One small step

Blogs. Wikis. Furl. RSS. As Captain Jack Aubrey said, "What an age of wonders we live in."

I'm an educator. I work with technology at a mid-sized community college in a mid-sized community in a mid-sized state that's seen its economy undergo radical changes.

The head of the state's board of regents recently told an audience that similarly radical changes were needed in education. "If we don't succeed, we're doomed," he concluded.

I found that encouraging. Unlike most of us in the trenches who've been calling for reform for decades, he's actually in a position to get the ossified academic structure to seriously look at alternatives to counting butt-in-seat time as a measure of learning, to find ways to do things in fundamentally different ways.

The read-write web is a disruptive technology. It's our job as tool-using educators to figure out how to use it to help our students. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," the saying goes. Let's get our walking shoes on.