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I’m in the midst of a great book by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson titled Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, and they spend about 20 pages writing about why the system is so resistant to change. The bottom line, they say, is that “teaching is an inevitably conservative practice.” When embedded in institutions that protect instruction from systemic change, a conservative practice is reinforced by a conserving institution. It is difficult for teachers to implement substantially changed programs when they already have dedicated years adapting to what the traditional system of school offers (36).

The act of teaching is fundamentally about sharing knowledge. OER embodies the purpose of teaching and is today’s most compelling manifestation of the core values of education in a digital world, that is, to share knowledge freely.

WikiEducator is a flagship project of the OER Foundation

Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Google Docs has had a commenting system for almost a year now. That system is a good one that I use for commenting on my students' writing. In fact, I just finished commenting on half a dozen essays.

Right now discussions in Google Docs is only available for new documents. If you created a document prior to this morning, it won't have the discussion feature enabl

The Tablet: It’s the most anticipated product of the year.

Geo: The combination of GPS chips in mobile phones, social networks, and increasingly innovative mobile apps means that geolocation is increasingly becoming a necessary feature for any killer app.

Realtime Search: After licensing realtime data streams from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others, Google and Bing are quickly ramping up their realtime search.

What's the goal, the one unifying everything that we need from technology? It's really quite simple... One device with ubiquitous access to information via the internet.

That's all we need. Paper, gone. Books, gone.

Assessment is one of the key components of technology in education.

Netbooks are essentially mini-laptops that combine the physical characteristics of a cell phone with the capabilities of a traditional laptop, overcoming nearly all of the hardware obstacles to continuous student technology use in the classroom.

But hardware is only half of the picture. Open-source software is the answer to achieving cell phone reliability and ease of use on a device. With Linux and open-source software on netbooks, all the complexities of typical proprietary operating systems can be stripped away, leaving elegant, cell-phone like interfaces of simple icons, with reliable and secure underpinnings that are not prone to failure, malware, or general instability.

Through the use of free, open-source applications, students gain access to a diverse set of tools and resources for content creation, and teachers are empowered to challenge students to demonstrate subject area mastery using any one of a variety of tools and contexts. Since the software is free to distribute, students can install the same programs on any computer they have access to, creating an environment in which teachers can have a reasonable expectation that technology-based activities and assignments can be completed regardless of the student's location. And free classroom management tools enable teachers to monitor student activity, communicate privately or with groups, take control of a workstation, start a demonstration from theirs or any student's machine, and garner the attention of the class at a moment's notice, all through an easy to use interface on the teacher's workstation.