Happy New Year!

Folks are still publishing their reflections on 2014. I’ve wrapped up my mammoth series on the Top Ed-Tech Trends as well as made my pick for the Top Ed-Tech Startups of the year. Melanie Fullick wrote about some of the major higher ed stories of 2014. Rebecca Solnit looked at the year in feminism. FiveThirtyEight asserts that “There Are Way Too Many ‘Best Of 2014′ Lists,” but then I see what Facebook offered everyone in way of a reflection on the year – “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” – and I gotta hope we keep writing these reviews and not handing more over to algorithms.

What will education hold in 2015? You can read thoughts from Chris Newfield as well as predictions from various education folks. I’d wager we’ll see more testing (which I’m skeptical will be better testing), more ratings, more algorithms, more blurring of MOOCs and online education, more sports scandals. And as Nicholas Carr argues, “The singularity is always near.” So that’s something to not look forward to (and not really worry about).

Lots of folks went to the movies over the holidays. (“A Poor Imitation of Alan Turing,” by Christian Caryl.) Lots of folks curled up with books. A motley crew participated in the #FedWikiHappening and (I’m biased I realize) pushed the concept of the federated wiki in education forward quite substantially. A sample of blogging about the “happening”: Alan Levine (1, 2), Catherine Cronin, Jon Udell (1, 2, 3), Maha Bali, Mike Caulfield, and others who I’ve missed.

See? There can be innovation in ed-tech.

But we must ask what we want from education and what we want from learning. A great back-and-forth among Dave Cormier and Stephen Downes and Dave again and Michael Feldstein:

The core problem with our education system isn’t the technology or even the companies. It’s how we deform teaching and learning in the name of accountability in education. Corporate interests amplify this problem greatly because they sell to it, thus reinforcing it. But they are not where the problem begins. It begins when we say, “Yes, of course we want the students to love to learn, but we need to cover the material.” Or when we say, “It’s great that kids want to go to school every day, but really, how do we know that they’re learning anything?” It’s daunting to think about trying to change this deep cultural attitude.

Yours in struggle, ~Audrey