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The birth and near-death of one piece of educational software

The Hechinger Report

February 2009: Bellevue, Washington. When Ben Slivka decided to create his own interactive learning software in 2006, the online options for students, parents, and teachers were pretty bleak. What made more sense to them was duplicating their textbooks on CDs or placing them online, thus making them digital cash cows.

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Education Technology and the Power of Platforms

Hack Education

I’d love to provide a link but Andreessen deleted his blog in 2009. Pearson promises “personalization” through its “adaptive learning” products, for example. (It “Ohio State collaborates with Apple to launch digital learning initiative,” the university announced in October.

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The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade

Hack Education

In 2011, the Mozilla Foundation unveiled its “Open Badges Project,” “an effort to make it easy to issue and share digital learning badges across the web.” In 2009, Techcrunch named the laptop one of the biggest flops of that decade.) US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called badges a “game-changing strategy.”.

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