First paragraph – The MOOC Model for Digital Practice responds to the “Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow” section of the consultation paper Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity by synthesizing the current state of knowledge about Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). It argues that building and sustaining prosperity through Canada’s current digital strengths depends on a digital ecosystem that embraces both infrastructure and the collaborative social networks enabled by that infrastructure. Prosperity in this context requires a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to turn these factors towards creating wealth. By exploring the relationship of MOOCs to the digital economy in general and their potential roles to prepare citizens for participation in that digital economy in particular, it illustrates one particularly Canadian model of how these needs may be addressed.

In fact, nearly all of the most hyped developments on the Web in the past few years have been tools for augmenting social connection…

This is why it is frustrating when there is talk that the use of technology and social media sites actually disconnects our students, when in my own experience, I have found the opposite. The more I have connected through our staff and student blogs, the more I have learned about them and what is happening in the classroom.

The less we work with students on being critically literate online, and the more we avoid social media and networking as an authentic part of the classroom experience, the more danger our students will be in.

Let’s not wait until high school when they are perceived to be old enough. If we wait until then, we will have to do more untraining of bad habits students have picked up Facebooking etc.

From my experience, although I don’t think any age is too early, I have noticed that ages 8-10 are the perfect time to start.

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