Research

As part of my work as an education writer, I have researched a number of topics in-depth. Below, you'll find links to various projects, past and present.

Current Projects

Teaching Machines: My forthcoming book on the cultural history of ed-tech and the long-running drive to automate teaching and learning.

The History of Ed-Tech Companies: Timelines describing how the largest ed-tech companies and organizations came to dominate education policy

Past Projects

Ed-Tech Trends: An annual review of the 10 most significant "trends" in education technology (or rather, a review of the stories that people tell in the hopes products and services and ideas become trends).

Ed-Tech Funding: An open data initiative to track education technology companies that receive angel and venture capital investment from 2010 to 2018.

The Ed-Tech Industry Network: An analysis of some of the investor and entrepreneur networks that have emerged from companies like Blackboard and Kaplan. (This research was funded, in part, through a Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship.)

The Blockchain: What is the blockchain? And how might it be utilized in education technology? (Or rather, please, let's not.)

The Week in Robots: A weekly summary of news about robots and artificial intelligence.

Horizon Report Data Liberation: Freeing the annual Horizon Report data from PDFs.

Ed-Tech and Science Fiction: A list of novels, short stories, television, and films that explore the future of education.

Technology Predictions: Who's making predictions about the future? (And can or will these predictions ever come true?)

The Monsters of Education Technology 4: A collection of my lectures and keynotes from 2017.

The Curse of the Monsters of Education Technology: A collection of my lectures and keynotes from 2016.

The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology: A collection of my lectures and keynotes from 2015.

The Monsters of Education Technology: A collection of my lectures and keynotes from 2014.

Ed-Tech Guide: What should educators and technologists know about ed-tech?

Adopt-A: A Knight Foundation-funded project to "adopt" a federal agency data-set and clean it up.

OER in K-12: A review of the availability and usage of open educational researches, along with an investigation into some of the barriers to adoption.

Learning to Code: What resources are available for learning to program? What works, what doesn't work, and why? (And for whom?)

Image credits: Bryan Mathers, Noun Project. Updated June 2019