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We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections.

“Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge

the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

“while new digital technologies make a learning revolution possible, they certainly do not guarantee it” (Resnick, 2002 , p. 32).

in fact, is critical is “how” the technologies are used (Reimann & Goodyear, 2004)

ICTs are used in education in two general ways: to support existing ‘traditional’ pedagogical practices (teacher-centric, lecture-based, rote learning) as well as to enable more learner-centric, ‘constructivist’ learning models. Research from OECD countries suggests that both are useful, but that ICTs are most effective when they help to enable learner-centric pedagogies.

despite rhetoric that ICTs can enable new types of teaching and learning styles, for the most part they are being used to support traditional learning practices.

The existence of formal and informal communities of practice and peer networks can be important tools to support ICT in education initiatives and activities. Such support mechanisms can be facilitated through the use of ICTs.

Those studies about the wonders of handwriting all suffer from the same set of flaws, namely, a) that they don’t actually work with students who have been taught to use their laptops or devices for taking notes. That is, they all hand students devices and tell them to take notes in the same way they would in written form. In some cases those devices don’t have keyboards; in some cases they don’t provide software tools to use (there are some great ones, but doing it in say, Word, isn’t going to maximize the options digital spaces allow), in some cases the devices are not ones the students use themselves and with which they are comfortable. And b) the studies are almost always focused on learning in large lecture classes or classes in which the assessment of success is performance on a standardized (typically multiple-choice) test, not in the ways that many, many classes operate, and not a measure that many of us use in our own classes. And c) they don’t actually attempt to integrate the devices into the classes in question,

I have plenty of conversations with students about how to take notes already. Most of the time their problem isn’t which device (pencil, laptop, phone, quill) they use to take those notes, but how to take them and how to use them to learn based on their own experiences, learning styles, and discipline