Steal this Book! the yippie Abbie Hoffman once declared. In that same spirit -- share this book! -- comes LibraryBox. Librarian Jason Griffey is forking the PirateBox, in his words taking "the 'pirate' out of PirateBox to produce a tiny, battery-powered, linux-based, anonymous file server capable of serving arbitrary types of digital files to anyone with a wifi-enabled device." Griffey has built a demo version that contains the top 100 public domain e-books from Project Gutenberg, but the LibraryBox project could serve all sorts of files and all sorts of community literacy needs. [...]
More Digital Textbooks For Sale in More College Bookstores (So What?)
In the last few weeks there have been several big announcements about digital textbooks: Microsoft's investment in Barnes & Noble's spinout of its NOOK and college bookstore divisions, for example, and news today that Inkling is partnering with Follett, which runs some 900 college bookstores. Will we see a "format war" between publishers and hardware makers over control of the higher ed textbook market? [...]
TeachBoost: A Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Development Tool
TeachBoost is another graduate from this latest ImagineK12 cohort. TeachBoost offers what it calls a "performance management platform" -- a tool for teacher evaluation. With the emphasis in Race to the Top on "teacher effectiveness," there's a lot of opportunity here to build something useful (and mobile and collaborative). But this is a pretty controversial topic, and as such TeachBoost might have a lot of challenges ahead. [...]
Hack Education Weekly Ed-Tech Podcast
Each week, Steve Hargadon and I discuss the week's ed-tech news and the posts I've written here on Hack Education. In this week's episode, we discuss the changes I made to this website, school Internet filters (and what happens when these filters and restrictions follow students and teachers home), Mathalicious' Kickstarter campaign, what I've learned from MOOCs, (more!) protests against Pearson, and more. [...]
Paying to Learn (to Program)
With the proliferation of free educational resources, why pay for school? Why pay to learn? Sure, there's the argument about college credits and certification. There's the argument too that "you get what you pay for." I'm particularly interested in the question of free learn-to-program resources (along with what works and what doesn't work -- paid or free -- for learners) in part due to the pivot that the folks at the startup Bloc have made. [...]
Edshelf: An Educational App Directory for Teachers
I haven't done a good job of covering the startups that emerged from the ImagineK12 incubator program. Here's the beginning of my attempt to rectify that. This is a look at edshelf, a directory for educational websites and apps. [...]
The Week in Ed-Tech News: RIP Maurice Sendak
In this week's ed-tech news, beloved children's author Maurice Sendack passes away, UMass students protest Pearson, and ProPublica uncovers the FCC's failure to enforce E-rate's cost-saving measures, all 7 Harry Potter novels come to the Kindle Lending Library, and Google Hangouts on Air come to everyone's G+ accounts. [...]
Why Is Mathalicious Raising Money on Kickstarter?
As I've written about before, I'm a big fan of crowdfunding via Kickstarter. I think there are lots of opportunities to fund interesting and important projects. But as I think about Mathalicious' Kickstarter campaign, I have lots of questions: where's the VC investment in this sort of project? where's the public interest? The Pebble Watch can raise $10 million. But a great project for helping teachers rethink how they teach math doesn't "go viral" the same way. [...]
Author
Audrey Watters is a technology journalist, freelance writer, ed-tech advocate, recovering academic, rabble-rouser, and single mom.
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