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Howard University announced "Howard University Online," part of a comprehensive initiative that will expand the flagship research University's array of blended/online courses and programs in partnership with Pearson.

"Here are a baker's dozen of the main principles of connected learning. As you will see, they form an "ecosystem," where each component influences and changes the others. These apply in any field (although differently in each field). These principles draw from constructivist, engaged "public educators" (Stuart Hall's term)  going back as far as Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey and including Howard Gardner, Franz Fanon, Jacques Rancière, and digital pedagogy theorists including Yochai Benkler, Howard Rhinegold,  Mizuko Ito, and many others.  "

"An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that's not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold's book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of "supercollaborators," as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who's interviewed in the book."

This is true for digital natives...my grandson is always on- line playing games with people he has never seen in person. I am not quite there yet! I still like to make eye contact -:)

"Rheingold writes that "only a fraction of those who have access to networked mind-amplifiers know how to use them convivially." I asked him if he could give a contemporary example of an online community whose members have a high degree of convivial literacy?  "Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them," Rheingold replied."

"one unanticipated consequence has driven me to distraction-and that's the tendency of many people, including persons whom I cherish, to credit me with the notion of 'learning styles' or to collapse 'multiple intelligences' with 'learning styles.' It's high time to relieve my pain and to set the record straight."

"The far greater danger is that of preparing today's students en masse for a repeat of life in the twentieth century, when homework was for the eyes of teachers only, where learning was delivered exclusively by an expert standing at the front of the room instead of sometimes constructed collaboratively by a network, and where students were taught to be effective but largely passive cogs in an industrial machine, rather than active and intelligent nodes in a networked learning society."