Hacking Education Topics


Topics of Discussion

Please add, edit, comment freely.  We will use this input to help guide the discussion.

Goals and role of education?
- Is there a difference between learning and education
- How is this changing as the economy is changing?
- What are we training people for?  How is it different than what we've done in the past.
- Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind"

Learning how to learn
- Has the web changed the way people learn, should we expect it to?
- Is web literacy a prerequisite to be a successful student (today? in five years?)

How do we measure success?
- Alternatives to standardized testing
- Who controls accreditation?
- Should content + interaction + assessment be disaggregated? 

Access
- Do we need OLPC for US?
- Should we subsidize connectivity?

Sources of Motivation
- Intrinsic
- Fun (learn through games)
- Explicit rewards (pay for grades)

Role of Schools and Teachers
- The challenge of a high rate of change for teachers
- Barriers to integrating technology in the classroom
- Students more "web literate" than many teachers?
- What about success of school-based models (e.g. KIPP)? And is a more costly approach scale-able? Is it for everyone?

Content generation
- Open sourcing
- Peer production
- Collaboration around content
- Should we subsidize content capture? (Content as Infrastructure)

Business models
- Free / not-for-profit
- Direct to student
- Via existing institutions
- New distribution channels / platforms? (eg. Valve for educational software)

Promising technologies and how to deploy them
- Adaptive learning
- Casual games
- Immersive games / virtual worlds
- Simulations
- Authoring environments (and new means of expression)

Is Facebook a credible platform for learning?
- Does it teach web literacy skills?
- Can it teach other skills and/or knowledge?
- Can it serve as a foundation for other learning experiences (virtual worlds, gaming)
- How do we tackle moderation and privacy in the education context

Models of learning
- Role of repetition
- Memorization versus lookup
- Construction/manipulation
- Critical reasoning
- Exploration and Experimentation

"Open Education" Movement
-  Cape Town Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/)
-  Successes and Failures of 'open source' curriculum in K-12 and Higher Ed
-  Social Networking Models for teachers, students, and parents
-  State of K-12 Knowledge Management Systems
-  OER as Reuse vs. OER as Transparency 

Innovative funding opportunities for edu ventures
- A YCombinator-esque fund for edu startups
- Using NCLB funding for innovation rather than to maintain status quo
- Opportunity for start-ups to leverage flexible education spending accounts for retraining (http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/)

Scaling education initiatives into the developing world
- Microfinance for education
- Lessons learned from things like Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html)

Human Capital in U.S. Education
- How do we recruit and sustain talent
- How do we deal with the current realities
- Mike Petrilli's thesis: we need to create extraordinary schools with ordinary teachers
 
Democratizing Education
- How can affordable higher education function as a stimulus package for the global economy?
- How have eLearning and educational technology changed traditional concepts of education?  Where are the biggest opportunities?
- What are the advantages of peer-to-peer learning? How does this pedagogical model impact retention rates?



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