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Bain advises professors on engaging students cognitively, through specific forms of group work and introducing students to debates in the field immediately. How can we use technology to facilitate this sort of engagement?

Christopher Shamburg is an Associate Professor in the graduate program in educational technology at NJCU. He's also a former high school teacher, a Folger Shakespeare Library Educator. Chris has a new book out this month, but before I get to his book, let me give you a good example of what he is getting students and their teachers to do in English language arts classrooms. As a Folger Educator, he worked with students and faculty at Washington DC's McKinley High School in a project called "Remixing Shakespeare." You can watch the video of the students doing their Macbeth remixes. It shows how they create original short audio dramas using scenes from Shakespeare. I've seen Chris do this in a workshop for teachers and he's using open source software (like the Audacity audio recorder/editor) and simple no-tech sound effects (coconut shell hoofbeats & the potato chip crunch of footsteps) as well as the students' recordings of the dialogs and license-free audio sound effects. There are so many lessons going on with this, including the ethical and legal remixing of other creator's work.

If I were forced to choose an aspect of the internet that made it simply indispensable, it would definitely be its availability as a huge learning resource. 20 years ago, who would have thought that one would have easy access to already completed business documents, research papers of world class universities, free encyclopedias and some great books, no matter where he or she is located in the world.