non-technical disclaimer
My Story
Like many of us, I enjoyed making things as a kid. I used paper and pencil. Sometimes, I used colored pencils and colored paper. Even in college, I liked to make things.
When I became a teacher, I still liked to make things.
Then the Internet came along.
As students, we used to make things and put them on classroom walls. Now we can put the work in other places.
We could create our work and share it beyond the hallways. Back in 1999 we could tell our stories about a challenging rock climbing experience. Or about the challenges of communicating clearly while in a canoe.
What does all this mean for us? As faculty? As students? As parents? In our workplace?
A TIME OF COLLABORATION
Unlike traditional printed material, the web allows us to share ideas, and collaborate with colleagues in real time to create new understandings.
As faculty, we can write and interact with an audience of our peers who read the work we publish - and we can write for our peers and share in other ways.
For the first time in the history of humanity, external expressions of what we know have the same magical property as knowledge itself. Like the flame of Jefferson’s candle, both ideas and their expressions can now be given without being given away.
Education has to some degree lost its way; forgotten its identity. We’ve allowed ourselves and our institutions to be led away from our core value of openness – away from generosity, sharing, and giving, and toward selfishness, concealment, and withholding. To the degree that we have deserted openness, learning has suffered.