Ben Werdmuller

Tag: learning

  • Mission: Explore puts the fun back into checking in

    For the past few years, my friend Helen Steer has been working with the Geography Collective on Mission: Explore, a new way to promote exploration and curiosity: Mission:Explore is a game, but not as you know it. There are two aims to the game. One is to collect points and unlock rewards. The other is […]

  • “What it means to be a school is now up for grabs.”

    Education, for me, is still the most exciting field that open source is opening up. It’s a vital part of any civilized society, and so it seems right that the software that helps participants teach and learn should be open. I have no qualms about charging private institutions like Stanford, say, the six figure license […]

  • The crusade against college

    Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz in tech circles about college being a waste of time. It started with investor Peter Thiel’s creation of the Thiel Fellowship, which awards potential students technology & entrepreneurship mentorship and $100,000 of incubation money to work on their own projects. In an interview with the National Review, he […]

  • Learning on the social web

    ScienceBlog reports that on Saturday, Carl Whithaus will announce the preliminary results from a California Department of Education study into increasing academic achievement using computers in 4th grade classrooms (emphasis mine): During the first year of the two-year study, student achievement increased 27.5 percent, according to Whithaus, who is principal investigator of a study to […]