EdSurge Podcast

Burned out, tired, demoralized, at a breaking point. Spend time with educators these days in K-12 or higher ed and phrases such as these will come up often. For those in classrooms and for school leaders, the challenge is how to meet the many needs of educators during this time—social, emotional, intellectual and ethical.

What happens when a venture capitalist who funds edtech companies faces off with an edtech critic about what role AI should play in education? We found out, in this discussion between professor Neil Selwyn and venture-fund founder Ryan Craig.

The Rhodes Scholarship was designed to forge a network of people who would go on to rule the world. So who gets this opportunity? And how is the oldest and best-known graduate scholarship dealing with the legacy of its founder, who used ruthless and racist practices to build the diamond empire that funded the effort?

Philosopher and historian of technology Justin E. H. Smith has been diving into the past to see where our dreams about the internet have come from. And he has a warning for what he thinks is going wrong in how things have evolved in recent years — and what tech might be doing to us as learners and thinkers. Understanding that past, he argues, can help make a course correction.

Even though the metaverse is not really here yet, some educators are already trying to get ahead of the curve to help influence what kinds of education products and services emerge in this new, more-immersive internet.

There are universities aiming to do top-notch research and serve large numbers of students of color and low-income students. This goal—what some campus leaders call ‘inclusive excellence’—challenges common assumptions about prestige in education. And according to the authors of the book “Broke,” it’s hard to accomplish in a time of reduced state support for public colleges.

Clay Shirky has long been an influential voice on how technology is impacting society. These days the NYU professor has been weighing in on where higher ed is headed, with a newsletter called "The (Continual) Transformation of Higher Education."

A group of researchers at Harvard have a unique window into student well-being during the pandemic, following a group of a couple thousand families with young children in Massachusetts. They're seeing more behavior issues in kids during remote learning, and they have advice for educators on how to manage shifts back and forth between online and in-person teaching.

A polio outbreak in 1937 may have been the first time tech made emergency remote learning possible. There was no Internet, of course, so schools used the big medium of the day: radio. But did that leave any lasting impact on schooling? That's one question explored by education historian Larry Cuban in his new book, Confessions of a School Reformer.

An evolutionary biologist who studies the physiology of aging has some surprising advice about brain health. And it has implications for schools and colleges—and anyone interested in learning.