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"It's not about the tools, Bill," Sheryl pushed back. "It's about the behaviors that the tools enable."

After all, most schools are investing their professional-development technology budget in training teachers to use computers for non-instructional purposes even though new tools allow for a significant shift in pedagogy.

Instead of exploring how new digital opportunities can support student-centered inquiry or otherwise enhance existing practices, today’s schools are preparing their teachers to use office automation and productivity tools like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

This new revolution started in the 20th century with sound recording and film, moved next to television and radio and today takes the form of the internet.  He points out that there is a common theme when people consider these changes – that they are not simply something new but also the end of something old. 

The primary impact on the mediated context of content during the parenthetical period is containment.  Look at a printed work, Pettitt suggested, and you will see strict regimentation.  Words are forced into lines, surrounded by margins, placed on pages that are sewn into a binding, contained by a jacket and placed on a shelf where they can be contained and controlled.  The words have been "imprisoned" and have lost much of their pre-parenthetical fluidity.  This confinement of cultural production has obviously not been limited to the written work: plays move to stages and music to concert halls during the parenthesis.

He said that human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the kinds of categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a "medieval peasant."

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

Nobody even bothers to ask the question Seymour Papert first posed 45 years ago, “Does the child program the computer or does the computer program the child?” This is a tragedy.

Today one merely has to promise 75 quick and easy things to do in 37 minutes with the hottest product being peddled to schools. Another popular topic is incessantly about how your colleagues won’t or can’t use the latest fad.

PLN, PLC, PLP, etc… are just fancy alphabet soup for having someone to talk with. We should not need an National Science Foundation grant to make friends.

Secondly, tools shape behaviours. Tools shape cognition. Tools shape societal structures in both intended, and unintended, ways.

Anthony Aguirre, in The Enemy of Insight, suggests that “information input from the Internet is simply too fast, leaving little mental space or time to process that information, fit it into existing schema, and think through the implications”. (

“Important issues fade from focus fast, and while many of humanity’s challenges get more complicated, society’s ability to pay attention to complex arguments dwindles. Sound bites and attack ads work well when the world has attention deficit disorder.”

that it no longer makes sense to consider the world as divided between developing and industrialised countries; and that people everywhere respond similarly to increasing levels of wealth and health, with higher material aspirations and smaller families. “There is no such thing as a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, with a gap in between,”

The best measure of political stability of a country, he believes, is whether fertility rates are falling, because that indicates that women are being educated and basic health services are being provided. “

Innovation in infographics has always been driven by the need to explain difficult things,

Post a list of norms for online and offline behavior and keep it up. Refer to it. Make it a part of your classroom culture.

No matter if you have a one-computer or a 10-computer classroom, you can have resources available and open at all times using the computer as a station. Can't find the right word when you're modeling writing an essay? Walk over to the computer while you are talking to the students and use visualthesarus.com to find just the right word.

#7. Take a photo of an interesting location with your cell phone, email it to yourself, and use it the next day to help teach a concept: descriptive writing about a setting, for example. Show students you are thinking of their learning even outside of the classroom. After all, learning shouldn't end at the bell.

he two most important points to consider when paraphrasing are: 1) you must cite the source of the paraphrased text both in the body of your article, and in the reference list, and 2) you must express the original concepts using different words.

f you’re still not sure what constitutes plagiarism, see the comparisons put together by the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington.

The University of Wisconsin also offers practical tips and exercises to help you paraphrase, including, “Look away from the source; then write,” and “While looking at the source, first change the structure, then the words.”

PRINT BOOKS: We joined book clubs. DIGITAL BOOKS: We discuss them in booklogs.

PRINT BOOKS: We find them in libraries, bookstores and bookmobiles. DIGITAL BOOKS: For people who own personal computers, e-readers, smartphones, iPads and other tablets, there's 2 4/7 access to libraries and bookstores for purchasing, borrowing and downloading material.

PRINT BOOKS: Scribble notes in the margins. DIGITAL BOOKS: We use Kindle's Public Notes virtual annotation application.

Courses should encourage open participation and meaningful engagement with real audiences where possible, including peers and the broader public.

Students have the right to understand the intended outcomes--educational, vocational, even philosophical--of an online program or initiative.

n an online environment, teachers no longer need to be sole authority figures but instead should share responsibility with learners at almost every turn.

We are aware of how much we don't know: that we have yet to explore the full pedagogical potential of learning online, of how it can change the ways we teach, the ways we learn, and the ways we connect.  

As we begin to experiment with how novel technologies might change learning and teaching, powerful forces threaten to neuter or constrain technology, propping up outdated educational practices rather than unfolding transformative ones.

All too often, during such wrenching transitions, the voice of the learner gets muffled.

His mathematical models are tailored to identify word patterns and thematic elements in written text. The number and strength of links among novels determine influence, much the way Google ranks Web sites.

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.

The work that results from your use of the copyrighted materials needs to be transformative, i.e. substantially different from the original, and offer added value; it can’t  just be a copy, or a slightly modified version of it with a few words changed or the odd sentence or paragraph moved around;  and

2) The copyrighted work can’t be used in a way that is likely to deprive the original author of income, or any potential income they might earn from the copyrighted works (such as book sales, or income from online advertisements if they run a web-based business).

Personally, I would always check with the person who created any work that I proposed to use that they were happy for me to use it, to avoid encountering problems further down the line.

He explains that gamification involves crafting an experience where a player engages in a challenge and uses interactivity and dynamic feedback to make decisions and work toward a specific outcome.

where you present a challenge, the learner makes choices, and the choices produce consequences

Organize reminders of your resulting to-do lists — for the e-mails you need to send, the phone calls you need to make, the meetings you need to arrange, the at-home tasks you need to complete. Park the inventory of all your projects in a convenient place.

In other words, our attraction to a world of infinite possibility, information and complexity is here to stay. The challenge is how to participate productively in this new and turbulent world, and not be paralyzed by it.