Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) has released her annual Internet Trends presentation, which has taken on a life of its own. Her data is very useful to see macro trends and the significance of Internet-related technology. Even in the non-education sections, the presentation should be very useful to education. One interesting perspective […]
Why Unizin is a Threat to edX
In the week since we published our Unizin exposé, there has been nary a peep from the group to us, or apparently to the traditional news outlets either. When we ran the piece, we emailed Indiana University CIO Brad Wheeler to request comment or corrections. We have not heard back from him yet. Brad, if […]
DOE Doubles Down on State Authorization: 25x increase in regulatory language
Now that the Kabuki Theatre of the Department of Education’s negotiated rulemaking process has finished its penultimate act, can we all act surprised that the likely result includes the proposed State Authorization regulations growing by a factor of 25 with no comments allowed by one of the groups most affected? The gist of State Authorization is […]
Some Real Reasons the “Two-speed Internet” Hurts Higher Education (Hint: impact on the “Next Facebook” is not one of them)
The debate around net neutrality so far has been almost as depressing as the set of judicial and administrative decisions that got us here. Central to the debate has been the obsession about how the two-speed internet will “stop the next Facebook/Google/Netflix” from being able to innovate. Save the Internet does a bit better than […]
The IMS Is More Important Than You Think It Is
I have long argued that the development of technical interoperability standards for education are absolutely critical for enabling innovation and personalized learning environments. Note that I usually avoid those sorts of buzzwords—“innovation” and “personalized learning”—so when I use them here, I really mean them. If there are two fundamental lessons we have learned in the […]
Unizin: Indiana University’s Secret New “Learning Ecosystem” Coalition
Indiana University has been the driving force behind the creation of a new organization to develop a “learning ecosystem”. At least ten schools are being quietly asked to contribute $1 million each over a three-year period to join the consortium. The details of what that $1 million buys are unclear at this point. The centerpiece for the […]
Policy Updates on FERPA and Net Neutrality
Two policy debates that could have a significant impact on education – updates on FERPA and data privacy & FCC proposals on Net Neutrality – both entered the next stage this week. FERPA Modernization I recently wrote about the new federal moves to update FERPA to handle the age of Big Data (should I have used […]