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....

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....

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....