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The altered roles of the teacher and the student substantially change teaching itself. Learning with digital media isn’t about giving our well-worn teaching practices a hip appearance; it is, more fundamentally, about exploring radically new approaches to instruction. The future of learning will not be determined by tools but by the re-organization of power relationships and institutional protocols. Digital media, however, can play a positive role in this process of transformation.

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century, described good contemporary teachers as learning experts, mentors, motivators, technology integrators, and diagnosticians.

The most burning problem for digital learning is technological obsolescence and the attendant need to learn and readapt to new technological milieus and cycles of transformation. Openness, flexibility, playfulness, persistence, and the ability to work well with others on-the-fly are at the heart of an attitude that allows learners to cope with the unrelenting velocity of technological change in the 21st century. Digital media fluency also requires an understanding of the moment when technological interfaces hinder learning and become distracting.

Welcome to the website for The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age. The goal of this project: to help ensure that all Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information that will enable them to enrich their families, communities and democracy.

YOU can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging, transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”

Like most technologies, our new electronic digisphere is made up of good and bad. How we use it is, as always, up to us.

Speaking to investors last month, Mr. Murdoch said that the News Corporation was in “final discussions with a number of publishers, device makers and technology companies” about digital delivery of news and entertainment. “We will soon develop an innovative subscription model that will deliver digital content to consumers wherever and whenever they want it,” he said.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.

little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments.

"This was not [built as a] marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building environment."

intersection between digital and physical

"The experiences you have online can translate to rich offline experiences."

it turns out that some powerful Republicans in some agricultural states have supporters who have been poaching into the spectrum LightSquared owns and intends to use for a new nationwide broadband network.

the LightSquared initiative is a game changer. It builds on the satellite network already familiar to boaters and first responders to create a national wireless network with no dead zones -- if you have access to the American sky, you have access to your phone and the Internet.

While LightSquared now says it has fixed most of the GPS interference problems, including issues with "high precision" GPS devices , the GPS industry said "no way," and -- finding that perhaps the FCC was not buying the story -- spent millions to expand the debate into Congress and anywhere else it could find, like the Department of Defense.

The digital era has revolutionized photography. Photojournalists not only have access to high-end cameras with a seemingly infinite number of features, but their photos can be presented in many different ways, including slideshows and multimedia packages. However, it doesn't matter the technology that powers the photography, what matters is the eye and innate skill of the photographer, as evidenced below.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment,

in the current digital news ecosystem, having “week” in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.

in a publishing landscape filled with the lame and infirm, weeklies are the most profoundly challenged. A weekly schedule, with its tight turnarounds and frenzied production, is costly as a matter of course. Monthlies can still do step-backs for readers who don’t expect to see what happened five minutes ago, and daily newspapers have co-opted the newsweekly formula to build in real-time analysis.

It is axiomatic that in the current epoch, it is much less cost-intensive to build out a new brand than to try to walk back the cat on a legacy business.

Voices Beyond Walls is a participatory media initiative that supports creative expression and human rights advocacy among impoverished youth through digital storytelling workshops, new media production, and global dissemination of their work.

“My Ohio State colleagues took the initiative last November to convene a community conversation to discuss the implications of the report for Columbus. They could not get a single mainstream media news outlet (print or broadcast) to participate—although public and alternative media were well represented…”

“What would it be like to organize an entire college or university education around the idea of journalism? I am not talking here about what we think of as vocational journalism education. The idea is not to make everyone a professional editor or reporter. I am talking, instead, about conceiving an entire program of liberal education that takes as its central theme the idea that the new media phenomenon is potentially making everyone a journalist.

I’ve long believed that basic journalism training would benefit everyone, and that journalistic assignments could start as early as elementary school. Shane points out that his vision of journalism-centered higher education could help solve three major social problems: The shortfall in local news production around the country. The well-documented deficiency in college student writing. Low civic literacy: Americans’ generally poor knowledge about how social institutions work, and who makes the policy decisions that affect their lives. Shane also observed that involving students in local journalism “wins the educational trifecta”: Students would tackle meaningful and intellectually challenging issues. Students enjoy dealing with such issues. Students would develop marketable skills while also learning to function effectively as citizens.

U.S. publishers come in for withering criticism in a report this month from the German Newspaper Publishers’ Association.

While daily newspaper circulation in the United States fell 27 percent from 1998 through 2008, it slipped 19 percent in Germany. While fewer than half of Americans read newspapers, more than 70 percent of Germans do. While newspapers’ revenues have plunged in the United States, they have held steady in Germany since 2004.

Most German newspapers are owned by family concerns or other small companies with local roots,