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What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years, countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations," and tried to move "from Good to Great."

With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates into what I do with students.

This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.

ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy

Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.

Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills

The place for people to discover, explore, and connect

interconnecting existing social networking tools

body of scholars' stories

sophisticated examinations that better measure problem-solving and critical thinking.

Once charter schools have opened, it becomes politically difficult to close them, even in cases where they are bad or worse than their traditional counterparts.

Congress will need to broaden and sustain those reforms in the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Does this jettisoning of time-honored titles mean that the paperless classroom is also lacking a creator, controller and grader?  Is the paperless classroom also a teacherless paradigm?  The answer is in some regards, yes.  I have removed myself from center stage.  I have relinquished the need to control every class.  I have stopped seeing work as stagnant…completed and submitted by students and then graded by me.  I have let go of my need to pre-plan months at a time, in favor of following the path that unfolds as we learn together.  My classes are not, however, teacherless, just less about the teaching and more about the learning.  The students know that I am ready and willing to be student to their insights, that they can teach, create, control and even evaluate their own learning.

In the absence of my control, the students have many choices to make

Teachers often say that modern students are lazy.  I have long felt that as the shifting winds of technology began to gain force, we teachers were the ones who were unwilling to do the work of rethinking our roles and meeting the students were they were learning already.  Rethinking paper as the primary tool of class is a step in the right direction because it forces a rethinking of the how and why of teaching and learning.

This is about as close to getting it wrong as I could imagine.

Too bad they couldn't have found room for politics (which is not the same as policy), economics (sorry, finance isn't the same thing, either), demographics, history, cities and urban planning, trade and resources, or war, let alone art, media, psychology, or cultural studies, too.

almost nothing about the consequences