passion-based

Skills learned today are apt to be out-of-date all too soon. The concept of life-long learning – a term used all too glibly – is now more important than ever.

In the 20th century, the approach to education was to focus on ‘learning-about’ and to build stocks of knowledge and some cognitive skills in the student to be deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education worked well in a relatively stable, slowly changing world where students could expect to learn one set of skills and use them throughout their lives.

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For those who are too shy to speak out, find speaking in English challenging, or who are more contemplative, the classroom blog can serve as a way to participate in a class discussion.

enhances a sense of intimacy

For today’s students, who are used to multiple windows being opened on their desktops and multiple things happening simultaneously, this space seems second nature.

The fact that all can see the collage does provide a bit of a social constraint on what gets surfed

Nothing need be said

that although this technology is beautifully simple, its potential is realized only when it is coupled to new teaching practices.

an asset

At this moment you could stare the student down, you could ignore him, or you could turn this moment into a critical, Socratic learning event.

Halmos was doing mathematical research; he was exhibiting the practices of being a mathematician.

To fully utilize a new teaching technology you often need to invent new teaching practices as well. And to do that you need to have the desire, freedom and time to experiment with and refine these new practices.

Maybe new teaching practices tuned to this new kind of learning environment were needed.

Also consider how students in studios start to pick up skills from each other,

students in either India or China you can’t help but be impressed with their passion to learn and the energy they bring to this pursuit.

our students will need to feel comfortable working in cross disciplinary teams that encompass multiple ways of knowing.

it is critical that we shift our focus from education to life-long learning.

possible that com-panies would have an even greater incentive to innovate ifthey could not rely on a near twenty-year monopoly.

10 — Against Intellectual PropertyCCooppyyrriigghhtt

This is good internet citizenship. Articles on the web that repurpose other information or artifacts should state their sources, and, if appropriate, link to them. This matters to creators, because they deserve credit for their work. But it also matters to readers who need to check the credibility of the original sources.

Each footnote leads to a source that the community has deemed reliable.

Our normal inclination is to ignore verification needs when we react strongly to content, and researchers have found that content that causes strong emotions (both positive and negative) spreads the fastest through our social networks

In other words, this guide will help you become “web literate” by showing you the unique opportunities and pitfalls of searching for truth on the web. Crazy, right?

As many people have noted, the web is both the largest propaganda machine ever created and the most amazing fact-checking tool ever invented.

The barrier to everyone having a copy of the album no longer has anything to do with distribution costs or fidelity and everything to do with copyright

This definition, of course, will be provisional, revisable and temporary as it relies upon contexts remaining the same — which they seldom do for long! !The advantage of an emergent approach to digital literacies is that stakeholders don’t see the process as being done to them. They feel part of it, as if digital literacies are something inclusive, something they have control over, and something continually changing. Which, of course, is absolutely correct.

If educational institutions are to prepare young people for the wider world, they need to be showing them how to navigate across various digital contexts and cultures.

We saw earlier in this chapter that literacy is already a problematic term. Therefore, adding a modifier (e.g. digital literacy) not only adds another layer of ambiguity, but raises the question of the relationship between the two words.

As new tools for communication have been introduced — for example, email, social networking, video-sharing sites — so new forms of literacy are needed to understand them.

Literacy, however, also depends upon a different kind of knowledge. There has to be both something that is being communicated through the writing as well as an ability to use tools to do that communicating. I shall call this content-knowledge.

Literacy is a characteristic acquired by individuals in varying degrees from just above none to an indeterminate upper level. Some individuals are more or less literate than others but it is really not possible to speak of illiterate and literate persons as two distinct categories.”

Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing.

It means opening dialogue about why we write in public, to what end, and for whose benefit.

We also need to recognize the risks of blogging/tweeting, which include opening avenues for abuse.

what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities?

Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom.

Digital literacies are not solely about technical proficiency but about the issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose. —Doug Belshaw, educational researcher

Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others. It allows them to demonstrate their learning to others beyond the classroom walls.

This can be a way to track growth and demonstrate new learning over the course of a student’s school career — something that they themselves can reflect upon, not simply grades and assignments that are locked away in a proprietary system controlled by the school.

These portfolios can contain text, images, video and audio recordings, giving students opportunities to express themselves in a variety of ways beyond the traditional pen-and-paper test or essay. One student uses her domain to showcase her artwork. Another chronicled her semester abroad

Today, UMW and a growing number of other schools believe that students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online. Students have little agency when it comes to education technology — much like they have little agency in education itself.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures.

Without such fluency, students cannot compete economically or intellectually, and the astonishing promise of the digital medium will never be fully realized.

Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.

In building that personal cyberinfrastructure, students not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking

Here's one idea. Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution's web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services, with built-in affordances ranging from database maintenance to web analytics.