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The photo and caption above illustrate the “Lan House Revolution” taking place right now in Brazil.

The concept of the LAN arrived in Brazil in 1998 but it had been previously observed only in the rich Brazilian neighborhoods.

Over the past decade, higher education has invested millions of dollars in classroom technology. The addition of document cameras, DVD players, Internet access, and projectors (to name a few) has added new functionality to the classroom. It is now possible to bring much more diverse materials to the classroom, to present them in a variety of ways, and to devise new classroom activities for students. As a result, the concept of the classroom has expanded to include this set of new functions.

More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling "coursecasting." The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language. And some advocates say that coursecasting can be more than just a review tool, that it can also enliven classroom interaction and help lecturers critique themselves.

One of the things you do by podcasting is participate in student culture," Mr. Jackson says

Make students listen to a podcast before class, and they will show up ready to converse.

With the use of quality networking tools, we can as a professional expand our learning and conversation and bring a true sense of understanding to the communities in which we work.  I would even guess that if used properly, we could drag the “parking lot conversations” that are currently happenning online into the staff room and even the administrators office where they could be productively dealt with in effective and productive ways.

IMAGINE a faculty meeting where a ning site was set up to allow for followup questions and online conversation. 

People are more apt to give you accurate and honest feedback immediately following a meeting instead of days and weeks afterward. 

More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork, repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles.

we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).

Teachers do NOT provide digital access to notes and materials, and students are quizzed regularly about the content on which they have taken textual notes to see if this traditional “broadcast/spray model” of learning has been effective. (Or at least if the items included in the quiz have temporarily been stored in short term memory.) We MUST move beyond this traditional “banking model” of education, and I’m convinced the impetus for these changes is NOT coming and is not GOING to come from “inside the system” of traditional education.

People were invited to come by and sample the high-quality factual information on offer – and were encouraged to leave their own offerings. The high-quality facts encouraged visitors; some visitors would leave their own contributions, high-quality facts which would encourage more visitors, and so, in a “virtuous cycle”, Wikipedia grew as large as, then far larger than Encyclopedia Britannica.

It wasn’t the server crash that doomed Britannica; when the business minds at Britannica tried to crash through into profitability, that’s when they crashed into the paywall they themselves established.

Just a few weeks ago, the European Union launched a new website, Europeana. Europeana is a repository, a collection of cultural heritage of Europe, made freely available to everyone in the world via the Web. From Descartes to Darwin to Debussy, Europeana hopes to become the online cultural showcase of European thought.

There must be a point to the exercise, some reason that makes all the technology worthwhile. That search for a point – a search we are still mostly engaged in – will determine whether these computers are meaningful to the educational process, or if they are an impediment to learning.

What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.

A student about to attend university in the United States can check out all of her potential instructors before she signs up for a single class. She can choose to take classes only with those instructors who have received the best ratings – or, rather more perversely, only with those instructors known to be easy graders. The student is now wholly in control of her educational opportunities, going in eyes wide open, fully cognizant of what to expect before the first day of class.

Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious. Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam. RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

In many fields the life of knowledge is now measured in months and years.

The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.

All of these learning theories hold the notion that knowledge is an objective (or a state) that is attainable (if not already innate) through either reasoning or experiences.

I would argue that postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multisensory communication—speaking, storytelling, dialogue, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multimedia formats.

Libraries, especially those that serve children and young adults, need to acknowledge that society is becoming postliterate.

PL libraries budget, select, acquire, catalog, and circulate as many or more materials in nonprint formats as they do traditional print materials. The circulation policy for all materials, print and nonprint, is similar.2. PL libraries stock, without prejudice, age-appropriate graphic novels and audio books, both fiction and nonfiction, for informational and recreational use.3. PL libraries support gaming for instruction and recreation.4. PL libraries purchase high-value online information resources.5. PL libraries provide resources for patrons to create visual and auditory materials and promote the demonstration of learning and research through original video, audio, and graphics production. They also provide physical spaces for the presentation of these creations.6. PL libraries allow the use of personal communication devices (MP3 players, handhelds, laptops, etc.) and provide wireless network access for these devices.7. PL library programs teach the critical evaluation of nonprint information.8. PL library programs teach the skills necessary to produce effective communication in all formats.9. PL library programs accept and promote the use of nonprint resources as sources for research and problem-based assignments.10. PL librarians recognize the legitimacy of nonprint resources and promote their use without bias.