

It’s clear that building teaching machines has been a goal in the past. But that doesn’t mean that doing so is “progress.” What is our vision for the future? Either we decide what these new technologies mean for us — what our ethical approach to technology will be — or someone else will.

Hack Education Weekly News: Maine No Longer Apple-Only for Its 1:1 Laptop Initiative

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:56:59 PDT

Politics

Maine’s Department of Education announced that Hewlett Packard has been awarded the contract for the state’s laptop program, making it the "primary technology and learning solution." Students will begin receiving their Hewlett Packard ProBook 4440s running Windows 8 in the fall (there will be some leeway to purchase others among the five finalists -- and Apple products, both the iPad and the MacBook are on that list -- although the price point of choice). Apple has had the exclusive contract to provide equipment for the state’s one-to-one laptop program since 2002. I guess it’s time to think different, or something.

Minnesota legislators have voted to end high-stakes testing in the state. Rather than tests that are required for graduation, the bill that passed the State Senate this week “switches to a new testing system that is focused on career and college goals,” reports the Star Tribune.

The LA Times reports that the state of California will adopt performance-based funding for its universities and colleges under a proposal that Governor Jerry Brown has drafted. The funding would tie budget increases to certain metrics, including graduation rates.

Florida has approved new online-only degree programs to be offered through the University of Florida. The state, which already offers fully online K–12 education, is the first in the country to offer this via a public university. The courses will, according to Reuters, “cost no more than 75 percent of in-state tuition for regular classes.”

The Guardian reports that Lego will build its first-ever school in Billund, the Danish city where the corporation is headquartered. The school will focus on inquiry-based learning. The school “is just one of a long line of projects in a town of 6,000 people sponsored by the Lego family. The family has also paid for an airport – the second largest in Denmark – and worked with the council to construct a church, community facilities, a library and a theatre.”

The state of Washington has passed and signed into law HB1472, a bill that creates initiatives to “improve and expand computer science education” in the state. In part, the legislation will allow CS to count as a math or science requirement towards high school graduation.

Lawsuits

Pearson is being sued in China for stealing trade secrets. Certiport China “claims that Pearson stole its client list under the pretense of an audit and informed customers of the change without prior consent of the other shareholders of Certiport (China).”

News Corp’s education wing Amplify is suing the education publisher Greenwood Publishing for patent infringement. (Sorry I don’t have any further information on this story… I’ll keep sleuthing.)

Launches and Upgrades

IncitED, a new crowdfunding site for education-related initiatives, launched this week. Featured campaigns at launch include “Open Road Learning Community for Teens" and “Street Poetry Outreach.”

Mozilla has released the draft version of its Web Literacy standards. Feedback is welcome.

Lego has announced the release date for its latest Mindstorms kits for classrooms: August 1. (You can read my write-up of The Mindstorms EV3 here.)

The latest version of MinecraftEDU (the official version of Minecraft designed for teachers and students) has been released. It’s based on Minecraft 1.5.1 and includes a number of upgrades, including improved teacher’s “Give Menu,” better server displays, and improved Mac support.

The Tin Can API has reached version 1.0. (For more details about the Tin Can API, see my article from last year.)

Online tutoring company Varsity Tutors now accepts Bitcoins, a crypto-based currency. If this sounds appealing to you, heartily recommend some lessons on economics.

EdReach, an education-oriented podcast network, has partnered with Stitcher Radio to distribute the former’s content.

Downgrades and Closures

InBloom has clarified the news that the state of Louisiana has pulled out of its pilot program, strangely with a letter posted to a Colorado school district. According to CEO Iwan Streichenberger, Louisiana has “decided to pause their fast-track implementation" in order to have “conversations” and to continue the move away from using Social Security numbers as students’ ID in state records.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art — one of the last tuition-free universities in the US — announced this week that it would charge undergraduates tuition. The university was founded in 1859 with the mission of educating working class New Yorkers at no cost.

Ooops. Bad timing for an outage for digital textbook provider Coursesmart as it experienced a “service interruption” during what was, for many students who took to Twitter to complain, apparently finals week.

Obligatory MOOC News

Universities from 11 European countries have joined forces to launch the MOOC initiative OpenupEd. It will offer 40 classes, taught in 12 different launches.

Bravo to Mozilla for remixing the meaning of the MOOC acronym — a “Mozilla Open Online Collaboration.” You can join the organization’s MOOC “Teach the Web,” which will help folks learn how to teach digital literacy and webmaking skills and starts May 2.

According to a study conducted by the Instructional Technology Council and released at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, just 1% of community colleges offer credits or certificates for MOOCs while 44% say they are “beginning to explore options” to do so. More details via Inside Higher Ed.

Credits

The American Council on Education’s College has recommended 5 classes offered by Sophia Pathways for ACE Credit: Human Biology, Introduction to Psychology, Introduction to Statistics, College Algebra, and Introduction to Sociology.

Funding and Acquisitions

Pearson has acquired Learning Catalytics, which the press release describes as “an advanced, cloud-based learning analytics and assessment system developed by Eric Mazur, Brian Lukoff, and Gary King of Harvard University.” Mazur popularized the idea of “peer instruction,” and according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Learning Catalytics uses data-mining techniques to find the right partners for them, he said. It also provides instructors with real-time information about student learning on a graphical dashboard display. In the last year or so, the start-up company has proved to be very popular, Mr. Mazur said. In fact, it was too popular for just three people to handle.”

The student portfolio startup Seelio has raised $900,000 in seed funding, reports Techcrunch.

The education-focused startup incubator ImagineK12 announced this week that it’s moving to a rolling admissions process, as well as increasing the amount of funding it makes available to participants. In addition to the $14,000-$20,000 that startups currently receive, new companies will be eligible for $80,000 in convertible debt funding.

The online speech therapy startup PresenceLearning has raised $8 million in funding led by New Markets Venture Partners, reports Techcrunch.

The for-profit DeVry University announced this week that its third quarter profits were down 15% due to lower enrollments.

Research

The New America Foundation and Education Sector have released a report called State U Online, detailing the history and the future opportunities for public universities moving online.

Research from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College has found that community college students prefer face-to-face classes over online ones, particularly for ones they think will be difficult, important, or interesting. More details on the study at Inside Higher Ed.

Competitions

The deadline for entries for this year’s Google Science Fair is Tuesday April 30 (so hurry!).

The Minerva Project, a for-profit university startup, is offering a $500,000 prize — what it dubs a “Nobel Prize for Teaching” — “to a faculty member at any institution in the world who has demonstrated extraordinary, innovative teaching.”

Cheers

Happy 20th birthday to the Mosaic browser — not the first Web browser, but arguably one that helped popularize the Web. Built at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, it’s a excellent example of the innovations created by public universities.

I lost track of all the faculty this week who announced new jobs and/or promotions, after hearing updates from Mark Sample,Tom Scheinfeldt, Dave Parry, and Jeff McClurken. Bravo to them, and to those I missed.

President Obama honored the Teacher of the Year at the White House this week — Zillah, Washington science teacher Jeff Charbonneau.

Jeers

Unbelievably ridiculous and awful news from Brian Kelly who posted a picture on his blog this of his redundancy letter, effective end of July. Kelly, along with 23 others at UKOLN (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking), have had their positions eliminated, thanks to budget cuts. UKOLN was established in 1989 and has been a leading force for innovative digital practices. I can't begin to express my thanks for all the hard work of Kelly and his peers have accomplished, nor can I really find the words to say how devastating this loss of expertise will be for open education.

Photo credits: B E R N A

Hack Education Weekly News: The Digital Public Library of America Launches

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 09:41:31 PDT

Politics and Pursestrings

Senator Charles “Chuck” Grassley (R-Iowa) is seeking to defund the Common Core State Standards. Grassley’s asked Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to include verbiage to that end in the Department of Education’s funding measure.

A bill to create a “New University of California,” an exam-centric, credit-delivery school with no professors, is dead, as its sponsor Assemblyman Scott Wilk has pulled the legislation.

Another piece of legislation in California, Senate Bill 520, lives on. The bill, which would require the state’s public universities to accept online courses for credit for certain classes, has been amended due to pushback from faculty concerned about the outsourcing of curricular decisions. The language of the bill now reads: the new California Student Access Platform “shall be developed and administered by the President of the University of California, the Chancellor of the California State University, and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, jointly, with the academic senates of the respective segments.” More details via the Remaking the University blog.

Lousiana superintendent John White has pulled student data out of inBloom, reports The News Star. Louisiana was one of the states participating in the pilot program — a Gates and Hewlett Foundation-funded project to build a nationwide data infrastructure. (For more information on inBloom’s plans for student data, see my latest story on the non-profit startup.)

The Philadelphia School District has put forward what it describes as a “catastrophic” budget. The district’s $304 million deficit means a budget with no money for counselors, librarians, sports, extracurricular activities, aides, summer school. Some 3000 employees could be laid off.

The Department of Education has approved Southern New Hampshire University’s plan to offer federal financial aid to students enrolled in its self-paced online program called College for America. The university describes this as ““the first degree program to completely decouple from the credit hour.” More via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A bill in West Virginia would make science fiction compulsory, in order to "stimulate interest in the fields of math and science.” Because nothing stimulates kids’ interest in something more than making it a school requirement.

Patents and Lawsuits

Apple has been awarded a patent for its “virtual university” (aka iTunes U). PatentlyApple has the details: the patent is “about systems, methods, and computer program products for accessing e-learning courses from an online resource. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) allow students to enroll in online courses or collections of other media (e.g., video files, presentations).” Because if it weren’t for the Apple GUI, clearly there would be no online education.

The Orlando Sentinel reports that the Florida Education Association, the Florida teachers’ union, is suing the state, alleging that merit and performance pay violate employees’ rights to due process. The suit claims that district employees are being evaluated for students they did not teach.

Launches and Upgrades

The Digital Public Library of America has launched! There’s so much to love here: a portal that links together the libraries, museums, and archives of the US; open source and openly licensed code and metadata; mapping and discovery tools that help us rethink how we might “browse the stacks” in a digital space.

The educational wiki providers at Wikispaces have launched a new product, Wikispaces Classroom, which expands on the existing wiki capabilities but adds new features — like a news feed, mobile capabilities, and assessment tools — and a new look.

Learn-to-code startups continue to pop up. This week, it’s Hopscotch, which offers an iPad app for for those 8 and up. (iTunes link) The app looks a lot like MIT’s Scratch (as do many of the recent entries in the market).

A golf clap for for the Boy Scouts of America who proposed on Friday — at the height of the media fixation with the search for the Boston Marathon bomber — to lift its ban on gay members. It will continue to exclude gay adult leaders.

“Verbling Brings Immersive Language Learning Into Your Living Room (Exclusive),” reads the Venture Beat headline. I confess I only kinda skimmed through the story because “immersive language learning in the living room” doesn’t seem terribly exclusive. But I guess the big news is there are Verbling Courses now, which are different than Verbling Classes, which launched in December. Read more at Venture Beat.

Scholastic rolled out what it’s calling its “largest education technology product launch” in the company’s history — a suite of tech tools including MATH 180, iRead, and Common Core Code X.

Downgrades and Closures

On Friday afternoon (news burial alert!), Yahoo announced it was closing down a number of services, including Yahoo! Kids (formerly Yahooligans) in 11 days. As Internet archivist Jason Scott tweets, “Good job there. Countdown to parents finding kids browsing cool new shit!” Yet another good time to ask who owns kids’ data, as well as for parents to think about how they plan to keep an archive of all of it.

The MOOC News Just Keeps on Comin’

The faculty at Amherst have voted down a proposal to join edX, reports The Amherst Student. Professors said they were “underwhelmed by the tools edX currently offered, that edX seemed too new and unreliable a program, that there were better things to spend money on and that the requirement to offer certificates, either immediately or after the first time the course is offered, was against the College’s interests.” More details via Inside Higher Ed.

The online learning startup Udacity is expanding its partnership with San Jose State University, offering 5 for-credit classes this summer: Intro to Programming, Intro to Psychology, Elementary Statistics, College Algebra, and Entry-level Math. The classes cost $150 and will offer transferable college credit.

Because it appears you can never have too many MOOC initiatives out of Stanford: NovoEd launched this week. Formerly known as Venture Labs, NovoEd was founded by Stanford management sciences professor Amin Saberi and PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi and offers a “team-based, collaborative, and project-based approach” that “helps learners foster the core competencies of leadership, collaboration, and communication.”

P2PU and the Open Knowledge Foundation kicked off their School of Data MOOC this week to help teach journalists, non-profit folks, and citizens how to gather, clean, and use data

Funding and Acquisitions

Learnzillion has raised $7 million, reports Techcrunch, in its Series A round. Learnzillion is building a Common Core State Standards-aligned platform that offers lessons and videos for teachers (made by teachers). (See my story from June 2012 for an introduction to the startup).

Houghton Mifflin has acquired Montreal-based Tribal Nova, which according to the press release means “in-house game development expertise” for the textbook publisher. Wheee.

The online learning startup Echo360 has acquired Thinkbinder, a tool that’s still in beta that helps students communicate and collaborate. Sounds unique. More details at GigaOm.

From the Human Resources Department

Karen Cator, formerly the head of the Department of Education’s Office of Ed-Tech, has taken on a new role as the CEO of Digital Promise, a Congress-created initiative to enhance teaching and learning with technology.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the appointment of Michael Steffen as Director of Digital Learning. Steffen will help lead the charge for better broadband access at schools and more digital learning stuff via this newly created position. (The FCC handles E-Rate, the federal fund that helps make schools’ and libraries’ Internet affordable.)

The National Louis University has cut its full-time faculty by nearly half, according to the AAUP. The school, which is facing revenue shortfalls (but um, seriously, who isn’t?!) has laid off 63 faculty members, including 16 tenured professors, and has closed four departments: English, fine arts, mathematics and natural sciences. Ditch the reading, writing, and arithmetic; hire more adjuncts. Brilliant.

Research (and Retractions)

The education reform think-tank Education Sector and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni have retracted a report they issued last month that claimed that university faculty teaching loads have gone down by 25% — something they argued had led to the increased cost of college. Oops. Could have been worse, I guess. (See: Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s famous 2010 study ”Growth in a Time of Debt” — a report invoked to argue for austerity policies — and the apparent Excel spreadsheet mistake they made.) Maybe we should hold off on dismantling public institutions ’til we’ve checked each others’ work or something.

According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, one out of every four of black students, nearly one out of five students with disabilities and one out of five English language learners were suspended in the 2009–2010 school year. More on this story at The Nation.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a study that’s found that examining students’ criminal histories and running background checks on college applicants does not accurately predict whether students will pose a threat once on campus.

Project Tomorrow has released its annual Speak Up Survey that asks parents, teachers, principals and students about their thoughts on education technology. Among the findings: 34% of school technology leaders said that bandwidth was their most challenging technology issue.

According to the 2012 ACT National Curriculum Survey, high school teachers think their students are ready for college at a far higher rate than college professors do. “89 percent of high school teachers think report their students are ‘well’ or ‘very well’ prepared for college-level work in the subject they teach, while just 26 percent of college instructors say incoming students are ‘well’ or ‘very well’ prepared for entry-level course,” writes Education Week.

Testing

Pearson has admitted major errors in its scoring of the test it offers to parents to see if their children are eligible for New York’s Gifted & Talented program. Gotham Schools has more details, including the apology letter that Pearson sent to parents. They are, of course, "truly sorry" that "errors were made."

Across the nation, it’s been a shitty week, compounded in schools everywhere by standardized test-taking time. So in my best Edward R. Murrow voice, I wish you all "Good night. And good luck."

Image credits: andymw91 via Flickr

Don't Go Back to School... Or Do

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:13:45 PDT

As the chorus crescendoes: “Don’t go back to school,” I’m fairly happy to sing along.

I mean, I didn’t finish high school in the US (was sent to school in the UK instead), dropped out of college (then got pregnant), finished my Bachelors with my baby (then toddler) in my arms, went to grad school (LOL), and proceeded to drop out of a PhD program, two chapters into my dissertation. I owe a fair amount of money in student loans, and now I’m a freelance writer.

So really, I get it. Don’t go. Skip college. Ditch grad school. The debt. The depression. The dismal job market.

Despite the dominant cultural narrative that “everyone should go to college” and the attitude among many employers that “everyone should have a degree,” I’m still happy to counsel against it. Because it’s true: school (in the US at least) is incredibly expensive. School might not be the best place for you to learn. School might not be the best place for you to network. School might not be your best bet for credentialing.

But then again… it might be.

That’s the problem with a lot of the “don’t go back to school” arguments. They’ve done some back-of-the-envelope math that demonstrates college is not a good investment. How much you pay in tuition. How much you’ll have to borrow. How much you’ll earn when you graduate. No doubt, these are calculations anyone looking at pursuing higher education — whether an undergraduate or graduate degree — should make.

But these figures are frequently predicated on a particular socio-economic status as the starting point and value a particular socio-economic status as the outcome. They’re really just one way to run the numbers — assessing higher education in terms of income, expenditure, and debt — and as such, just one way to determine if school is “worth it.”

They make for a pretty compelling calculation, don’t get me wrong. But often the advice — “don’t go!” — simply stops there. Or it is accompanied with a fair amount of mocking of those who do, not to mention a fair amount of wand-waving at what’s supposed to happen to those who don’t.

And this is where the “don’t go to school” chorus can be quite tone-deaf. A veritable cottage industry has sprung up to pen the “don’t go back to school” books, blog posts, articles, and op-eds. But the advice — “don’t go!” — frequently comes with some trite recommendations of what to do in lieu of formal education: “Need a job? Invent it.” Or “Want to learn anything? Write a personal learning plan.” Or “budget $150 a month” to take smart and interesting people out for coffee. Or “open up 20 or so tabs in your Web browser.” “You can learn anything you want on the Internet!” — except, let’s be honest, you can’t. And even if you could, so what?

The exception to the decidedly unhelpful or unrealistic "don't go!" guides and diatribes might be Kio Stark's recently published Don't Go Back to School, unique not because it offers a diagnosis of what's wrong with formal institutions of learning (there's lots of that out there) or because it offers a solid list of resources of where to go to learn "independently" (her list is a particularly good one though. It includes this blog). What makes Stark's book different are her interviews with 20-some-odd successful professionals — "people who rejected school early on as well as those who loved school and then graduated into passionate learning without it. They'll tell you how they do it and what drives them to learn." The book contains the personal experience narratives of journalists, artists, scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs — their own learning experiences written in their own words. And these stories highlight how varied, how messy, how complicated, how lucky, and — to invoke a cliche — how "lifelong" the process of learning-without-school can be.

Pursuing a four-year degree, in other words, might be a lot simpler.

Indeed I’ve watched my 19-year-old son struggle since high school graduation. He opted to not go to college, and despite the promise of saving tens of thousands of dollars and debt, the decision has hardly made things easy. “Take a MOOC!” “Learn to code!” “Start a business!” These aren’t necessarily helpful or applicable alternatives to college, and when you’ve just got a high school diploma, “find a job!” can be an extraordinarily difficult challenge.

My son doesn’t really see himself as an “autodidact” — although I’d argue that when he’s learning about something he’s passionate about, he is. Indeed, we all are. But the “don’t go to school” narrative doesn’t do much to help people get from here to there, particularly when “do what you’re passionate about” doesn’t pay the bills. Nor does the increasing hype about online learning opportunities help people realize, as Stark points out in her book, that "independent learners are interdependent learners."

But it isn't simply about "learning" to "learn together," either. The “don’t go to school” narrative is often quick to brush aside the ways in which gender, race, class, and ability afford privilege and complicate alternatives. Stark does address this in Don't Go Back to School, noting that doing things "by the book" — that is, getting a college degree — may be necessary for those who are "already at a disadvantage in the race for jobs." No doubt, most of us do not live the lives of the “don’t go to school” poster-boys (and yes, they are boys) — Gates, Zuckerberg, and the like. In touting the “age of the Internet” as “age of the autodidact,” we’re quick to overlook the networks (and let's be frank, the K-12 education) that many of these so-called “self-taught” and “self-made” men were already privy to.

These networks are powerful — they can be political, professional, regional, and yes, school-affiliated. They are, I would contend, more powerful than the informal learning networks fostered by the Internet. Perhaps that will change. Perhaps justice and social mobility can be leveraged through them. But as we sing the "don't go to school" song, I wonder how we do best to ensure that there are opportunities for everyone — not just the exceptional or the elite — to learn and grow and live meaningful, productive, and sustainable lives. Because even with all the ills of higher education, just telling folks "don't go to school" hardly feels like a sufficient or responsible response.

Photo credits: Terrapin Flyer

Hack Education Weekly News: Elsevier Buys Mendeley, edX Expands in California, and More

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:52:29 PDT

Law and Politics

President Obama has put forth his 2014 budget, and the education portion proposes to wipe away all outstanding student loan debt, fund free preschool for all children, bring about an end to high stakes standardized testing and an end to Race to the Top, provide free health services for students, and earmark more money for arts and music programs, libraries, and school counselors. Sike!

PBS's John Merrow has uncovered "a missing memo" that suggests that former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was fully aware that there was widespread cheating on standardized tests. Merrow's 4500-word piece, "Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error" is worth reading, and I'd add too that investigative journalism in education is worth supporting.

Mark Zuckerberg, along with other Silicon Valley tycoons, has launched a SuperPAC, Fwd.us, which will tackle immigration reform (particularly for those “most talented and hardest-working people” — that is, tech types) and education reform (that is, “higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math”). Many of those on board with the SuperPAC are investors in education technology startups and charter schools, so this should be fun to watch how they “hack” policy.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a proposed law in North Carolina that would remove the state income tax break for parents who allow their college student children to register to vote in the towns where they attend school. Because, ya know, “democracy.”

Tennessee lawmakers have tabled their proposed legislation that would cut families’ welfare benefits if students didn’t perform well in school. A shout-out here to 8-year-old Aamira Fetuga who followed the lawmaker behind the bill, Rep. Stacey Campbell, around the Capital asking him questions about his incredibly mean-spirited proposal.

A bill in California called the Textbook Relief Act is moving on to committee. The title of AB–479 sounds great, sure, but reading the fine print raises lots of questions. The bill will exempt from state sales tax just those textbooks sold by university bookstores or “textbook-only” stores in the state. (So purchases from Amazon, for example, are ineligible.) And “textbook” in this case, “does not include books on audio tape, computer disc, cd-rom, or similar storage media.” Well played, college bookstores. Well played.

Florida legislators are working on a bill, akin to one proposed in California, that would let officials in the state bypass the regional accreditation process and accredit individual courses on their own – including classes offered by unaccredited for-profit providers. I can’t imagine anything would go wrong with that. Can you?

Launches and Upgrades

The learning management system Instructure unveiled its new App Center this week (although it won’t officially launch ’til InstructureCon, its annual conference, this summer). The App Center will offer teachers, students, and administrators a one-click installation of a variety of apps (100 at launch) into Canvas.

Khan Academy is teaming up with Bank of America, the good folks who helped bring about the banking/mortgage crisis, to teach us all “Better Money Habits.” I used up all my snark about this news on Twitter, which was greatly enhanced by a response from the BofA customer service, asking me to DM them with my property address and my concerns.

NextGenU had its official launch this week. It provides a portal for free online courses (for interest or for credit) in the health sciences. More details here.

Amplify, the education division of News Corp, is teaming up with the education startup Clever. The latter will help integrate Amplify’s tablets with schools’ student information systems, reports Edsurge, which calls this a “huge deal” for Clever. Indeed, paying for data integration instead of just hacking phones to get what you want seems like a huge deal for News Corp too.

Closures

On the heels of its acquisition of the language-learning community Livemocha and its promise to move “to the cloud,” Rosetta Stone says it’s closing down the last of its famous airport and mall kiosks.

Obligatory MOOC News Section

EdX and San Jose State University announced this week that they’re collaborating on an initiative that would expand the offering of a “blended” version of the MOOC platform’s Engineering Circuits and Electronics to 11 other California university campuses. According to the press release, “San Jose State will concurrently establish a Center for Excellence in Adaptive and Blended Learning to train faculty members from other campuses interested in offering the engineering course and other blended online courses in the future.” More details from the press conference here (where my question — “is edX charging schools money for this?” was answered in the affirmative.)

Coursera is making money — $220,000 in the first quarter, reports Inside Higher Ed. That revenue comes from those in the “signature track,” who pay for a “verified certificate” in classes they complete. At a Coursera-focused conference at UPenn, the company revealed that “70 or 80 percent of paid users are finishing courses.”

Other Classes and Standards

The Next Generation Science Standards were released this week. Developed by 26 states and many science organizations, the new standards aim to cover fewer ideas (including -- gasp! -- climate change) but in more depth, with an emphasis on hands-on learning and not just memorizing facts.

The Atlantic offers a look at libertarian, former Congressman, and two-time presidential candidate Ron Paul’s new homeschool curriculum, which includes info on starting a home business, building a website, defending the free market, and understanding basic science. If he’d just called it a MOOC, I bet he could’ve got VC funding.

Funding and Acquisitions

The evil Elsevier has acquired the much-loved Mendeley. OK, that’s a bit of a polemical way to describe the news, but reading the responses from many academics, it’s fairly clear that the acquisition isn’t popular. As danah boyd explains in a blog post on why she’ll now abandon Mendeley’s bibliographic tool for the open source alternative Zotero, “Elsevier published fake journals until it got caught. Its parent company was involved in the arms trade until it got caught. Elsevier played an unrepentant and significant role in advancing SOPA/PIPA/RWA and continues to lobby on issues that undermine scholarship. Elsevier currently actively screws over academic libraries and scholars through its bundling practices.”

The learn-to-code startup Treehouse has raised $7 million in Series B funding from Kaplan Ventures. More details at Techcrunch.

And the learn-to-code startup Tynker has raised $3.25 million in funding from 500 Startups, NEA, Felicis Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, Cervin Ventures, GSV Advisors, XG Ventures, and others. More details at Techcrunch.

Ashai Net International has acquired the Sakai Division (that is, the learning management system division) of rSmart. More details on the acquisition on e-Literate.

From the HR Department

Education Week reports that Jim Shelton, the Department of Education’s Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, is in line to become the department’s Deputy Secretary, replacing Tony Miller.

Research and Survey Data

The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report on federal student loan debt for those who do not complete their degrees. Among the findings, “the cumulative amount borrowed per credit earned was highest for non-completers in for-profit institutions ($350 per credit, compared with $80 to $190 per credit” at public and private non-profit schools). Also “in 2009, the median cumulative federal student debt for all non-completers amounted to 35 percent of their annual income; debt burden was highest for students in 4-year private nonprofit institutions (median debt equaled 51 percent of borrowers’ annual income). Debt burden among non-completers who started in for-profit institutions increased from 20 percent to 43 percent of annual income between 2001 and 2009.”

Among the findings in a new survey (PDF) commissioned by the Association Of American Colleges And Universities, “employers recognize the importance of today’s colleges and universities providing a liberal education—one that focuses on both broad knowledge in a variety of areas and knowledge in a specific field of interest, as well as intellectual and practical skills that span all areas of study and a sense of social responsibility.” When given this description of a “liberal education,” 94% of those employers said that it was important that colleges provide students with this. I'm sure Zuckerberg's SuperPAC will lobby accordingly.

Photo credits: Harald Hoyer

Reclaim Your Domain: A #ReclaimOpen Hackathon Project

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:27:10 PDT

I spent last weekend at the MIT Media Lab, thanks to an invitation from P2PU’s Philipp Schmidt, for an “open learning hackathon.”

When I think of “open learning,” I think about the “open Web.” And for me, it isn’t simply a matter of what’s becoming a rather tired cliché that “you can learn anything you want online.” (You can’t. Lots of great stuff isn’t available there, or it's behind a paywall.) Rather, the open Web has allowed me to write and share and learn and collaborate with others — in public, in open and informal spaces, with openly licensed content, with open-ended and unscripted inquiry.

But there’s a sense for many of us, I think, that while one of the most talked about trends in online learning, the MOOC, contains the word “open,” that that use of the adjective — to borrow from Gardner Campbell’s keynote at last year’s OpenEd — “is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”

Add to some of the uneasiness about an “open” education that was or could be but isn’t, the notion that there’s also a “Web We Lost.” As Anil Dash writes,

”In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.”

I believe this is something we should reclaim -- particularly when it comes to learning.

I’ve been incredibly inspired lately by what I think is among the most important projects in education technology — the Domain of One’s Own initiative at the University of Mary Washington. This gives students and faculty, as the name suggests, their own domain name and Web space, along with the open source tools and skills to run it: their own blog, storage, and so on. When the students graduate and/or faculty leave, all that content and data is theirs to keep. They control it. They own it.

Indeed, I’ve been asking the question a lot lately — “who owns your education data?” — because far too often, the answer isn’t the learner herself.

So knowing that the UMW’s Jim Groom would be at the Open Learning Hackathon, I was pretty sure that anything I worked on over the weekend would be in the service of the “Domain of One’s Own” vision.

I didn’t do much, truth be told, but thanks to my boyfriend “the API Evangelist” Kin Lane who worked with Groom over the weekend, we've got a wireframe and an early beta build of the “Reclaim Your Domain” site.

This isn’t simply about an easy button to launch a Wordpress blog on your own domain (although it’ll do that eventually). It’s a recognition and hopefully a first stab at building a simpler way for folks to be able to take control more of their digital identity and digital footprint. A place for your videos. A place for your photos. A place for your writing. A place for your feeds. A place for you to experiment. A place you control.

The Reclaim Your Domain site will offer a wizard, but will also have explanations along the way. What is a domain? What is a subdomain? What is DNS? Where can you host your resources? What’s the difference between a local server and Amazon Web Services? What are your options for a blogging tool and what considerations should you make when choosing one? The costs? The benefits? What are the Terms of Service?

And hopefully — hopefully — once more folks have the know-how to answer these questions and to make more informed decisions as they live and learn online, we can reclaim the open Web for us.

More thoughts from Jim Groom here. And, of course, a big shout out to Boone Gorges and D'Arcy Norman and Martin Hawksey and Anil Dash (and others who I've forgotten as I type this up on the plane ride home) for the inspiration.

Photo credits: Luc Viatour

On "Hacking" Education

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:57:13 PDT

Facebook and the Gates Foundation have teamed up (again) to hold education hackathons at the social networking giant’s Menlo Park and London offices this month. The name of the event: HackEd.

Needless to say, nobody from this similarly named blog was invited. I’m not surprised. I fit into neither the organizations’ agenda(s) nor their guest list of of those “ed-tech advocates, top-shelf technologists, and education experts” working to “solve mission-critical problems in education systems around the world” — if for no other reason than I’m not convinced there’s a Facebook app for that.

Despite the similarities in the names HackEd and Hack Education, I’m not terribly concerned about branding confusion. The differences between us, I'm confident, are fairly obvious. And for me to claim a trademark (now or ever) on those two terms side-by-side would surely run counter to my vision of “hacking education.”

But what do others mean by that phrase?

Indeed, what interests me far more than a Gates Foundation/Facebook-sponsored app-building challenge is the increasing usage of the word “hack” to talk about what folks are planning to do to education: there’s Dale Stephens’ new book Hacking Your Education, for example. Steve Hargadon’s recent tour “Hack Your Education.” DonorsChoose.org’s “Hacking Education” contest from a few years ago. VC Fred Wilson has also written about “hacking education,” and his firm Union Square Ventures has held a conference with the same name. You can “hack your dissertation, “hack schooling,” “hack college,” and, of course, “hack into your school computer network” and change your grades. A headline in PandoDaily yesterday read “Education is a hack, in a good way.”

So what exactly do we mean when we use the word “hack”?

Here’s the blurb on my personal blog that describes my naming of this site and gestures towards a definition:

“To ‘hack’ can mean a lot of things: To break in and break down. To cut to the core. To chop roughly. To be playful and clever. To be mediocre. To solve a problem, but to do so rather inelegantly. To pull systems apart. To ‘MacGyver’ things back together. To re-code. To rebuild. To ‘Hack Education,’ in turn, has multiple interpretations: a technological solution, a technology intrusion, a technological possibility, a technological disaster.”

I think there’s much to like about the ambiguity of the term “hack.” But, as Zac Chase argued in a recent blog post, there’s still reason to pause and consider how it might be misused when applied to education. “We might not be hacking when we say we’re hacking," he writes, "and we might not be hacking what we say we’re hacking."

“Saying we are hacking a subsection of education like classroom management when we mean questioning classroom management approaches, researching proven effective practices of classroom management, and developing plans for the implementation of those practices of classroom management misleads others about what we hope to accomplish and makes it more difficult to call hacking hacking when we truly intend to do it.”

Is every proposed change to the education system — or even just those changes that involve technology — a “hack”? Does every educational app “hack” how we learn? Is anyone who agitates for change, particularly anyone who uses technology for teaching and learning, a “hacker” (or “hackademic,” or “hacktivist” or what have you)? If so, it does seem likely that, as Chase contends, we’ve purged all meaning from the term.

But it could be too that, in addition to a dilution of meaning, we’re seeing something else: a purposeful appropriation of elements of a subculture — or at least a noun and a verb that describe it — by corporate forces. Let us note, for example, the great irony of Mark Zuckerberg invoking “The Hacker Way” as part of his IPO filing. And today too, Zuckerberg officially announced he has formed SuperPAC with other technology investors and CEOs which will focus on education and immigration reform. Will Facebook's powerful branding message of "hacking education" be there too?

No doubt many of these sorts of projects — and they are political, not merely technological — to “hack education” are intertwined with what Evgeny Morozov calls “technological solutionism” — the notion there's a quick and easy “solution” (a “hack”?) that will make society shinier, more efficient, and ah! more perfect, all while failing to really recognize the messiness of problems and the great value in deliberating about them. And as I recently argued when I reviewed Morozov's latest book, it’s quite easy to see how “solutionism” underlies much of the tech industry’s efforts in education. It’s quite easy to see how “hacking education” easily veers towards "ed-tech solutionism."

Not for me. Not here. I’ll keep the contested slipperiness of the term “hack” (grumbling about it some days, for sure) but I’ll ask questions about the intentions and technologies and power and politics of what that means. And when some folks say they’re “hacking education,” damn, I’ll (yak and) hack right back.

Photo credits: Rick Philipps

Hack Education Weekly News: Robot-Graders, MOOCs, and a Professor-Free University

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:26:27 PDT

Happy 30th anniversary to A Nation at Risk, and congratulations to all the reformers who’ve managed to maintain the chant that “schools are broken” with such steady determination for three decades!

Law and Politics

A new bill proposed in the California state legislature would create a fourth division of the state’s higher education system. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, it would establish the “New University of California,” “an institution with no faculty and no tuition that, like the University of California, would be governed by a board of 11 trustees and one chancellor.” No teachers. Lots of administrators. Sounds like a revolution to me.

The North Carolina State House voted unanimously this week to require elementary students be taught cursive and memorize their multiplication tables. The sponsor of the bill said that cursive is "a skill that’s needed in the larger world and is thought to be a requirement for a well-rounded educated person.”

Oregon governor John Kitzhaber signed into law this week a bill that grants in-state tuition to undocumented Oregon high school graduates. Eligible students must have attended school in the US for at least five years; studied at an Oregon high school for at least three years, and graduated; and show intention to become a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

Great headline from the Electronic Frontier Foundation highlighting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a piece of legislation that’s been used by the Department of Justice to prosecute folks like Aaron Swartz. According to some interpretations, violating a website’s Terms of Service is a crime. Hence the headline: “Are You A Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal.” After all, many news sites state in their TOS that they cannot be used by those under 18.

Launches and Upgrades

Check out Episode 1 of Adafruit’s new science series for kids, Circuit Playground. Adafruit Industries is a DIY electronics marketplace. Founder “Ladyada” Limor Fried is featured in the first video — “A is for Ampere” — along with a friendly robot Adabot.

The open-access publishing startup Unglue.it (one of my picks for the best education startups of 2012) announced this week that textbook publisher De Gruyter will offer 100 of its titles on the crowdfunding platform. Books that raise $2100 will be “unglued” — released in a DRM-free digital format under a Creative Commons license.

Punishments

Texas high school student Kyron Birdine was suspended this week for writing YOLO on a state-mandated standardized test and tweeting about it. As Gawker reports, Birdine and his peers “are being forced to take both the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test and the old Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, even though only the TAKS will count.”

Obligatory MOOC Section

Stanford isn’t joining edX, but it is planning to work with the MOOC initiative on the code-base for the edX platform. EdX announced this week its timeline for open-sourcing that platform (June 1), and Stanford says it will contribute features from its Class2Go platform. Among the projects that will be open-sourced: code for the edX LMS; Studio, a course authoring tool; xBlock, an API for integrating third-party learning objects; and machine grading API’s.

The Saylor Foundation announced that it’s made agreements with 7 colleges and universities that will offer transfer credits to students who pass exams after taking Saylor’s free online courses. The institutions: Charter Oak State College, The City University of New York (CUNY) Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, Colorado Technical University, Excelsior College, Granite State College, Thomas Edison State College, and the University of Maryland - University College; and the classes are Corporate Communications, Western Political Thought, and Business Law & Ethics.

Non-MOOC Classes and Course Materials

George Mason University history professor Mills Kelly will no longer offer his infamous “Lying About the Past” course after a undergraduate committee rejected a proposal to make the course part of the history department’s core curriculum. “Lying About the Past” has received a lot of notoriety as one of the projects involved students creating a historical hoax and releasing it online (for example, via a Wikipedia entry). That made Jimmy Wales angry. And no one likes Jimmy Wales when he’s angry…

Phoenix College math instructor James Sousa has posted some 2,600 video tutorials online, all under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Sousa, who has been teaching math for 15+ years, has posted all the work on YouTube as well as on MyOpenMath.com. More details via the Creative Commons blog.

Funding and Acquisitions

Rosetta Stone has acquired the Seattle-based language learning community Livemocha for $8.5 million, reports Techcrunch. Rosetta Stone remains the giant in the language learning industry, but it’s moving slowly to transition away from boxed software (sold at airports). Livemocha’s 16 million member community is one step in that direction.

The reference and information services company Credo has acquired OnlineTutorSolutions.com, which the company contends will help it boost its services by connecting “students to on-staff, state-certified tutors at their point of need.”

Haiku Deck, an iPad presentation app, has raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Trilogy Partnership and including existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Founders Co-Op, reports Techcrunch.

The Australian textbook startup Zookal has raised $1.2 million in funding. Zookal buys university textbooks, then rents them to students.

Hires and Fires and Other HR News

No, McDonalds is not requiring cashiers to have a Bachelors Degree. Reports to that effect circulated this week, coinciding quite nicely with the narrative that college degrees are oversold. The AP clarifies that a third party job search site added the requirements, not the fast food giant.

Rutgers University has fired its basketball coach Mike Rice after video surfaced of him physically and verbally abusing his players — shoving them, throwing basketballs at them, calling them gay slurs. The team’s assistant coach has resigned, the university’s athletic director is out too, and there are rumors that the Rutgers president might be the next to go.

But in some awesome Rutgers news, Joyce Valenza — blogger, librarian, champion of kids’ digital literacy, and all around nice person — is joining the faculty of the university’s School of Communication and Information.

Techcrunch reports that “Aardvark Co-Founder Max Ventilla Departs Google To Read A Lot Of Books On Education.” The Q&A site Aardvark was acquired by Google in 2010. And apparently, based on a photo that his wife posted to Twitter, Ventilla is reading about education. Journalism.

Research and Data

President Obama has proposed a new $100 million initiative — the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN for short. Pretty clever, huh. The plan is to map the human brain. Many scientists are non-plussed.

The data journalists at The Guardian have launched the US Student Debt Project, a series on… well… US student debt. Drilling down into the data is important as many people throw around numbers without much thought or criticism: take for example the difference between the average student loan debt owed in the US ($24,301) — this is the number you hear most folks cite — and the size of the median student loan debt in the US ($13,600). And all those students who are saddled with “hundreds of thousands in student loan debt”? Just 3% of borrowers take out more than $100,000 in loans. Debt still sucks though. Trust me. I know.

Education Journalism “Digs Deep”

UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton and Chapman University will pay $275,000 apiece to the OC Register for “a half-page ad in each of 45 sections over the next year, along with feature stories, events coverage, personality profiles and other light fare produced by Register staffers.”

In other totally non-biased education news, tune in all month for a special series on online education in the pages of PandoDaily — sponsored by the venture capital firm Accel Partners. “Education is broken,” writes founder Sarah Lacey, so her tech blog is going to “dig deep” into the online education trend. Wheee!

Photo credits: Chris Christian

More Details on InBloom's Plans for Student Data

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:24:16 PDT

There has been an incredible amount of hype and fear and confusion and excitement surrounding inBloom, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative to build a new data infrastructure for public schools. One such promise: better interoperability will streamline schools’ handling of data. Another promise: more access to student data will help companies build tools to “enhance personalized learning.” One major fear: more thorough data capture and data processing will result in an unprecedented invasion of student privacy.

InBloom, which had its formal launch at SXSWedu, boasts 9 states (Delaware, Massachusetts, Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky) that will pilot the program. Many companies are on board too, with plans to use and integrate inBloom data. These include Amazon, Clever, Compass Learning, Dell, eScholar, Goalbook, Kickboard, LearnSprout, Promethean, Scholastic, and Schoology (for the complete list of inBloom partners, see here).

But as inBloom moves forward, many questions remain, and not simply as Information Week recently and patronizingly suggested, because the project is “understandably obscure to the average PTA mom.” Indeed, Bill Fitzgerald, co-founder of the open source education company FunnyMonkey has posted a number of questions on his blog after diving into the technical specifications: What is a “unique state identifier”? Which states use Social Security Numbers for student records? Will inBloom data be used to screen students’ immigration status? Why is corporate punishment not tracked? What student characteristics really matter, and what’s the educational goal (versus the administrative goal, perhaps) of tracking some of this data?

So in an attempt to get some clarity over what inBloom will gather, how long it will store it, and what recourse parents have who want to opt out, I sent the following questions to the company. Comments from inBloom’s spokesperson are below:

1) Is this one database? Or does each state, district, school have a separate database? Will inBloom ever allow researchers to access datasets across unrelated states, districts, or schools? If so, how will these proposals be vetted, and will students and parents within affected schools be notified/given a choice to participate?

inBloom is not creating a national database. It is providing a secure data service to help school districts manage the information needed for learning, and to support local educational goals. Only school districts decide who has access to that information and for what purpose. Student data will not be combined across states; each participating state and district will have its own protected space in the inBloom service, and they will continue to manage and control access to their student data based on local policies. There is no public or third-party access to data unless it is authorized by a school district or state educational agency to support a local priority. inBloom does not offer any research or aggregated reporting beyond what school districts or state educational agencies implement.

2) What is the delay on open sourcing the infrastructure?

inBloom is committed to making its technology open, and code for a number of applications is already available to developers. inBloom is planning to deliver full source code in the third quarter of 2013. There are two areas of work that are taking longer than we expected. The first is the restructuring of our internal development teams and processes to support and accept code contribution from the community. We want to get there as quickly as possible, and we are adding resources to the team to be able to move faster. The second is developing the business relationships and ensuring interoperability of any resulting new instances of services that result from our code. Our core mission is about interoperability, so while code will be available, we need business structures with potential partners to ensure we can deliver on that goal. As an aside, it’s important to note that the open sourcing of code does not in any way impact the security of student data stored in the inBloom service. The management of the open source code-base and the operation of the production service are completely separate.

3) inBloom states that it needs to agree to store SSNs. What circumstances would lead inBloom to refuse to store SSN’s if a school, district, or state wanted to use them as identifiers?

inBloom discourages using social security numbers as student IDs. It’s best practice to use unique student IDs that are not social security numbers. Not all states and districts have made this transition yet, so we would not refuse such a request (but we would want to be aware that this info is being stored).

4) How long will students’ data be stored? How long will educators’ data be stored?

The inBloom service is able to store multiple years of data, so states and districts can choose what data they want to store and for how long. Some will choose to store historical achievement and enrollment information to power reporting applications that help make sense of a student’s entire academic career.

5) What is the business model for inBloom?

inBloom is an independent, nonprofit organization that is committed to keeping its operating costs and service fees low to support sustainable, cost-effective personalized learning. Thanks to initial funding from the Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation, we are able to offer our 9 pilot states and districts the secure data service and Learning Registry Index for free until 2015. Later in 2013 we will begin working with additional state and district customers, who will pay a nominal per-student license for our services. inBloom has done significant cost benefit analysis, and we project that states and districts who invest in three or more personalized learning tools per year will typically save $5–10 per student on application integration costs, easily recouping inBloom’s license fees. We are also exploring approaches to recover costs from providers who benefit from using our service to serve their customers.

6) Much of the focus has been on standardizing the data – are you standardizing data-related policies too? Does inBloom plan to help states/districts negotiate the permissions that companies might want granted in order to access to data (that is, those who want to collect or use or store student data)?

inBloom is providing states and districts with tools to make data management easier, but the districts retain ownership and control of their data and their data policies. Our security model was designed around the core belief that school districts have the responsibility and authority to manage student records and determine legitimate educational need through their own policies and processes.

7) Can parents opt out? Or, has inBloom considered an opt-in model? If not, why not?

Under the law and as reaffirmed in our policies, only school districts can determine who has access to student data and for what purposes. inBloom is not authorized to alter or remove student records from its data store; those records are owned and controlled solely by the school districts. Parents should contact their child’s school district to inquire about their policies.

8) What data is being collected by inBloom that is different than states are currently collecting? For new data fields, how has inBloom decided which student characteristics to track?

While many states tend to collect year-end data for policy and research purposes, districts store a variety of classroom-level learning data created by instructional tool such as local quiz and assessment applications, online games for learning, student portfolios, and teacher daily grade books. States and districts will store the same data with inBloom that they were previously collecting and storing in other places. The inBloom data model is based on CEDS, which means it’s capable of storing a wide variety of information, but school districts don’t have to populate all the fields of the data store – they will store only the information that is relevant for their learning or administrative purposes, and districts will control who sees what information and for what purposes.

I’ll follow up in a separate post with some thoughts on these responses and further questions they prompt me to ask — and not just ask inBloom, I should add, but ask all states and districts and schools about their data tracking plans (and the transparency surrounding them).

Hack Education Weekly News: Chicago Public Schools' Protests, Zuckerberg's SuperPAC, Goodreads' Acquisition

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:43:17 PDT

Education Law and Politics

Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Chicago this week to protest the city’s plans to close 53 elementary schools and one high school. Dozens were arrested. African American students account for 90% of those affected by school closings, even though they make up just 42% of the public school student population. For more details, see School Cuts, a website that uses the city’s open data to share more information (including student body demographics) on the schools affected by the impending closures.

The Texas House voted 145–2 to reduce high-stakes testing in the state. Currently students in Texas are required to take 15 high-stakes tests in order to graduate; the new law would only require 5, in algebra, biology, U.S. history and 10th-grade reading and writing.

President Obama signed a bill to fund government operations for the rest of the fiscal year. It will also restore tuition aid for the military and limit NSF funding for political science research.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced this week that the state is assuming control of the Camden City School District, pointing to the district’s low graduation rate and students’ poor academic performance. Thanks to Matthew Di Carlo from the Shanker Institute for a clear look at the data: “NJ officials have justified their decision to the public based in large part on the argument that Camden schools are severely ineffective, but their evidence doesn’t really come close to supporting that conclusion.” Maybe there’s a tech CEO that can donate $100 million to the state to help?

HEY! Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is exploring forming a SuperPAC, according to SFGate, that will target a number of issues including immigration and education reform. “Sources say the group is bringing on Jon Lerner, the Republican strategist who founded Maryland-based Red Sea LLC and who is behind the conservative Club for Growth. Joining him will be ultra-conservative GOP consultant Rob Jesmer, a former strategist with Texas Sen. John Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.” I’m gonna go reread Zuck’s “The Hacker Way” to see what it says about SuperPACs…

Legislation in North Carolina will force schools tono use digital materials in lieu of printed textbooks by 2017. Schools will be allowed to spend money that’s been allocated for textbooks on technology. But according to the Fayobserver.com, the state has slashed textbook funding in order to balance the budget, and there isn’t any money earmarked for devices. Sounds like a winning plan.

The Department of Justice has reached an agreement with the Meridian Public School District in Mississippi “to end harsh disciplinary practices in which black students face harsher punishment than whites for similar misbehavior. The agreement comes after a lengthy federal investigation that found that black public school students in Meridian are five times more likely than whites to be suspended from classes and often got longer suspensions for comparable misbehavior.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take on another affirmative action in higher ed case, stemming from a Michigan referendum that banned public universities in the state from considering race in admissions decisions. (Lower courts have ruled that this was unconstitutional.) The Court is also considering Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin this term.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Fulton County prosecutors are close to seeking indictments stemming from test-cheating uncovered in the Atlanta Public Schools. “In July 2011, three special investigators found cheating on standardized tests occurred at 44 Atlanta schools and involved 178 educators, including 38 principals.” Lawyers close to the probe say “a large number of people” could be indicted. UPDATE: while I was penning this post, the news crossed the wire. Former Atlanta school Superintendent Beverly Hall has been indicted on 65 counts. She and 34 others have been charged with racketeering.

A proposed bill in Tennessee would cut a family’s welfare benefits by 30% if a child fails a grade. “It’s really just something to try to get parents involved with their kids,” said the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Stacey Campfield, who has no plans to punish affluent families for poor school performance.

The Scholarly Kitchen blog has taken down posts relating to Edwin Mellen Publishers, after receiving legal threats from the company. The posts in question deal with the publisher’s lawsuits against librarian Dale Askey and McMaster University (EMP is suing Askey for libel, based on negative reviews about it.) To make an unfortunate story even odder, some sleuthing has uncovered that the publisher has registered domain names relating to Askey, including DaleAskey.com.

Vagina Vagina Vagina Vagina

An Idaho high school biology teacher is being investigated by the state’s professional standards commission after complaints from 4 parents that he said “vagina” during a lesson on human reproduction. Apparently the teacher also showed An Inconvenient Truth in class, so clearly he’s a dangerous, science-y sort. .

Launches and Upgrades

Dave Winer, podcasting and blogging pioneer and developer of RSS, has a new company, Small Pictures, which released its first product this week: Little Outliner. As the name would suggest, the browser-based tool is great for outlining writing projects.

Google announced a trial that will use white space (that is, unused TV spectrum) to distribute broadband Internet to schools in South Africa.

Kuato Studios has launched an iPad game called Hakitzu that teaches JavaScript. Wired’s GeekMom blog has a review of the game. (iTunes link)

Pearson says that it will allow libraries to purchase and lend Penguin e-books. So thoughtful.

Closures

Tinkercad, a browser-based 3D CAD tool (often used in conjunction with 3D printing), is closing down. All academic accounts will be switched to read-only, effective August 31, 2013.

Departures

The digital textbook startup Boundless is losing another co-founder, as CTO Aaron White says he’s stepping down from the company. (Another co-founder, Brian Balfour, departed last year.) The third co-founder, CEO Arial Diaz, remains (as does thelawsuit from the publishing industry, charging the startup with copyright infringement.)

Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner is stepping down. The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit that manages Wikipedia.

Obligatory MOOC Section

Harvard is asking its alumni to donate their time as online mentors and discussion group facilitators on the edX platform. Because, ya know, the adjunctification of higher education wasn’t bad enough; let’s have TAs work for free!

Udacity is piloting Course Pods, “in-person tutorials for online courses” beginning with its Intro to Computer Science class. The Course Pods will meet once a week for an hour.

Google has funded an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education to develop a new acronym — a BOOC or “Big Open Online Course.” No, I jest. Google has given Professor Daniel Hickey a $50,000 grant to offer a class titled “Assessment Practices, Principles and Policies,” which will use Google’s CourseBuilder platform and be open to 500 students.

Non-MOOC Class News

The University of Washington will offer its first online-only degree program, reports GeekWire. The Early Childhood and Family Studies degree will launch this fall and will cost students $160 per credit.

Enrollment in California’s community colleges has reached a 20-year low and course offerings a 15-year low, thanks to the slashing of the state’s education budget.

Funding and Acquisitions

EduKwest’s Kirsten Winkler reports that the language-learning site Babbel has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Reed Elsevier Ventures with participation of Nokia Growth Partners. (Babbel was in the news last week for its acquisition of the mobile app company PlaySay.)

The private student loan group SoFi announced that it has “secured a $60 million warehouse line from Morgan Stanley.” SoFi connects students to alumni who invest in a pool of loans for their alma mater. According to the SoFi press release, “This announcement comes two weeks after Sallie Mae, the largest U.S. student lender, sold $1.1 billion of securities backed by private student loans, according to the Wall Street Journal. The popularity of this sale demonstrated investor interest in student loan credit.” Wheeeeeee!

Amazon has acquired the social reading site Goodreads. PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen interviewed Amazon and Goodreads execs on the deal. So will Amazon get the Goodreads data? Yup — another good reminder that we need to ask “who owns our (education) data?”

“Research” and Data

The mean base salary for (non-faculty) professionals in higher ed is up 2% from last year, reports Inside Higher Ed. But with a 2.1% rate of inflation, most “lost purchasing power.”

The National Association of State Budget Officers has released a report (funded by the Gates Foundation) on the state of higher ed funding. According to Inside Higher Ed, it confirms that “that the proportion of state spending going to higher education is lower than in the past, and that per-capita spending on higher education has gone down more than similar spending on prisons and Medicaid.”

According to a report from the market research firm Ambient Insight, “the mobile mearning market in Asia is in a boom phase,” with revenues projected to reach $6.8 billion by 2017. The report, which suggests that Asian countries are spending more on mobile learning than on e-learning, will run you $3875, suggesting that the market for white papers is also pretty damn strong.

Although the recent MetLife Survey of the American Teacher found that teachers’ job satisfaction was at a 25-year low, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index said this week that teachers are happy — or at least “teachers ranked above all other professions in answers to questions about whether they ‘smiled or laughed yesterday,’ as well as whether they experienced happiness and enjoyment the day before the survey.”

Take the source with a grain of salt here, but Kaplan Test Prep surveyed students to see if they’d prefer to take the SAT on a computer or via the ol’ No. 2 pencil and paper route. And more than four out of five said they prefer the latter.

ProPublica has published a report investigating the “growing burden of college fees.” Take Auburn University, for example, where mandatory fees “now make up 16 percent of an in-state student’s combined tuition and fee costs.”

The Brookings Institution has published a report on “ed-tech success stories.” The successes: robot-assisted language learning, MOOCs, Minecraft, Computerized Adaptive Testing, and stealth assessments. It’s always great to read the endnotes on things like this and see what think tanks “count” as “research.” In this case, sources where you can learn about ed-tech success include CNET, TIME, PC Gamer, PC Magazine, Forbes, the Minecraft wiki, and Dan Lortie’s book Schoolteacher, published in 1975.

Photo credits: jacinta lluch valero

Click Here to Save Education: Evgeny Morozov and Ed-Tech Solutionism

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:27:39 PDT

To Save Everything, Click Here

Since the publication of his first book, The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov has become one of the fiercest critics of the sweeping and giddy proclamations we hear about the liberatory power of Internet technologies. Morozov skewers with brilliant ferocity many of today’s best known “cyberintellectuals” (including Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Kelly, Tim Wu, and Jane McGonigal). That ferocity — in various publications as well as on Twitter — has won Morozov few fans in certain pro-tech camps. Indeed Jarvis described Morozov’s review of his book Public Parts as having “the air of history’s longest troll comment.”

His second book, To Save Everything, Click Here, offers a more measured Morozov. There are still moments of hyperbole and some fairly brutal zingers, to be sure. (He describes McGonigal as “a bad parody of Mitt Romney” for example.) But the book carefully draws on a wide range of political, philosophical, and historical works about science and technology, and as such, Morozov’s arguments are firmly rooted in canonical, cultural criticism and not simply in an easy-to-dismiss curmudgeon-hood.

The book identifies two main ideologies — “Internet-centrism” and “technological solutionism” — that permeate the tech industry, its PR wing the tech blogosphere, and increasingly government policy and thus our public and our private lives. “Internet-centrism” connects to Morozov’s earlier arguments in The Net Delusion and describes the tendency to see “the Internet” — Morozov uses quotations around the phrase throughout the book — as a new yet unchanging, autonomous, and inevitable socio-technological development and a master framework for how all institutions will supposedly operate moving forward. “Technological solutionism” is the related tendency to identify simple answers — in all domains, not just the tech sector — “before the questions have been fully asked” or the problems fully articulated.

Take, for example: “the Internet has changed everything about how we teach and learn.” Thus, “education is broken.” And from there, “technology will fix it.”

Ed-Tech Solutionism

Morozov does not explore education technology at any great length in his book (the writing of which, I imagine, coincided with the unfolding and escalating MOOC hype — otherwise I’m sure he’d have had much much more to say, particularly as he spends a good amount of time in To Save Everything questioning “our new fetish for digital openness”). Nevertheless, his book does draw on the theories of several important education philosophers, including John Dewey and Ivan Illich, an intellectual heritage that should serve to remind us of the ways in which the theories of teaching and learning (not to mention schooling) are deeply interwoven into our formulations of democracy and public life.

Even without Morozov addressing ed-tech solutionism specifically, one can readily recognize its existence in the examples he explores. Open government, data- and algorithm-based decision-making, the quantified self movement — none of these exist terribly far afield from ed-tech; all are, in fact, connected to many of the major trends that myself and others have identified in the sector.

I would contend too that my ability to scribble “see also: education” in the margins throughout To Save Everything speaks to the ways in which much of ed-tech (as well as the journalism that’s been cultivated to cover it) easily fits into Morozov’s larger arguments about Silicon Valley: context-free, deeply ahistorical, and suffering from a poverty of theory but certainly not from a lack of ambition.

Ed-tech solutionism is evident in the tools and particularly in the trade mags: where everything is disruptively innovative and wonderful and, oh hell yeah, well-funded; where — wow, thanks Stanford! — online education is a brand new development; where classroom practices get “gamified”; where learning to code is Sputnik 2.0; where teaching math is just like teaching reading is just like teaching programming is just like teaching physics — it’s all “content delivery,” right? — but in this brave new “Internet-centric” world, who needs teachers anyway when you have engineers, algorithms, autodidacts, and, of course, videos of Salman Khan?!

Silicon Valley certainly eyes education as “ripe for revolution” (not to mention, of course, ripe for profit-making) — there’s no hiding the industry’s intentions — but as Morozov’s work underscores, these “quick fixes [technological solutionism] peddles do not exist in a political vacuum.”

The Industry, the Government, and the Quantified Student

The recent fervor in education and technology circles for “data” is certainly a case in point. More data — more tracking and sharing of student and teacher data and by extension evaluation of their “performance”; more algorithms devised from what’s being gathered — promises to make education more efficient, more accountable, more personalized. And it’s not just a promise either; it’s policy — an effort supported by established corporate players in education (textbook publishers, the testing industry, the software industry), by startups (funded oftentimes by those very corporate giants), philanthropic organizations (also funded by the same folks), and politicians (once again, follow the money).

As such it’s here, with education data, that technological solutionism and Internet-centrism most obviously collide: the ubiquity of computing devices, now in the hands of more teachers and students, not to mention learning analytics and data-tracking and data-storage systems in the hands of administrators and politicians — are supposed to bring about an entirely new epoch in the “science” of schooling. (It's a new epoch in the "science" of schooling that sure looks a lot like that old one of B.F. Skinner's.)

So here too, Morozov’s insights might be most applicable, helping to interrogate a growing fixation with data, modeling, and measurement — he uses predictive policing and the quantified self movement as his examples — and to raise questions about the means and the ends of efforts like the Gates Foundation-funded inBloom, along with all the various systems and practices -- RFID tagging, CIPA-mandated logging, LMS tracking -- that students are subject to, often without their knowledge, let alone their consent. The end that Morozov envisions from all this: the stripping away our democracy, if not our very humanity.

So his book urges us to ask — of tech and, I’d add as well, of ed-tech: what exactly do we mean by optimization — optimized for what and for whom? Who builds and who audits the algorithms that purport to steer students forward through subject material? What subject material is important? Who says so, and why? Who wants to build more automated classroom software, more robot teachers, and why? Why is efficiency, particularly when it comes to learning, something we’d want to pursue? Why do we suppose that more data means better teaching, let alone means better learning? By what means? To what end?

Morozov argues that,

This flight from thinking and the urge to replace human judgments with timeless truths produced by algorithms is the underlying driving force of solutionism. Bruno Latour distinguishes between “matters of facts,” the old unrealistic way of presenting all knowledge claims as stable, natural, and apolitical, and “matters of concern,” a more realistic mode that recognizes that knowledge claims are usually partial and reflect a particular set of problems, interests, and agendas. For Latour, one way to reform our political system is to acknowledge that knowledge is made of matters of concern and to identify all those affected by such matters; the proliferation of self-tracking—and the displacement of thinking by numbers—risks forever grounding us in the matters-of-fact paradigm. Once we abandon thinking for optimizing, it becomes much more difficult not only to enact but to actually imagine possible reforms of the system being “measured” and “tracked.”

As the education system — and the ed-tech industry that is prepping itself to both serve and steer it — becomes more and more obsessed with numbers and facts and with building algorithms that both explain and shape it, are we sacrificing what Morozov (drawing on Martha Nussbaum) describes as the “narrative imagination” for a “numeric imagination”?

“Where narrative imagination is self-reflexive — it’s painfully aware that in order to account for the world, it also needs to account for the observer—numeric imagination believes in objective, firm accounts of reality out there; these accounts are timeless and never expire.” Somehow, all that matters in the numeric imagination, are how well American students score on standardized test scores — as if that is a measurement that could ever capture the complexity of an individual’s learning, let alone an entire nation’s education system.

But as politicians and policies and parents and headlines insist: numbers matter. Test scores matter. So ed-tech solutionism steps in to offer a (somewhat) new way to obsess over them — by testing and tracking students more regularly and rigorously, by metering their every mouse click, by acting as though students are machines themselves that can be installed, upgraded, recoded, and rebooted as the latest apps and algorithms might dictate.

Constructing a world preoccupied only with the most efficient outcomes—rather than with the processes through which those outcomes are achieved—is not likely to make them aware of the depth of human passion, dignity, and respect. We don’t earn our dignity by collecting badges; we do it by behaving in a dignified manner, often in situations in which we have other options. Tinker with this spiritual pasture, and those options might go away—along with the very possibility of dignity.

And my, how (ed-)tech loves to tinker.

Technostructuralism and Tinkering with Ed-Tech

So what do we make of the tinkering? Utopian and dystopian readings likely see very different outcomes in these technological developments: a challenge to outmoded practices and institutions on one hand; privatization and profiteering on the other; personalized learning on one hand; a well-scripted, but ultimately scripted, curriculum on the other; open access and opportunity on one hand; surveillance and standardization on the other.

Morozov claims to reject both cyber-utopianism and cyber-dystopian. Despite his savage critiques of Silicon Valley and his dour outlook on the future, Morozov insists that he’s neither anti-tech nor a “techno-pessimist.” Instead, he appeals throughout the book to what he calls “technostructuralism,” a framework for examining technologies not as “good” or “bad” or “neutral,” but as situated, constructed, social, and deeply deeply political. “Technostructuralists,” he argues, “view information technologies ‘neither as technologies of freedom nor of tyranny but primarily as technologies of power that lock into existing or emerging technostructures of power.’ Thus, any given technology is allowed to centralize and decentralize, homogenize and pluralize, empower and disempower simultaneously.”

But it’s worth pushing Morozov on this point, I think: should the scenarios that he postulates for our future— and they are, no doubt, powerfully nightmarish scenarios — stop us from tinkering? Or in other words, should we tinker more with our political, social and education institutions, in the hopes perhaps of dismantling less? (Because let's not kid ourselves, there are plenty of folks, to misquote Grover Norquist, who want to shrink public education down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.)

As Morozov frames his arguments in To Save Everything — and he does so incredibly carefully when it comes to political and social theory — I worry that this technostructuralist mode overlooks users’ agency, appropriation, resistance, and (mis!)use of technologies. If not overlooks, then misreads. Or, perhaps, and this is how I imagine Morozov would respond, it always situates them within solutionism. Nevertheless the recognition of an outside to or an escape from technological solutionism is crucial, I would argue, if we are to combat the ideologies that Morozov identifies in his book. (Are these ideologies totalizing? That would seem so… solutionist.)

How do we distinguish between ed-tech as solutionist marketing (what you hear in (ed-)tech blogs that gush uncritically about every new app and every new investment) and ed-tech as contingency-in-practice (the ways in which students and teachers have always MacGyver-ed together the tools that they need — hacks for inquiry and pleasure, despite a regime that might demand otherwise)? Because do so — distinguish, dismiss, agitate — we must.

Ed-Tech’s Neuroscientific Turn

I’ve been told quite often that I’m too negative. Too critical. Too unsupportive of education technology entrepreneurship. Too loud. Too mean. And lately, I’ve wanted to retort, "Maybe. But I’m no Evgeny Morozov” — even though, truth be told, I think ed-tech desperately needs one. Ed-tech, once so deeply grounded in progressive educational theory and practice, has been largely emptied of both.

There have been brave anonymous commenters here too that have suggested I’m too reliant on continental philosophy. That instead of being the “post-modernist wannabe ‘foucault’ of ed tech , I should “go teach a few years of K–12 with some real kids.” In such formulations, apparently teaching is distinct from theory, the classroom distinct from critique. Solutionism, no doubt, has far-reaching tentacles. Solutionism serves to foreclose critique.

I have to imagine that Morozov has been similarly charged — too much “talk” and not enough “action” or something (laughable, if you know his background) along those lines. In some ways, Morozov predicts this criticism in To Save Everything when he contends that we have witnessed a “triumph of psychology over philosophy.” All the carefully crafted arguments he makes -- all the rich references to political and social theory -- matter for naught if someone can appeal instead to another field. And that’s clearly the case in education and ed-tech, where neuroscience (of both the armchair and academic varieties) claims that it can provide us with all we need to know about teachers and students, about cognitive development, competency, and their measurements. That triumph comes, in no small part, because psychology and neuroscience carry the markers of science and truth, while philosophy "merely" gives us agonism and contingency, neither of which can be packaged neatly into ed-tech policies surrounding curriculum standards and assessments, neither of which make us turn, when looking for a quick and easy solution to the woes of the public school system, to an app in the education section of iTunes.

Am I too negative? Is Morozov? Maybe. If you prefer, you are welcome to bask in the sunny shininess of ed-tech solutionism which wants to sell you technology so you can share and like and score and learn (ha, maybe) more seamlessly. It wants to sell you an app (or two or three, plus hardware!) to download, all with the promise of a fix for education, an institution whose purpose we can't all agree upon, let alone all articulate if or how or why it’s broken.

But it's broken, Silicon Valley repeatedly tells us. It's broken. So click here. Save it.

Hack Education Weekly News: Australia Gets a MOOC Platform, Chicago Closes 54 Public Schools

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:02:22 PDT

Law and Politics

Thanks to the across-the-board budget cuts resulting from the sequester, NASA has suspended its public outreach and education programs, effective immediately. Good job, Congress. Way to support STEM education.

And because the U.S. legislative leaders are such smarty pants, they’re also making moves to restrict the National Science Foundation from awarding grants relating to political science, “unless the agency can certify them ‘as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." God forbid we study how democracy works — or, um, doesn’t.

The Supreme Court ruled this week in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, upholding the “first sale doctrine.” The case stemmed from a lawsuit by textbook publisher Wiley & Sons who sued a Thai student Supap Kirtsaeng who was purchasing cheaper versions of textbooks in his home country, then reselling them in the U.S. Wiley & Sons argued that copyright law bans this. “Nope,” said the Supreme Court thankfully.

The Department of Education released new guidelines this week to help higher education institutions navigate “competency-based education” and how and if they’re eligible to receive Title IV funds while doing so.

The city of Chicago says it is closing 54 public schools in order to address over a $1 billion in deficit that the CPS faces. Some 30,000 students will be affected by the decision. The majority of the schools are in Black neighborhoods. According to mayor Rahm Emanuel, the decision was a difficult one. (He’s been on vacation skiing, but did not offer a ski slope grading metaphor to explain just how difficult.) The mayor says the city closed the schools so that “all children in Chicago receive a quality education.” I call “bullshit.”

Maine plans to revise its contract for supplying the state’s public schools with computers as part of its one-to-one laptop program. That means schools can purchase tablets, not just laptops.

MIT says it plans to release documents relating to Aaron Swartz’s prosecution (Swartz, who committed suicide in January, was arrested in 2011 for downloading a massive number of JSTOR articles while using the MIT network.) More details via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Utah legislature has passed a law that would create a “cloud-based student achievement ‘backpack,”” allowing students and parents to access their education records from their entire school career, all in one place. Utah has earmarked $250,000 for this — a budget and a process to keep an eye on, particularly in light of the $100,000,000 that the Gates Foundation has poured into its student data infrastructure, InBloom.

California’s higher education faculty are pushing back on the proposed legislation that would require the state’s colleges and universities to grant transfer credit for online courses. In a letter, the UC Faculty Senate write, ““First, limits on student access to the courses this bill targets are in large part the result of significant reductions in public state higher education funding, especially over the last six years. Second, the clear self-interest of for profit corporations in promoting the privatization of public higher education through this legislation is dismaying. In fact, UC’s graduation rates and time to degree performance show that access to courses for our students is not an acute issue as it may be in the other segments. Lastly, the faculty of the University of California, through the Academic Senate, approves courses for credit at the University and reviews courses offered for transfer credit to determine whether they cover the same material with equal rigor. There is no possibility that UC faculty will shirk its responsibility to our students by ceding authority over courses to any outside agency.”

Testing Failures

The Providence Student Union published this week the results of an experiment it conducted: giving 50 “successful adults” a math test based on the New England Common Assessment Program. In the state of Rhode Island, a new requirement says that students must achieve a score of at least “Partially Proficient” to graduate high school. 60% of the adults received a lower score. A publicity stunt? Sure. But it certainly does raise lots of questions about what sorts of things we should put on a test if we’re going to make a test mandatory for graduation.

Obligatory Section on MOOCs

“Coursera’s Contractual Elitism,” reads the headline in the Inside Higher Ed that examines the contracts that the online education startup is offering various universities who come on board. These contracts stipulate that Coursera will only partner with “elite institutions” (members of the Association of American Universities or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America). Funny way to “democratize higher education,” if you ask me.

It’s Australia’s turn! Open Universities Australia, an online education organization, announced it was launching a MOOC platform called Open2Study. Participating universities include Macquarie University, RMIT University and the Central Institute of Technology and will offer 10 courses at launch including nursing, anthropology, financial planning and management.

Launches and Upgrades

Google launched a new free tool this week called Keep — a note-taking and storage app for Android phones. Considering the fate of Google Notebook (axed) and more recently Google Reader (axed), I’m not sure why anyone would want to use it to “safely store” anything.

Google also announced the availability of Chromebooks to schools in 6 more countries this week: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, and The Netherlands.

Duolingo has released an updated version of its mobile app that includes offline mode and voice recognition. The language-learning and web-translation startup was one of my picks for the best education startups of 2011. More via Techcrunch.

Khan Academy says that teachers can now create accounts for students under the age of 13.

The launch of EA Game’s new SimCity has been fairly disastrous: issues of DRM, online-only requirements, and server failures. But hey, SimCityEDU has officially launched so I’m sure that’ll just be hours of problem-free city-building for schools to check out.

Microsoft unveiled a new programming competition this week, the Imagine Cup Kodu Challenge. The Imagine Cup is the company’s college-level contest; this new one is aimed at developers age 9 to 18 who develop video games with Microsoft’s Kodu software.

Downgrades and Closures

Formspring, the Q&A site that was enormously popular with teens (prompting concerns about cyberbullying from some) is closing down at the end of the month.

In news that should surprise no one, it appears that the Aakash tablet — the promised $35 device — faces an “uncertain future.” It’s already been plagued with problems: delays, the inability to meet demand. And now India’s Human Resource Development Ministry is expressing its doubts too, saying that it’s looking at other rival devices.

Funding and Acquisitions

The Walton Family Foundation (of Walmart wealth and fame) has given the non-profit GreatSchools a $7.5 million grant, bringing the total its given to the site that encourages parents to rate and review their schools to $13 million.

Demand Media has acquired Creativebug, a website for video-based arts and crafts instruction. Yay! More content farms for education!

Textbook publisher Macmillan has acquired Late Night Labs, a startup that creates virtualized science labs. (I covered Late Night Labs last year on Inside Higher Ed.)

The language-learning startup Babbel has acquired the iOS app-maker PlaySay, reports The Next Web. PlaySay will be shuttered and the app pulled from iTunes. It’s part of a move to help the Berlin-based Babbel expand into the US.

Techcrunch reports that Nearpod, an app that lets teachers project what’s on their screens onto their students’ iPads, has raised $1.5 million from New Schools Venture Fund.

EverTrue, an alumni social network, has raised $5.25 million in a Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures. More via BostInno.

Book Banning

The Chicago Public Schools have pulled copies of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis from classrooms and library shelves. There have been numerous, conflicting stories from the district as to why this occurred — a clerical error, said one source; denying the book was banned from another; arguing that the book was inappropriate, said another.

HR Changes

Edsurge reports that Crystal Hutter, formerly the COO of Edmodo, has updated her LinkedIn profile — looks like she’s the CEO now. (Hutter’s husband, Rob Hutter, is the managing partner of Learn Capital and previouslyserved as Edmodo’s Chairman.) Edmodo founder and former CEO Nic Borg is now chief product officer.

The entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration has resigned over disagreements with the publication’s publishers Taylor & Francis about issues of open access and authors’ copyright. (Taylor & Francis’ says it owns it.)

”Research” and Data

Another week, another reform group offers a report card for schools. This time, it’s the Digital Learning Now folks. (The organization is “a national campaign to advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment,” brought to you by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former West Virginia governor Bob Wise — so you know, totally non-partisan and stuff.) The report card is based on on “ten digital learning elements,” such as student access, funding, and personalized learning. Congrats Utah on getting the only A (and it’s an A- at that.) As USF professor Sherman Dorn tweeted, “If someone will issue a “state report card” giving CT, IL, MA, & ND A’s, we’ll have perfection: EVERY state will have both an A and an F.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education published the results of a survey it conducted with professors who have taught MOOCs. (It was sent to 184 professors; 103 responded.) Among the findings: when asked if they believe “that students who succeed in MOOCs deserve formal credit from your home institution,” just 28% said yes. What can we learn from this? Well, among other things: that The Chronicle sorta sucks at making accurate pie charts. And that Techcrunch, which re-blogged the story with the headline “72% of Professors Who Teach Online Courses Don’t Think Their Students Deserve Credit,” can’t seem to regurgitate news accurately either.

Back to School

Malala Yousafzai has gone back to school. The young Pakistani girl and education activist was shot in an assassination attempt by the Taliban last year and has been recovering in the U.K. since then. Over 32 million girls around the world are prevented from going to school, and Malala says she will continue to advocate for girls' education.

Image credits: Eddy Van 3000, because kittens...

What Impact Have MOOCs Had on Open Courseware?

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 09:22:40 PDT

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed

“What has the impact been of MOOCs on MIT OCW usage?” Matthew Rascoff (@mzrascoff) tweeted earlier this week. It’s a great question.

Have massive open online classes spurred more interest in MIT Open Courseware — that is, those freely available and openly licensed course materials (readings, lessons, lecture notes, and quizzes) posted online by the MIT faculty?

Or has the interest and hype surrounding massive open online classes (MOOCs) driven users away from MIT’s openly licensed course content and towards course content on the various new MOOC platforms — course content that might be free to access or enroll in, but that isn’t necessarily openly licensed?

It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, of course. It’s not necessarily a matter of MIT Open Courseware or MOOCs winning the future of education. (It’s worth pointing out, perhaps, that within the institution of MIT, MIT OCW and MITx (now edX) have always been separate initiatives.) But then too, this is not just a matter for MIT, whose open education practices are well established — over a decade old.

For other institutions, this might appear to be a choice: either open education or MOOCs. That’s part of the concern that (NITLE]’s Bryan Alexander articulates when he says that “All of the issues around creating or using OER, of getting faculty towards supporting open access, of implementing inter-institutional open source software communities – all collapse before the MOOC.” Rather than pursue policies and practices that would lead to establishing open access, open educational resources, open source, many administrators simply want to pursue MOOCs.

For MIT Open Courseware, the pursuit of MOOCs — by MIT and by higher education at large — seems to have boosted usage. That’s the response by MIT Open Courseware’s spokesperson Steve Carson to Rascoff’s tweet, at least. The site has seen “record levels of traffic” since the MOOC craze began: 22.3 million visitors in 2012, up 25% over 2011.

Other open education initiatives, such as the online study group Open Study, also report growing numbers. According to its CEO Preetha Ram, “Over 9 million people visited OpenStudy last year, generating over 25 million page views. They came from 160 countries to learn from each other, to hang out, and to help one another. Our partnerships have grown to include corporate and MOOC providers.” One of Open Study’s partners has long been MIT Open Courseware, in fact, and the two — along with Peer2Peer University and Codecademy — have offered a “Mechanical MOOC,” an introduction to Python based on open resources and open study groups (and a good old fashioned email list serve). More evidence, it would seem, that the choice here isn’t between MOOCs or open education.

But that’s not the only signal that points to this. Indeed as Mike Caulfield has argued, xMOOCs (along with textbooks) seem likely to become courseware themselves:

What’s happening right now is that xMOOCs are moving backwards into replicable content from the interaction and assessment pole while textbooks are are moving forward into interaction and assessment from the replicable content pole.

The end result of this is not necessarily massive classes. It’s broadly used courseware — software that provides much of the skeleton of standard classes the way publisher texts do today. In other words, the best way to think of a MOOC isn’t really as a class brought to your doorstep — it’s more a textbook with ambitions.

There’s still plenty to question here about the “ambitions” of xMOOCs (MOOC providers in particular) and how these might support or undermine the efforts of those who’ve long worked in open education — a tension that reflects, no doubt, the struggles around (and sloppiness over) our usage of and intentions for that adjective “open.”

What happens to open courseware, what happens to OER with the hype about MOOCs? If MOOCs do become courseware, how much (if at all) will they rely on OER? Will only institutions like MIT -- those with an institutional history of open source, open education, and so on -- be able to maintain open education initiatives? How important to universities is “openness”? And how important is all this massive hype?

Image credits: Helen Cook

2010-2011 Ed-Tech Startups: Where Are They Now?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:02:01 PDT

It’s a story I’ve long been meaning to write: “update on edu startups I covered last year.” I’m taking a first stab at it here, prompted by some poking around in the Crunchbase (startup funding) database and by comments on a blog post where I talk about doing so.

My (Crude) Methodology

I’ve looked through all the blog posts that I wrote when I was at ReadWriteWeb (Spring 2010 - Summer 2011) for mentions of education technology startups, products, and initiatives — about 40 all told.

Obviously this is not a full list of the education technology companies that were founded or funded during this time period (heck, it doesn’t include those that I wrote about here in the early days of Hack Education, a blog that was designed to cover the things I was discouraged from writing about for RWW — namely, um, ed-tech). These 40-some-odd startups, products, and initiatives do not include all the ed-tech related topics I covered for RWW either — things like cellphones in the classroom, web filtering at schools, social media bans, and so on.

And finally, yes, the time frame for this analysis is based solely on the duration of my stint at RWW, for what it’s worth. But that is a time frame that works well with the recent resurgence in ed-tech entrepreneurship, one that is typically dated from around 2009.

The Data

Here’s a link to a spreadsheet with the data I’ve gathered. Yup, there are empty fields. In some cases, that means I couldn’t find the data; in all cases, it’s a reminder that “this spreadsheet is a work-in-progress.” Feel free to chime in the comments about what’s wrong or missing or presumptuous.

Some Thoughts

On ed-tech startups: To be honest, I thought that I’d discover that many of the startups that I covered 3 or so years ago had gone away. Turns out, of the 25 I covered while at ReadWriteWeb (Kno, Grockit, Quora, Mahalo, Inkling, Udemy, StudyBlue, Inigral, Instructure, Schoology, Highlighter, Babbel, Teachstreet, Rocketship, MeeGenius, Internmatch, Open Study, LearnBoost, MiniMonos, DonorsChoose.org, TripLingo, Stencyl, ResearchGate, Neverware, GoodieWords), all are still in business with the exception of Teachstreet, which was acquired by Amazon last year. (Of course, maybe that’s because I chose to write about the “good” ones. Or something.)

The health of those remaining startups, however, isn’t all that clear. 4 have pivoted (Kno moving from tablet to e-book software, Grockit moving from test-prep to Learnist, for example). 6 CEO/co-founders have stepped down and/or left the company. Not all have recognizable revenue streams. The startups have survived, sure, but not all are thriving.

It’s hard to say who’s doing the best out of this group — I haven’t seen these companies’ balance sheets. And I’m pretty skeptical that that would really tell us what’s “the best” in and for education.

On legacy (ed-)tech: It’s worth noting, particularly in light of all the hoopla about “ed-tech revolutions” (in products and in sales cycles and so on): the continuity and sustainability of ed-tech products introduced by older, more established tech companies. Lego’s Mindstorms lives on, for example. So does Microsoft’s Imagine Cup (its college-level coding contest) and its educational productivity suite (although it’s since been rebranded from Live@EDU to Office 365 for Education). All (9) companies and products still exist — except those provided by Google.

I covered 8 of Google’s education products and programs while at RWW. 7 are still around. One of my last stories while at RWW hinted at the precariousness of the Android App Inventor project. Sure enough, less than a month after I left the publication, Google quietly shut down App Inventor, eventually handing the code over to MIT.

I realize some of these comparisons are apples-to-oranges. But it’s still worth asking: which ed-tech products have been the best bet for for schools, for students, for teachers (and, of course, for entrepreneurs and investors)? Which will be in the future?

On university-built ed-tech: According to my limited sample of data, there’s an interesting answer — one that might run counter to plenty of mainstream (ed-)tech narratives that posit that schools are boring and broken and that the tech industry is here to innovate and fix stuff. Whereas both startups and big companies have pivoted, stuttered and shuttered their edu initiatives, 100% of the university-sponsored ed-tech products I covered while at RWW are still up and running. Okay, okay, it’s a tiny sample size, sure: Zotero, Omeka (both from George Mason University), MIT OpenCourseWare, and the Digital Public Library of America (which, okay, is a university- and public library and government organization-sponsored initiative — but you get my point). Up and running and under active development.

Are the successes of these efforts a matter of open source and openly licensed content? Administrative and professorial and developer support and affinity? A matter of edu expertise? Strong product-user fit? Smart resource allocation? Is there something to be said about developing an education product outside the market?

How does the funding and resource allocation for all of these products — startups', enterprise companies', universities' — compare? What other metrics should we look at?

Next Steps?

I’ve had quite a bit of interest from readers about building out a database that can better address questions of ed-tech's business models, revenues, learning outcomes, viability, alignment, and so on. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now (um, I’m writing a book, remember?), but I’m going to see how I can continue to move this project forward — refine and open the data. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Image credits: Chris Christian

The Ed-Tech Startup Crunch

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 18:43:12 PDT

Following the slew of recent startup acquisitions, pivots, closures, and resignations (along with a couple of emails from entrepreneurs hinting that their company is weighing some of these options), I thought I’d take a look back at the last few years’ worth of ed-tech startup history:

Who’s been funded? How much and by whom? What’s happened since? Who’s been acquired? Who’s pivoted? Who’s shuttered? Who’s got a (sustainable) revenue model? Who’s been in the headlines (and why)? Who’s been ignored by the press? Who’s been forgotten by bloggers and users alike?

Ed-Tech and Crunchbase

While far from the perfect source to answer these questions, Techcrunch’s Crunchbase does provide a decent amount of data about startups’ funding, staffing, and media coverage. Anyone can edit the Crunchbase database, so there are lots of gaps and messiness in the data. But (for better or worse) it’s a free, tech-community-supported effort — one that some folks worried would fall into disrepair after AOL acquired Techcrunch. (It does look like the company is putting some resources into Crunchbase, hiring developers and — gasp! — blogging.)

You can query Crunchbase directly through the website’s search interface (that works well for looking up a company or two), or you can utilize the API to pull the data you want.

Thanks to (a lot of) help from my partner Kin Lane, I chose the latter, pulling the data I wanted via the Crunchbase API . You can read Kin’s thoughts on working with the Crunchbase API here. He cites me as calling the process “tedious” — which if you know me is a well-censored description of how I’d describe the endeavor.

For my research, I pulled information on all startups tagged “education” that have been founded or funded since 2009 — the year when we started to see this recent resurgence in ed-tech entrepreneurship (as well, I confess, as the year that I founded this blog).

Crunching Startup Data

Based on Crunchbase data, I can give you the list of the startups who’ve received the most funding in recent years (I should note again, as I state above, that this is crowdsourced and incomplete data):

1. 2U (total raised: $90,800,000)

2. Kno (total raised: $89,000,000)

3. Desire2Learn (total raised: $80,000,000)

4. Kaltura (total raised: $69,100,000)

5. Rafter (total raised: $66,000,000)

6. Knewton (total raised: $54,000,000)

7. Grockit (total raised: $44,700,000)

8. Xueersi (total raised: $40,000,000)

9. Edmodo (total raised: $40,000,000)

10. Parchment (total raised: $35,500,000)

11. Axilogix Education (total raised: £30,000,000)

12. ConnectEdu (total raised: $28,200,000)

13. Knowledge Adventure (total raised: $26,800,000)

14. Altius Education (total raised: $26,600,000)

15. Flat World Knowledge (total raised: $26,200,000)

16. Zeebo (total raised: $25,000,000)

17. Coursera (total raised: $22,000,000)

18. UniversityNow (total raised: $21,500,000)

19. EverFi (total raised: $21,000,000)

20. Trovix (total raised: $18,300,000)

21. Bloomfire (total raised: $18,000,000)

22. Apreso Classroom ($15,000,000)

23. Classteacher Learning Systems (total raised: $15,000,000)

24. K-12 Techno Services (total raised: $15,000,000)

25. Revolution Prep (total raised: $15,000,000)

But that list is really not that interesting...

What I'm more interested in: what about those startups who’ve raised between $800,000 and $5 million since 2009? Where are they now? What are their prospects — for sustainability, for acquisition?

Other questions: which investors are “doing well” in ed-tech startup-land? Which investors are furthering which education policies (CCSS, NCLB, RTTT, etc) with their funding? In other words, does investment follow policy? Does investment lead policy? Are trends like “data-driven education,” for example. market-driven? Policy-driven? Investor-driven?

Which metrics are the startup ecosystem tracking that give us the wrong signals for which education startups are interesting or important or tranformative? Which signals do investors (and by extension Crunchbase and Techcrunch… to name a few) follow that do not mean much when it comes to questions of learning, equity, justice? (i.e. user sign-ups, funding amounts)?

And finally, how can I make my research on this topic more relevant? What questions should I be asking of the Crunchbase(ish) data? What questions does this data fail to answer? How can I make this research and data open and accessible to others?

Hack Education Weekly News: MOOCs, Badges, RSS, and Twinkies

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:55:44 PDT

Education Politics

Legislation was introduced in the California Senate this week that, if passed, could drastically reshape public higher education as we know it. SB520, authored by President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, will require the state’s public colleges and universities to accept credit for certain online classes if a student is unable to get into the class on-campus. The state will identify some 50 introductory classes, available from any online provider, including unaccredited ones. While the proposal is being hailed in some quarters as making higher education more accessible, it’s hard not to see this being a dangerous spiral, where for-profit providers (Straighterline, Coursera, Udacity, etc etc etc etc) lobby the state legislature to limit higher education funding. See e-Literate for the most complete coverage on the bill.

Thank you for your military service, soldiers. Here’s how, thanks to sequestration, our federal government thanks you: by suspending the Tuition Assistance Program. During the 2012 fiscal year, it provided $475 million to soldiers. Soldiers currently enrolled in classes will not be effected; but no one will be able to use the financial support to enroll in future education.

The New York Times reports that Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, wants to expand E-Rate, the federal program that subsidizes Internet connections for schools and libraries. Staff say that Rockefeller would like the program to expand by an additional $5 billion, and “be used to create one-gigabit connections to every school in America — a speed that is 60 to 100 times faster than most schools or homes now receive — and wireless connections in every school building.”

Obligatory MOOC News Section

As it’s been for a while now, the big education news of the week is MOOC news — the proposed legislation in California that sure seems a boon to the MOOC providers (who apparently saw a draft of the legislation before even the chair of the state Senate Education Committee did).

Timed in conjunction with Open Education Week, the School of Open has opened its virtual doors. The School of Open is developed by Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) with support from Creative Commons, will offer open online classes in, um, “open.” Four facilitated courses are currently available: “Copyright 4 Educators (US),” “Copyright 4 Educators (AUS),” “Creative Commons for K–12 Educators,” and “Writing Wikipedia Articles.”

The online education startup Coursera is revamping its forums. This will include a number of usability changes — good news considering how much Coursera courses rely on this very old format of online “discussion.”

edX is moving forward with its promise to open source its MOOC platform, releasing the XBlock SDK under the general public under the Affero GPL open source license. (The code is on GitHub.) XBlock provides part of the architecture for edX classes, so that their various components — text, video, etc — can be assembled via APIs.

Launches and Upgrades

Mozilla released version 1.0 of its Open Badges infrastructure this week. The project, which has been in beta since Fall 2011, has involved building the open source technology framework for a digital recognition (“badging”) system, one that would recognize formal and informal education skills and achievements.

Open education leader David Wiley announced the launch of his new startup this week. Lumen Learning hopes to be the “Red Hat for OER,” that is offering services and support to help institutions looking to utilize openly licensed educational materials. More on the launch via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The interactive whiteboard app ShowMe has added a new feature: groups. This will allow teachers to create specific groups for their classes, so that students can more easily share the lessons they create with one another.

The National Archives is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America in one of its first pilot projects, providing some 1.2 million digital documents from the National Archives catalog to the new library.

Closures

RSS is crucial to the work I do as an education technology writer, and Google Reader has long been my feedreader of choice. So it was sad news to hear from Google that it’s shuttering the service as of July 1. I’m still looking for a replacement I like, and for those in a similar situation, Bryan Alexander has collected a number of suggestions on his website.

Alleyoop, a college prep startup incubated by Pearson and hailed by Mashable as the “Zynga for Learning,” is closing its doors. (I received an email to that effect this week; no link on the Web to support it. Sorry.) I covered Alleyoop’s launch this time last year, raising questions at the time about what the implications for education startups might be with Pearson playing an active role in funding and incubating them. Well, I guess we know now!

Funding and Acquisitions

Noodle Education, an education startup founded by Princeton Review founder John Katzman, has acquired Lore, the not-really-an-LMS-LMS startup formerly known as Coursekit. Inside Higher Ed has a good look at what the acquisition might mean for Noodle’s future plans. No details about the finances involved in the transaction. Lore had raised over $6 million in funding from Peter Thiel, Joel Spolsky, David Tisch and others.

The learning management system Desire2Learn has acquired Wiggio, a Boston-based collaboration platform that Techcrunch describes as the “anti-sharepoint” for students.

SchoolRack, an education company founded in 2003 that offers a free tool that lets educators create class websites, has been acquired by Leading Capital SGPS, a private holding company.

This week, the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and the Metropoulos & Company (which owns Pabst Blue Ribbon and Vlasic pickles) acquired Hostess Brands. Why is this education news, you ask? Well, last month Apollo Global Management bought the education section of McGraw-Hill. So textbooks and Twinkies — saved for our future generations. Gee thanks, private equity!

CreativeLIVE, an(other) online education startup, announced this week that it’s raised $8 million in Series A funding from Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, CrunchFund and Google Ventures. More on Techcrunch, which was good enough to include a disclosure at the bottom about Mike Arrington’s connection to the blog and the investment.

The Gates Foundation announced new investments into adaptive learning, with 10 $100,000 grants available to colleges that “help them create the partnerships necessary to launch adaptive courses over the next 24 months.”

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp continues to position itself as a key provider of the new Common Core State Standards’ assessments, winning a contract this week from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop formative assessment PD and lessons for teachers.

Human Resources

The Boston Globe reports that Harvard University secretly searched the emails of several staff members last fall as it sought to identify leaks to the press about a cheating scandal that was making headlines. The staff were not notified of the search, and there have been some questions whether the search violated the faculty policy on electronic privacy.

The online education startup Minerva Project has hired Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn as its founding dean. Kosslyn has most recently been the director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavior Sciences at Stanford. More details on Kosslyn and the company on Edsurge.

Research

The “diploma gap widens between rich, poor,” writes The Hechinger Report’s Joanne Jacobs. A University of Michigan study by Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski found that 54% of students born into high-income families around 1980 graduated from college, compared to 9% of those born into low-income families. Both percentages are up from those born in the 1960s, but up by only 4 points for low-income students and up by 18 for high-income families.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report on “Teens and Technology 2013.” Among the findings, 78% of teens have a cellphone. 93% say they have a computer at home, and 71% say it’s a device that they share with other family members.

Contests

Congratulations to the winners of the annual Education Writers Association’s National Awards for Education Reporting.

Image credits: Steven Isaacson