Education

Technology and education is a funny topic. On the one hand technological innovation in education holds out the promise of helping students learn better and teachers teach better. Improving the productivity of teachers in particular I think is key to addressing long-term educational budget issues in Howard County and elsewhere. On the other hand, there’s probably been more hype, blather, and outright b******t associated with technology in education than most other subjects. Every new technological innovation with some sort of educational application, from television to social networks, gets hailed as the one true path to revolutionizing education. (For example, I just got the latest issue of Wired magazine, in which a Stanford professor claims that Internet-enabled online learning will lead to there being only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education–all the rest having succumbed to the gale force winds of creative destruction.) ...

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

I’m currently working on putting together a draft plan for Mozilla Education activities in 2010. I’m a bit blocked on coming up with a coherent plan, so I thought I’d try to unblock myself by blogging my thoughts on the subject. These are informed by the recent feedback on Mozilla Education I solicited from several Mozilla folks, as well as the Mozilla Education 2009 report I wrote earlier. Note that I’m thinking out loud here, so this will be somewhat long and rambling. ...

We received a lot of submissions for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge just prior to last night’s deadline. In order to accomodate last-minute entries, we’ve decided to further extend the deadline through midnight (US Pacific time) tonight, Tuesday, December 1. There will be no further extensions. We’ve received a lot of good submissions thus far, and the Jetpack for Learning team is hard at work preparing for the next phase of the challenge. ...

Do you have a great idea for a Jetpack or Firefox extension to help support learning online? Would you like a chance to attend an intensive Jetpack design camp in Austin TX and stay over to attend SXSW Interactive? Then you have less than a week left to send in your submission for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. To give you a little more time to prepare your submission, we’re extending the deadline for submissions to midnight (Pacific time) on Monday, November 30. If you’re in the US please relax and enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner before you send in your submission, and no matter where you live feel free to take time this weekend to polish it. ...