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We are already at the moment in which the ability to use social media, and particularly social media as amplified through the power of the mobile web, has become a key literacy.

Academics have held the online, user-written reference work in some disdain, said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University, "but now I'm hearing nothing but enthusiasm, and I really think this is going to work." Ms. Banaji, the association's president, has put the prestige of a leading scholarly group-and her own name-behind the project, which involves a new interface custom-designed to make encyclopedia entries easier to write and edit, a nascent social network that links scholars who share interests, and tutorials for professors on ways to make writing for Wikipedia part of course assignments.

I'm more convinced than ever that blogging and doing it with other students from around the world is essential to helping students connect with themselves and a larger world.

Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

This wiki is a collaborative learning space. If you want to contribute to this e-portfolio or digital portfolio page, please join the wiki and then add your thoughts, your notes or describe how you created digital portfolios for your students.

In short, [an eportfolio] is an online space from which to manage your life, learning and goals.

Established in 2009, the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL, pronounced "able") is a membership organization for the world e-portfolio community that now has established affiliations and collaborations with nearly all world-wide portfolio initiatives, projects and organizations.

I used Google Docs Forms to structure an in-class peer review workshop.

My work on blogs, articles, handbooks, and so on is an invitation to engage in conversation, not a proclamation of what I absolutely know.

One of the organizers of Edcamp Philly, a free education "unconference" that took place in Philadelphia last May. The event attracted the attention of educators from around the world--not only for the excellent content and collaborative spirit, but also for the unconference model itself -- one that costs next to nothing to produce by facilitating ad-hoc community participation.

While the next online model remains unclear, Southern New Hampshire's president, Paul J. LeBlanc, has sketched out one possible blueprint. … The vision is that students could sign up for self-paced online programs with no conventional instructors. They could work at their own speeds through engaging online content that offers built-in assessments, allowing them to determine when they are ready to move on. They could get help through networks of peers who are working on the same courses; online discussions could be monitored by subject experts. When they're ready, students could complete a proctored assessment, perhaps at a local high school, or perhaps online. The university's staff could then grade the assessment and assign credit. … The whole model hinges on excellent assessment.

Current practices of our educational institutions-and workplaces-are a mismatch between the age we live in and the institutions we have built over the last 100-plus years. The 20th century taught us that completing one task before starting another one was the route to success. Everything about 20th-century education, like the 20th-century workplace, has been designed to reinforce our attention to regular, systematic tasks that we take to completion. Attention to task is at the heart of industrial labor management, from the assembly line to the modern office, and of educational philosophy, from grade school to graduate school.

This study reports the findings of an investigation of the factors influencing the use and usefulness of wikis in an introductory, undergraduate information systems course. Informed by the media choice, technology acceptance model from information systems research, and group collaborative learning research from the education literature, a survey instrument was developed and administered across the entire course. The study found that wiki use was influenced by the student's prior expertise with wikis, with their perceived usefulness of wikis being strongly influenced by their teachers' attitudes towards the technology, and the ease of access to the wikis. The students' overall attitude towards wikis was largely influenced by the extent to which they saw wikis as helping with their assignment work, and their intention to use wikis in the future was driven by their perception of wiki's usefulness. The paper concludes with an outline of the lessons learned from the study and recommendations for instructors who are thinking of using wikis in their teaching.

New research suggests that even before 2-year-olds speak in full sentences, they are able to understand grammatical construction and use it to make sense of what they hear.

Cell phones are in the hands of the vast majority of adults, and whether schools like it or not, they're in the hands of most students. While many schools still see cell phones as a distraction rather than as an educational tool, it's hard to deny that these devices are quickly becoming the primary means by which we communicate, in or out of schools.

Through collaboration between the Thompson Writing Program and the university's office of alumni affairs, the Duke Reader Project offers our faculty members a way to supplement their own responses to their students' writing. When professors include their courses in the project, their students can get comments on drafts of papers from an alumnus or employee who has relevant experience in the field, like the Coast Guard commander or the wildlife expert.

The basic mechanism is simple: The group meets once a week. On the weeks that it is your turn to present, you (and only you) circulate your writing to the other members of your group, 48 hours before your scheduled meeting. The other members then read the draft and make written comments. When the members meet, those comments are shared and the piece is discussed in toto.

PBL is still kind of a cool way to address standards and, too often these days, is simply coverage by another name. But its ultimate benefit is to help students think, learn, and operate in the new century by challenging them at deeper levels. That requires reversing the equation between skills and content: PBL is method for teaching students to find, process, understand, and share information, not a way to extend the industrial landscape of regurgitation and recall.

In 2008, I started a non-profit organization called the Khan Academy to deliver free online education. As it turns out, our tools have given students and teachers the power to "flip" the traditional classroom: Students can hear lectures at home and spend their time at school doing "homework"-that is, working on problems. It allows them to advance at their own pace, gaining real mastery, and it lets teachers spend more time giving one-to-one instruction.