department of education

Late on Christmas Eve, the City of Newark released dozens of emails (as PDFs) relating to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to its schools back in the fall of 2010.

Number 9 in my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2011 Series
When I made my 10 tech predictions for 2011 for RWW last year, I included the following:
6. Openly-licensed content – open education resources, open source, open data – will thrive, as more people question outmoded intellectual property laws. Nonetheless, there’ll still be patent and copyright infringement lawsuits aplenty.

When President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech in January 2011, he spoke of the importance of science and technology research and education to the U.S. — past, present, and future:

Legalities
The lawyers at Georgia Tech ruined pedagogy (to paraphrase a tweet by my friend Jason B. Jones). With no debate or forewarning, the university crippled the university’s wikis, claiming that they violated FERPA.

Politics and Policies
Idaho will become the first state to mandate that all high school students take at least 2 credits online in order to graduate. The move has been very controversial, with the Idaho Education Association blasting the Board of Education’s decision.

I’d like to think that folks would be up in arms if suddenly the government website War.gov fell under the control of Halliburton, or if Drill.gov was run by BP. Those are pretty drastic examples, I realize (and non-existent websites to,o I confess). But I’m still shocked to see the news today that the Department of Education has handed over Teach.gov to Microsoft.