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A simple chart featuring the characteristics of education in the different web stages 

Learning environments of the future are in incubation. And therein lies the challenge: Learning environments that don't exist can't be analyzed. Moving into the unknown requires a pioneering spirit. Helen Keller reminds us that is the truth of not only our age, but of all ages: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

"Stuff happens, sometimes when you least expect it. But you just have to deal with it. One day I lost a child on the London Underground. Beat that."

While it's no secret that there seems to be more use and reliance on digital and blended learning with each passing semester, a transition may be happening faster than you think writes Tom Vander Ark. At a conference he talked about a dozen of the factors accelerating the shift to digital learning:

UNIVERSITIES that fail to embrace new technology will lose students and die, former federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner has warned. Mr Tanner, now a vice-chancellor's fellow at Victoria University, told a Melbourne audience last night that while Australian universities were using the internet to deliver study materials, they were not yet fully exploiting the potential technology offered for new ways of learning.

This is part of the 'change' problem, the way we attempt to persuade is simply not effective.

"While attending this particular workshop I was, at first, contemplating how I could utilize this tool as an administrator. As those thoughts wandered, the instructor repeatedly said the words "expand the walls of the classroom". That caught my attention and then I had no problem envisioning how the teachers I worked with could utilize a wiki to do just that."

Presentation slides from George Siemens on Connectivism

"In conjuction with our partners in the Rethink Learning Now campaign, we have produced an ESEA Toolkit for you to use in making your voice heard around ESEA reauthorization."

IMAGINE AN assessment system in which teachers had a wide repertoire of classroom-based, culturally sensitive assessment practices and tools to use in helping each and every child learn to high standards; in which educators collaboratively used assessment information to continuously improve schools; in which important decisions about a student, such as readiness to graduate from high school, were based on the work done over the years by the student; in which schools in networks held one another accountable for student learning; and in which public evidence of student achievement consisted primarily of samples from students' actual schoolwork rather than just reports of results from one-shot examinations.

"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring, others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the business world or involves digital technology. Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity, and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost). With a good dose of critical thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin to take back our schools."

Single standards are notoriously difficult to overcome or dislodge, even when they become ludicrously inefficient,

Sobel-Lojeski has called this phenomenon "Virtual Distance" because the death of (physical) distance due to the use of communications technologies just heralded a new kind of interpersonal detachment.

This article responds to a generation of techno-criticism in education. It contains a review of the key themes of that criticism. The context of previous efforts to reform education reframes that criticism. Within that context, the question is raised about what schools need to look and be like in order to take advantage of laptop computers and other technology. In doing so, the article presents a vision for self-organizing schools.

And it serves as a reminder to be less reverent about those long-held assumptions.

Anna Patty can you please link to your sources so SMH readers can read full transcripts of ideas you selectively quote? Poor journalism in a hyper-linked age. These ideas are NOT new, so why do they gain prominance once one GPC Pricipal obviously published their thoughts somewhere?