Instructional & Media Services at Dickinson College

I believe that not only are office slackers more productive than work-only employees, but that people who work from home are more productive than the office crowd -- and for many of the same reasons

2. It gets personal things off your mind.

3. It builds work relationships.

the entire campus is, and will continue to be, part of this exciting project

The human mind is a curiosity engine.

I propose we (you and me) get off our asses and put together an east coast higher ed blogger con that focuses not on a particular platform, but instead on the affordances of an open publishing platform. We’ll host here in State College or we can do it elsewhere — doesn’t matter to me. What do you think? A two day event that could (maybe) eventually rival Northern Voice … that may be shooting too high, but we need to set a bar somewhere.

As is often the case, it’s all about an investment in some good people who get excited about the possibilities of teaching and learning with technology. And if the header image for the main blog is any indicator, the instructional technology folks at Lafayette seem to be having an extreme blast. Fine work Courtney, Jason, and Ken! So why is your school afraid to jump? What do you have to lose save the LMS chains that bind you to the 20th century!

The world is changing because of social web technologies. Our kids are using them. No one is teaching them how to use them to their full learning potential, and ultimately, as teachers and learners, that’s our responsibility. To do that, we need to be able to learn in these contexts for ourselves.

Web 2.0. Social Networking. Gaming. Mobile Computing. Above all: teaching and learning.

technology has been losing our attention lately. It hasn’t become unimportant - developments in medicine, transportation and energy production are still critical to our well being. But we’ve got such a surfeit of technology available to us that it’s just become part of the environment. It’s just there. I think that the 21st century will be a century of creativity in the same way that the 20th was of technology. Much of the creativity, interestingly enough, will be based on the tools provided by technology, especially tools that allow us to create, collaborate and communicate.

video literacy including comprehension and creation - is one of those 21st century skills that get discussed so often. I’m in total agreement and I think that the foundational 21st century skill underlying many of the others will be creativity. If that’s the case, what will schools look like when they are designed to nurture creativity the way they nurtured technology skills like science and math in the 20th?