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Interestingly enough, schools often seem to discourage activities with these distributed forms of knowledge and resources, instead focusing on testing for what students have "inside their heads". However, I think it's just as important to recognize, evaluate, and help develop students' strategies for learning, collaborating, and accessing knowledge that they don't already possess, as this seems to be much more aligned with what we do as adults. I mean, I don't know all sorts of things, but I have pretty good strategies in place for finding them out.

experts and novices participate in the same areas and activities in affinity spaces. So, as I mentioned previously, novices aren't prevented from engaging in creative activities that they find interesting, even if these activities are challenging for them. And, through working in the same space as experts, novices are able to benefit from this exposure, by asking questions, collaborating, and by observing how experts go about certain tasks.

The differences between digital native learners and digital immigrant teachers. Digital Native Learners Digital Immigrant Teachers Prefer receiving information quickly from multiple multimedia sources. Prefer slow and controlled release of information from limited sources. Prefer parallel processing and multitasking. Prefer singular processing and single or limited tasking. Prefer processing pictures, sounds and video before text. Prefer to provide text before pictures, sounds and video. Prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information. Prefer to provide information linearly, logically and sequentially. Prefer to interact/network simultaneously with many others. Prefer students to work independently rather than network and interact. Prefer to learn “just-in-time.” Prefer to teach “just-in-case” (it’s on the exam). Prefer instant gratification and instant rewards. Prefer deferred gratification and deferred rewards. Prefer learning that is relevant, instantly useful and fun. Prefer to teach to the curriculum guide and standardized tests.*Ian Jukes and Anita Dosaj, The InfoSavvy Group, February 2003

If there's one bothersome side effect of getting a long Web video sent to you, it's getting to the good parts. In some cases, the part your friend wanted you to see could be a few minutes in, and you might not have the time (or patience) to sit through the rest. A service called Splicd fixes this, by letting anyone drop in a YouTube video URL, then pick the start and end point. It's not a very pretty implementation, but it works. You've got to manually plug in the start and end times, which requires skipping around to the part you want in YouTube, then heading back to Splicd. Once it's worked it through, you get a permalinked page that you can share with friends. What's nice about this system is that it doesn't require extra time to re-encode the video; when you've put in those changes it's instantaneous. The downside to that is that the finished product cannot be shared outside of Splicd's site.

Never before has it been more possible for educators to put instruction front and center of learning space design (i.e. physical classrooms and virtual spaces) than now.

Never before has collaboration with students and peers and with the world been more possible than now. Yet we still educate with strict control of space. It seems ridiculous even to think of learning spaces as confined now that students can connect with the world and glean content from everywhere.

As educators, we don't want to focus on developing test takers and rote repeaters of information; we aim to develop individuals who can think for themselves, find new information, work with others toward a unified goal, and utilize all resources available to them in their endeavors.