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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.

All these tools are technological with only the potential to be pedagogical… but they aren’t designed with pedagogy in mind.

Am I the only one who feels like a 30 hour day would still be too short? Are there others out there who wonder what kind of commitment it will take for a teacher to be technologically savvy enough to meaningfully engage students with all these new tools? Are we focusing too much on the tools and not enough on pedagogy? Will educational structures change fast enough to provide our students with a relevant education? … and for that matter… What would an ideal education look like today?

In my comment above I mentioned ‘pedagogical merit’ and to be honest, I have been on a bit of a focus in that direction recently. What I really mean by that is finding the right tools and structures for the right job in order to meaningfully enhance learning and engage learners.

but we’ll do so from our church, away from school, and we will not involve any Edmond PS students in the videoconference to comply with the directive from the district technology director. I did not realize the district forbids any parents or students from using any type of personal computer and outside Internet connection device (like my cell network data card) to provide an interactive learning opportunity for students. Now I know.

"I've had teachers tell me,” says Eklund, “that after they introduced the game to their students, the classroom went completely silent because all of the kids were just reading." "You just don't get that kind of engagement and involvement with the story" with a textbook, he says.

A report written by researchers about The River City Project for a 2006 conference concluded "that students learned biology content, that students and teachers were highly engaged, that student attendance improved, that disruptive behavior dropped, that students were building 21st-century skills in virtual communication and expression, and importantly, that using this type of technology in the classroom can facilitate good inquiry learning."

They see the broad difference between the two as being the amount of self-determination or self-direction; with cooperative learning being very much teacher-controlled and collaborative learning being learner-controlled.

However, experientially I believe that what distinguishes collaboration from cooperation comes down to exactly what is shared. When cooperating, it is only physical resources (objects, time, money) or intellectual resources (knowledge, expertise) that are shared. Whereas when collaborating, in addition to these shared physical and intellectual resources, are shared goals, responsibilities, values, beliefs and attitudes. Some of these intellectual resources (both cognitive and affective) may become shared through the practice of cooperation but with collaboration they are factored in from the start. From this collaborative sharing comes synergy which adds value by producing something new and unique.

There is another important area that needs to be addressed with collaborative learning software which is related to communication; namely knowledge construction. It has been noted by researches that threaded discourse, of the type found in Lotus Notes and the majority Web-based conferencing software, actually works against convergent thinking processes over time (Hiltz, 1986; Harassim, 1990; Eastmond, 1994). It is found that this can have "a negative effect both on the learner's efforts to synthesize ideas, and on collaborative processes which become increasingly fragmented as discussion threads and individual interests diverge." (Hewitt, 1997).