hacking education

ASCD’s counter argument: We prefer thoughtful discussion of solutions that help create good teachers.

I prefer results for our students, and getting rid of the massive amounts of dead weight in the teaching profession (as harbored by unions and tenure) will drive student performance much faster than will trying to raise the performance of the current teaching base. I am calling bull on ASCD… what is good for our teachers is not what I care about. I care about what is good for our students. And as long as America puts teachers before students, we will continue to see a decline in American educational performance.

Side note: something I discovered just today, U.S. teachers on average come from the bottom third of their academic class http://bit.ly/dfH4gR.

American students deserve better than what we are giving them. Cut the fat. Everyone but the fat should be able to agree with that.

http://ipt286.pbworks.com/Index

"When is the last time you took your students down to the pencil lab? Why do we treat technology that way? It needs to be so ubiquitous that we stop talking about it."

Via Ippio discovered by @cervus

Recent video from the thought leader on edu openness:

Via OpenContent

Via ReadWriteWeb

Vittana is the Kiva for EDU loans. It has caught the eye of TechCrunch and the Huffington Post among others.

I have been cheering on the evolution of P2P edu loans for a while now. Fynanz and GreenNote being the most prominent attempts up to now though both have had serious snags (GreenNote largely failed and was acquired as a fire sale and Fynanz had to pause all activity on the site while it right-sided itself).

Vittana, similar to Kiva’s start, is focusing on international students, where smaller dollar amounts can be leveraged to pay for full educations. I think it is a smart move and will resonate well with people. All indicators thus far are that it has, as Vittana has “sold out” most of its loans.

I believe this is a great idea and I love platforms that enable micro funding. I like many of you, cannot afford to finance a stranger’s education out of pocket, but I am glad for the chance to be able to finance $25 of it knowing hundreds of other people are doing the same thing.  I wish Chezra the best of luck and would challenge anyone else who believes in this kind of thing to get your credit card out, take the 5 minutes, and make a loan.

“Text books are really the low-hanging fruit. They’re $1,000 a year, they’re made of paper and they’re heavy. They’re the last bastion of a high-profit center in the traditional publishing industry. But e-books have so many advantages over the traditional text book. They’re editable and customizable. When I was in college eight years ago it was all about the course packet which is this ghetto, cut-and-pasted, xeroxed  thing that your teacher put together. It’s much easier to do in a wiki or a blog. A lot of people get excited with a new gadget that’s supposed to save education but it doesn’t connect to the fact that there is this broken model. If you layer new technology on top of the broken model, you’re not going to actually fix anything.” - Anya Kamenetz

Via CMTY

“Supercool founder Steli Efti [said] he’s trying to create is the Ning of Education, allowing anyone to build their own educational site.

“We provide a white label platform that allows everyone to create and customize an online school,” he said in an email. “The platform allows for social learning and real-time virtual classrooms and can be turned into a business by monetizing content and courses online.”

“Efti’s business model is to take a 20 percent cut of online course sales, as well as selling subscriptions for premium features. He estimates the opportunity at $400 per month per school.”

Via VentureBeat