It is a story that has been taught to generations of British schoolchildren about one of the most famous and pivotal events in the country’s history.

In September 1066, as a Norman duke called William prepared to sail from France to claim the English throne, King Harold of England discovered the Viking leader Harald Hardrada had landed in Yorkshire with an army of his own.

Unfortunately, according to historians, the English king had disbanded his naval fleet weeks before, and so he was forced to march his army almost 300 miles (about 480km) north to Stamford Bridge, near York, confront – and defeat – the Vikings, and then somehow march the troops all the way back to the south coast. Exhausted by this almost superhuman trudge, the English forces were then defeated by William on 14 October, in what would become known as the Battle of Hastings.

But what if historians have got one of the most crucial assumptions about one of England’s most pivotal battles completely wrong?

This is the 13th installment of The TechEd Revolution.

For generations, the syllabus has served as a map. It outlined where a course would go, what texts would guide the journey and what milestones marked progress. Over time it became more than a roadmap; it became a contract. Policies expanded, expectations grew and the document reflected not only pedagogy but institutional structure.

But what does this artifact actually look like from the learner’s perspective? And what new possibilities emerge for the syllabus in the age of generative AI?

The closest we ever came to abolishing the electoral college and why we probably never will.

Rural Renaissance appears to have been put out to pasture for a second consecutive session.

House Speaker Daniel Perez told reporters Wednesday that the House won’t consider in the last eight days of the 2026 regular session any legislation that has not already been heard by at least one House committee.

“A bill that hasn’t that hasn’t moved in the House is not going to be brought up at this time,” Perez told reporters Wednesday. 

That means Rural Renaissance, a top priority for Senate President Sen. Ben Albritton, most likely won’t make it across the finish line.

Still, the proposed $144.8 million appropriation for Rural Renaissance, directed toward roads, education, housing, and health care, remains in play because the chambers still must craft a budget for state fiscal year 2026-27. 

For decades, élite research universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Brown have relied on federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and other sources. Now, under President Donald Trump, their survival may depend on compliance with the government.

or Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences. The federal government terminated eight hundred million dollars in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Hopkins had been administering; this led the university to lay off more than two thousand employees. The slowdown and termination of scientific-research grants at Hopkins resulted in an additional financial hit of five hundred million dollars last year.

At Brown, administrators learned that their grant funding was ending from an April 3rd article in the Daily Caller, the conservative paper co-founded by Tucker Carlson. “EXCLUSIVE,” the headline read. “Trump Admin Freezes Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Another Ivy League School.” Later that day, the government stopped payment on all of its research grants to Brown, amounting to five hundred and ten million dollars. Princeton got its notification on March 31st: more than two hundred million dollars in research grants had been suspended. The Trump Administration was simultaneously sending a series of letters to almost every college and university in the country, beginning on February 14th. The first one ordered all schools to end their D.E.I. programs. “It said you can’t discriminate,” the president of Vassar, Elizabeth H. Bradley, told me. “We don’t. We didn’t use the term ‘D.E.I.’ ” Last spring, Bradley recalled, a new letter from the Trump Administration seemed to arrive roughly once a week, warning its thousands of recipients to stop doing something the Administration considered impermissible.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree of shock moves like these caused in American élite higher education. One could ask: How did universities not see the assault coming?

On America’s 250th anniversary, Ms.' Founding Feminists centers the women whose words, labor and resistance built—and keep rebuilding—democracy.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a new nation came into being. Amid the hard-fought war for independence against the British Crown, certain leading men residing in its 13 colonies came together to sign off on a document proclaiming, “All men are created equal.”  

The document would be called the Declaration of Independence—authored by Thomas Jefferson and signed by 56 men now recognized as the nation’s founding fathers, immortalized in John Trumbull’s painting that hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. 

One of the signees—John Adams (who would later serve as the nation’s vice president before succeeding George Washington, the first president of the United States)—had received admonition from his wife Abigail Adams to “remember the ladies” in their declarations for freedom and equality; however, one woman at least ensured that her name would be included on the document: Mary Katherine Goddard from Baltimore, the first woman postmaster in the colonies, printed the official documents and added her name at the bottom in typeset.  

Trump doesn’t want to send Republicans to the polls as the debt collector-in-chief. But right-wing state attorneys general and courts drunk on their own power may force the issue.

Today’s episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Brewster Kahle, Founder & Director, Internet Archive.

Brewster says that back in the 1980’s he believed that everything would eventually become digital. He dreamed of building a Library of Alexandria where humanity’s knowledge would be freely accessible. In this conversation, he talks with Michael about his work building early search technologies at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

In 1983, he helped create Thinking Machine Corporation, a pioneering supercomputer manufacturer.   In 1996, he founded Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis and ranking company that was eventually acquired by Amazon. He then launched The Internet Archive, which now contains over a trillion archived web pages and works with thousands of libraries around the world to preserve digital content.

Brewster says he believes the internet should be a global, open library that supports learning and that compensates content creators fairly. He also talks about some lawsuits against publishers, controlled digital lending and the importance of open access for the future.

The video of this interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/mJ-R9j7Oc4s

Social Media:

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mupshall/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brewster-kahle-2a647652/

Happy Pi Day! March 14 is the date that otherwise rational people celebrate this irrational number, because 3/14 contains the first three digits of pi. And hey, pi deserves a day. By definition, it’s the ratio of the circumference and diameter of a circle, but it shows up in all kinds of places that seem to have nothing to do with circles, from music to quantum mechanics.

Pi is an infinitely long decimal number that never repeats. How do we know? Well, humans have calculated it to 314 trillion decimal places and didn’t reach the end. At that point, I’m inclined to accept it. I mean, NASA uses only the first 15 decimal places for navigating spacecraft, and that’s more than enough for earthly applications.

What if ancient cave paintings weren’t just artistic expressions, but actually records of creatures that roamed the Earth long before humans?

A mysterious rock painting in South Africa’s cave could be the first-ever artwork of an animal that disappeared 250 million years ago. The San people’s “Horned Serpent Panel” features a strange creature with tusks and a long body, even though this animal never lived anywhere near there. The discovery has scientists asking if ancient rock art could actually record prehistoric creatures long before scientists did.

Painted between 1821 and 1835, the panel includes common animals found in the area. But one creature stands out, looking very different from the others. For years, scientists were puzzled by its appearance. Now, researchers suggest that the San people may have drawn inspiration from the fossilized remains of an extinct species, the dicynodont, which roamed the Earth millions of years ago.

In this Confidently Wrong podcast, a NYC public schools veteran shares his family's move to Sayulita, where he now leads a bilingual school.

As we continue to bring you diverse perspectives and experiences on raising and educating kids in Mexico, today’s podcast episode follows the journey of Rob Whiteman from New York City to Sayulita, Mexico.

Rob worked in the city’s massive public school system for years and was looking for a change in life for himself, his wife and their children. And change he made — moving from the largest city in the United States to a tiny beach community of less than 5,000 residents. As you can imagine, it was a massive change, in living, in work and in schooling for his young children.

Should parents have a right to monitor and control which sites and apps their kids use? Today, parents do have that legal right under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The 1998 law requires verifiable parental consent before websites or apps can collect, use or share personal information from teens 13 or under. In practice, that means parents must consent for all social media apps. 

The original version of COPPA would have required parental notification whenever teens (ages 14-17) sign up for websites; parents would have had the right to access personal information shared with such sites. Those provisions were dropped after free speech advocates warned that these provisions could “chill protected First Amendment activities and undermine rather than enhance teenagers privacy,” especially when “teenagers may be divulging or seeking information they don’t want their parents to know about.” Thus, the Center for Democracy & Technology warned, while “parents have an important role in protecting their teenager’s privacy, however the bill’s emphasis on parental access may overlook older minors’ interests.”

In her day, she was considered a style icon, spendthrift, deviant, monster, and hapless victim. And why are we still talking about her and dissecting her lifestyle, look, and acquisitions over 200 years later?

You'll find the answer in the South Kensington V&A galleries with portraits, clothes, artifacts, and haute couture fashion in Marie Antoinette Style, on view in London through March 22, 2026.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has pulled incredibly well-preserved fashions from its own 18th-century collection, and has also borrowed from Versailles and European collections that scooped up Marie’s stuff when it was ransacked and put on the open market after her death during the French Revolution – jewels, furniture, Sèvres table settings, and remnants of her dress fabric.