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Online learning should originate from everywhere on the globe, not just from the U.S. and other technologically advantaged countries.

The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs.

This can happen by building in apprenticeships, internships and real-world applications of online problem sets. Problem sets might be rooted in real-world dilemmas or comparative historical and cultural perspectives. (Examples might include: “Organizing Disaster Response and Relief for Hurricane Sandy” or “Women’s Rights, Rape, and Culture” or “Designing and Implementing Gun Control: A Global Perspective.”)

The artificial divisions of work, play and education cease to be relevant in the 21st century.

Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments. A wide variety of pedagogical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices should support students' diverse learning modes.

Experimentation should be an acknowledged affordance and benefit of online learning. Students should be able to try a course and drop it without incurring derogatory labels such as failure (for either the student or the institution offering the course).

Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play. Play allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change--a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century. We must cultivate the imagination and the dispositions of questing, tinkering and connecting. We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.

Another point by Donaldson was that there have been and will continue to be other parentheses – hypertext and Google for example – that attempt to contain and control content.  But at the end of the day, he said, there is no way confinement can work.  There will always be content beyond the boundaries of the parenthesis.

Learners within a global, digital commons have the right to work, network, and contribute to knowledge in public; to share their ideas and their learning in visible and connected ways if they so choose.

The best courses will be global in design and contribution, offering multiple and multinational perspectives.  

The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs.  

Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments.

Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play.

But liberal arts colleges are reluctant to expand in size out of fear of diminishing the quality of their experience. Their small-class and residential-campus models are expensive to provide, as are the financial aid programs they deploy to ensure diverse student bodies. Administrators fear breaking down the four-year, full-time model, which they believe is crucial to developing well-rounded students. And the liberal arts curriculum isn’t necessarily tied to preparing students for a specific career, and certainly not a single job

Despite significant looming challenges related to affordability, access, public skepticism about value, changing student demographics, and the influence of technology on students and education -- which all the attendees readily acknowledged -- most of the presidents of the liberal arts colleges here this week aren’t planning on substantively changing to how their institutions operate or their economic models.

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful"

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are  self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database

A huge problem with Twitter for some is understanding who is getting the message. Remember Twitter is Social Media and is based on social interaction. If you walked into an auditorium full of people and started talking without engaging someone first, no one would be listening. You would be talking out loud to yourself.  If you introduced yourself to someone and then began a conversation you now have someone listening and interacting. You would then do the same with a second, third, and fourth person. You have connected with those people and selected them as persons you may interact with, and they have selected you as well, based on your intelligent contributions to the discussion. As that works in life, so it works in Twitter.

Twitter is only one component of a comprehensive PLN. There are many Social Media applications that serve educators well for communication, collaboration, and creation. All of these applications are constantly evolving or disappearing, to be replaced by new applications. We need to buy into the method and not the tool. Tools change, but learning continues. To be better educators we need to be better learners.

an academic crime they have told us they really do not fully understand.

It’s not the core topic of most courses; it’s not fun; and it sounds school-marmish to bring it up. I prefer not to bring it up in my own teaching, so I quite understand the reluctance of teachers in your sample to do so.

It’s wrong to take the work of someone else and pass it off as your own, whether in the academic context or otherwise.

One area where some confusion seeps in has to with remixing content.

The remixing of content, with proper attribution and in keeping with the fair use principle under copyright, is something that we ought to encourage and to celebrate. We do need to help students understand the line between riffing off and ripping off the work of others.

These are skills that we should find ways to teach. I think they are best taught in the context of active projects where students have their hands dirty with materials, whether digital or not.

ibrarians should help our students figure out how to manage the rivers of digital information that they encounter every day…right now librarians are focused on the pools.

I think we need to be in the business of using these new rivers of information, adding to them, sharing what we know, and coding – developing, in the sense of writing computer code – new ones that work even better.

First, I want students to learn more about creativity and what they can and should do with information, whether or not it is held in copyright by someone else. How can they use and re-use they extraordinary wealth of information that they are blessed to have access too? Second, I hope that they will learn the skills to manage the vast amount of information they are confronted with. That includes knowing where to look, how to be efficient, how to stay on top of great sources.

And third, I think it’s crucial that they continue to learn to think independently for themselves.