The Rise of Digital Textbooks

Diverse districts say digital texts are the future; "living textbooks" are part of 21st century learning.

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The Next Open Source Movement

Educational institutions continue to embrace open source systems as alternatives to costly commercial systems. Read more here.

Convenience Is the Future

Monitoring classes on cellphones. Taking courses at multiple colleges. The college students of 2020 are going to demand an education on their terms. Is your college ready? Read the new report, "The College of 2020: Students," from Chronicle Research Services. Click here to read the free executive summary

Personal Learning Environments for Overcoming Knowledge Boundaries between Activity Systems in Emerging Adulthood.

Stephen Downes posted this article on his blog; OLDaily and I thought it worthwhile to share on my blog:

In this paper we suggest a possible answer to the question on why Social Network Systems (SNSs) are important for bridging social capital and for knowledge construction during emerging adulthood. We argue why web social artefacts 2.0, and particularly those defined as Personal Learning Environments, which consider also SNSs, could be more effective than web artefacts 1.0, such as those defined as Virtual Learning Environments (mainly represented by classical web platforms and web forums), for overcoming knowledge confines between activity systems during transitions in emerging adulthood.

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Whose problem is Digital Divide?

Source:http://latimes.image2.trb.com

As I mentioned in previous blogs, lately, I have been thinking a lot about the existence of a digital divide. Mainly because I am privy to an abundance of information on how technology is continuing to transform and revolutionize the way we learn. However, globally the majority of world's citizens do not have access to basic necessities, much less educational technology. I was speaking with a fellow education researcher recently and he believes that educators should not be concerned about the existence of a digital divide. His comments left me asking, "whose problem is it anyways?".

About digital divide,Christopher D. Sessums wrote,

"Funding issues for educational technology are not a teacher's problem, right? Many participants in a class I am teaching seem to believe that they must wait for someone else to solve this problem of finding adequate resources to ensure every student has Internet access at home. It is not knowledge of the issues that these teachers lack, but it could be a time and/or leadership constraint. After all, what incentives are there for teachers to work individually or better yet in unison to get community members involved in supporting learning?

In this sense I feel teachers' complacency is part of the reason we have a digital divide--that is, it's not my problem that my kids cannot access the Internet from home."

With teachers these days overly consumed with standardized tests and rigid accountability requirements, is it their responsibility to also fight the battle to eliminate the digital divide that exist?