[best] Hacking Education

Like every month, I'm sharing what I found the most intriguing blog post in my reader list for the past 30 days. The 'best' for April does not come from one of the many learning blogs I'm subscribed to, but a blog by Microsoft's Scott Guthrie on .net technologies that I started following when I started programming my quiz site.

Hacking Education : a contest for developers and data crunchers.

Ever since I took the MOOC course on learning analytics, my appreciation for open data and institutions that put data in the cloud for research purposes. The blog above lists such an initiative from the donorschoose.org foundation. They have opened up their dataset of charity projects for education. Not only that, they are also launching a contest to see what data crunchers around the world can find out based on these facts. This must be a wet dream for learning analytics folks, and by making it my 'best' of the month I hope the word will spread in learning land.

From their site:

Ten years ago, a teacher in the Bronx launched DonorsChoose.org. Since then, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom project requests, inspiring $80,000,000 in giving from 400,000 donors who performed over a million search queries and made more than a million donations.
We've opened up that data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking.

The contest runs until June 30th. Great initiative!