Category Online learning

Will the iPad help college students learn?

Will the iPad help college students learn? That’s the question many colleges will be trying to answer this year as they pilot its use on their campuses. Oklahoma State, Duke, and Northwest Kansas Technical College are among many schools carrying out tests. In fact, Northwest Kansas is giving iPads to the entire undergraduate population of [...]

The danger in oversimplifying new technologies

At a time when new technologies are emerging at an eye-popping rate (the iPad and the Phone 4.0 to name two), it can be hard to understand and keep track of the relevance, and value they deliver.  And that also means being able to look beyond the headlines, to examine more closely the substance, and [...]

Student-driven education

With the many exciting developments in education reform, education technology, and venture investing during the past year, we are indeed on track for what Tom Vander Ark calls the Decade of the Edupreneur. We’re now in a world where the levers of business are used to solve the big, meaty problems facing education. Where a [...]

Reconciling the academic and working worlds

A recent story from Network World entitled, “Why Computer science students cheat.” Has itself become a story as it generated a firestorm of commentary in the educational blogosphere. The original story talked about how first-year computer science students are the most likely students to be caught cheating. The growing popularity and size of introductory computer-science [...]

Getting smarter, faster, as a species – by Anya Kamenetz

Ed. note:  We’re thrilled to provide a guest post by Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U. Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. One of the biggest blocks to understanding how education might look in the future is an invisible assumption that learning has to be boring [...]

Consumer-driven technology adoption

The technologies companies and institutions rely on to get work done and make their employees productive become “mainstreamed” by consumers, at home, with their friends, in social circumstances.  And adoption by corporations substantially lags these consumers. This is a pretty incredible reversal that’s occurred over the past decade or so.  Almost un-noticed by most of [...]

Education on the verge of its own reformation

As we have written here before, change is scary.  It provokes a desire to hold on to the here and now, the stable and secure.  The problem with big significant change is that there’s just is no stable and secure to hold on to. It’s like trying to hold back the tide.  Just look at [...]

The importance, and difficulty, of practice

You may have seen an interesting article in the New York Times last Saturday about the essential role of determination and discipline in acquiring talent. There’s been a lot written over the last few years about how talent is neither innate nor immutable; we can develop it through determination, grit, and practice. Author Malcom Gladwell, who [...]

Stress relief

College students are more stressed than ever. They have academic stress as they work to absorb large amounts of material in short amounts of time to compete for the best grades and the best jobs and graduate schools after graduation. Exacerbating this academic stress is the increasing cost of college and the debt most students [...]

Teamwork and the Education Revolution

It’s an amazing moment for every parent when a child begins to shoulder some of the work load. Getting a driver’s license is a big deal. Having them take a sibling to soccer practice is even bigger. The key factor is getting to the point where kids help kids. Anyone interested in revolutionizing education would [...]