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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

You know that searching various areas of the Web requires a variety of search tools. You are the information expert in your building. You are the search expert in your building. You share an every growing and shifting array of search tools that reach into blogs and wikis and Twitter and images and media and scholarly content.

You open your students to evolving strategies for collecting and evaluating information. You teach about tags, and hashtags, and feeds, and real-time searches and sources, as well as the traditional database approaches you learned way back in library school.

You work with learners to exploit push information technologies like RSS feeds and tags and saved databases and search engine searches relevant to their information needs.

You know that communication is the end-product of research and you teach learners how to communicate and participate creatively and engagingly. You consider new interactive and engaging communication tools for student projects. ● Include and collaborate with your learners. You let them in. You fill your physical and virtual space with student work, student contributions—their video productions, their original music, their art.

Know and celebrate that students can now publish their written work digitally. (See these pathfinders: Digital Publishing, Digital Storytelling)

Your collection–on- and offline–includes student work. You use digital publishing tools to help students share and celebrate their written and artistic work.

You welcome and host telecommunications events and group gathering for planning and research and social networking.

You realize you will often have to partner and teach in classroom teachers’ classrooms. One-to-one classrooms change your teaching logistics. You teach virtually. You are available across the school via email and chat.

That relationship meant that, rather than working in relative isolation, our faculty worked together to create and implement standards-based projects. Rather than acting as directive teachers, our faculty members were more like coaches in a student-led inquiry environment. Rather than relying on books and worksheets, our faculty led students through a less certain learning path. Rather than perceiving critical thinking as a "result" (of directive teaching), we saw it as essentially an immersion mode in which exploration informs and develops students' thinking processes.

Finally, we identified student evaluation instruments to use throughout the project, including the culminating product.

Throughout any given project, we must be able to informally touch base at any time. Backup resources should be available (when computers fail, for example). We need to plan together in a very detailed, day-to-day way. We have to be able to easily communicate "on the fly." How we introduce the project to students is much more important than we thought (and we thought it was very important). As a teaching group, we must maintain a flexible, problem-solving attitude to productively work through the inevitable implementation challenges.

n addition, we are still grappling with how to best prepare our students to be successful in a project-based learning environment when they have difficulty working together cooperatively.

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.

Although much attention has been paid to the laptop computers that have been provided to students in the district, Mr. Edwards insists that the conversion isn’t about devices.

The digital conversion happening in Mooresville has required everyone in the district—including students—to “aggressively embrace continuous learning,” said Mr. Edwards. For instance, educators should continually be working toward their own professional goals and expanding their instructional knowledge, just as students are expected to add continually to their knowledge base.

“You have to clearly send signals that mistakes, bumps, and turbulence are part of the landscape. It happens, and it’s OK, and if things don’t go right, that’s normal,” said Mr. Edwards.

“If you don’t know what you’re going to measure, and carefully collect data along the way, you will not have that story to tell six or 18 months later,” said Ms. Cator, a former director of the office educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education.

In Albemarle County, for instance, students sit on the district’s tech advisory committee, participate in surveys about the district’s strategic goals, and provide feedback about budget initiatives, virtual learning, and other strategies through a county student advisory committee, said Ms. Moran.

Building a Culture of Innovation School leadership experts outline several ways districts should work to create an atmosphere in which good ideas can flourish, including: • Develop strong leaders who encourage informed risk-taking and experimentation rather than protection of the status quo. • Establish an expectation of continuous learning and improvement from every person at every level of the organization. • Craft a clearly defined and articulated vision for the district, and make sure everyone understands it and adheres to it. • Foster an environment in which people have the power to change course quickly if a project or initiative isn't working. • Empower everyone in the district, from students to teachers and administrators, to take on leadership roles. • Ensure a seamless infusion of technology throughout every sector of the district to produce efficiencies and collect meaningful data. SOURCE: Education Week

myriad ways in which technology allows students to connect with other students, field experts, and other teachers around the world,

learning is deeply pleasurable, if not always fun (doing hard things is not always fun, but worth it)

that students are good at deciding for themselves what kinds of remediation they may need and how best to get it (in consultation with an advisor or other students)

assumption that everyone has a stake in their own learning, that

Many of the conventional school environments I'm in are distinctly flat, arid, uninteresting places, physically and intellectually. Bulletin boards that could date from my own elementary school line classroom walls, with publisher's slogans about trying harder or doing your best. Adults choose what goes on the walls , and the aesthetics of learning spaces seem almost deliberately ignored.

"It's not about the technology, it's about rethinking how learning happens."

After hearing a number of ideas, and seeing a plan beginning to formulate, one of my students looked at me and said, “Can you help us create a unit plan for this?”

She looks first to the core competencies—critical thinking, empathy, persistence—that she wants to test, then breaks them down into smaller goals

student's grasp of systems thinking—understanding the complex relationships among parts of a whole—might ask players to complete tasks that show information gathering, developing hypotheses, and tracing causal relationships.

If instructors know where students need the most help, they can quickly tweak their courses—and their games

Taiga Park requires players to look for the cause of a widespread fish die-off in a virtual river by "interviewing" park rangers, environmental scientists, and the owners of a logging company. While students learn about pH levels and runoff, they also come away with lessons on data analysis, complex cause-and-effect relationships, and communication.

found that she could use routine assignments—like peer reviews and summaries of research material—to analyze her students' higher-order thinking skills. All assignments can be linked back to a larger skill, she says. "Evidence is everywhere."

Twitter and Youtube empower anyone with access to a computer, phone, or library to publish media. Television celebrates authority. Twitter dismantles authority, as witnessed by its use in Tunisia. Television celebrates the expert. Twitter fosters dialogue among amateurs.

"It’s slow and clunky. The design is bad. To talk to your friend, you can’t just go to their page and shoot them a message. The search box is worthless; I couldn’t find my friend, Tim, even when I know he’s in there. Every time you want to post to a particular class—every time—you have to select that class,

When social media supplements and transforms curriculum, students should experience this like play.

Don’t require students to write "correctly" in discussion forums. These spaces should encourage teens to advance tentative theories and experiment with different perspectives. You

Great online discussions thrive when students and instructors trust the community.

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.

The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

88 percent of faculty members see challenges in moving away from the traditional lecture format, including large class sizes, lack of time and lack of professional development.

Most of us could not imagine our lives without technology, and so we would not imagine today’s students’ education without it.