Group items tagged

move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able

“information revolution”

new ways of relating

discourse,

social revolution, not a technological one

new forms of

Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking

nspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration.

new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating.

“spirit” of Web 2.0

important

technology is secondary.

empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship

dea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.

first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there.

mportance of the form of learning over the content of learning

teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world.

We can't “teach” them. We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).

love and respect your students and they will love and respect you back. With the underlying feeling of trust and respect this provides, students quickly realize the importance of their role as co-creators of the learning environment and they begin to take responsibility for their own education.

The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. The beauty of the current moment is that new media has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment. There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the questions that drive us on.

Other than having the upper hand with digital distribution, an Apple tablet can compensate for other e-book readers' shortcomings. In a previous story, Wired.com polled students on their interest in Amazon's large-format Kindle DX reader. Several of them said they couldn't imagine ditching textbooks for a Kindle DX, foreseeing challenges with tasks such as notetaking, highlighting and switching between books while writing essays.

Assuming its computing powers and interface design are anything like the iPhone's, a touchscreen tablet would make these student-oriented tasks as easy as a few swipes and taps -- far more pleasant than clunking around with the Kindle's cheap buttons and sluggish interface. Plus, we would imagine students would be able to type their papers on the tablet.

There's huge potential in a tablet if Apple can pull this off. The challenge lies in establishing the right partnerships. If Apple weaves e-books into the iTunes Store, will book publishers hop on board? Given Apple's success in numbers, we think so.