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4. Taking risksThere’s so much to learn. How can you as an educator know all these things? You must take risks and sometimes surrender yourself to the students’ knowledge. Have a vision of what you want and what the technology can achieve, identify the goals and facilitate the learning. Use the strengths of the digital natives to understand and navigate new products, have them teach each other. Trust your students.

"Before you begin a telecollaborative project," she said, "Look at the plan critically and decide whether it's worth it in terms of learning outcomes. Ask yourself these questions: Does this use of the Internet allow students to do something that can't be done in another way? Does this use of the Internet allow students to do something in a better way? "If the answer to either of those questions is yes," said Harris, "then your project is probably worth doing." "As teachers, we need to do what is our art and our craft -- which is teaching, not technology."

An activity structure, according to Harris, is simply a description of what students do in an activity, without reference to content or grade level. For example, kindergarten students mixing paints, elementary students forming compound words, and high-school students creating chemical compounds are all using an activity structure that involves combining existing elements to form new elements. The content and grade level are strikingly different, but the basic activity, the structure of the activity, is the same. Existing activity structures, said Harris, are usually supported best by existing instructional tools. If Internet tools are going to be used to enable students to do something they haven't been able to do, or do as well, before, new activity structures, structures that are best supported by new instructional tools, must be identified and implemented.

Develop a project plan that's specific and logistically manageable.

As yet more tales of woe appear around failing business models (it’s not just the newspapers that are struggling: it appears Youtube is onto a loser too…), I thought I’d take a coffee break out of course writing to jot down a cynical thought or two about lifelong learning… …because along with the widening participation agenda and blah, blah, blah, blah, lifelong learning is one of those things that we hear about every so often as being key to something or other. Now I’d probably consider myself to be a lifelong learner: it’s been a good few years since I took a formal course, and yet every day I try to learn how to do something I didn’t know how to do when I got up that morning; and I try to be open to new academic ideas too (sometimes…;-) But who, I wonder, is supposed to be delivering this lifelong learning stuff, whatever it is? Because there’s money to be made, surely? If lifelong learning is something that people are going to buy into, then who owns, or is trying to grab that business? Just imagine it: having acquired a punter, you may have them for thirty, forty, fifty years?