Hello all, back after an extended period...insert standard excuses here!

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend Chris Dede's latest work(s) on "neomillenial learning styles."

For some time, I have been trying to describe the latest developments on the net (blogging, podcasting, RSS, social software, etc.) to educational colleages in a coherent way. I have explained that progress in this area now reminds me of the excitement of the mid-1990's, as the Web broke onto the scene for all of us, but summarizing the varied array of emerging tools has proved difficult.

Table 1 in Prof. Dede's piece gets to many of the latest developments and weaves them into the framework of emerging learning styles. What we are seeing is an explosion of tools and environments which, applied to learning, allow students to learn based on "collectively seeking, sieving, and synthesizing experiences rather than individually locating and absorbing information from some single best source" and to express themselves through "nonlinear, associational webs."

As an aside, I had a chance to meet and interact with Professor Dede several years ago, when he was a guest and keynote speaker at UTA's Technology Fair--he is clearly a writer to add to your reading lists!

SITE Conference

Hello from SITE (http://aace.org). Discussions hear have been centered around the new standards for research as dicted by the federal government. This organization and the content organizations which are represented here are dialoguing about how to define our principles of research in this context and set up some guidelines for people who are submitting to content, technology and ed journals. There wil be a SIG at AERA which will be led by editors from various journals. People can submit studies to these editors, and the editors will comment on how these papers would be received by their editorial board.

I am way fired up to be part of these discussions. I stood up and made a rather impassioned speech about the buisness/political model that is driving research design via the projects they will fund and asked the questions about how our principles of research design are designed? How can they be supported duing changing political climes? What happens if we swing one way now, and then another in four more years? I said it a bit more eloquent than that, but those are the questions that are driving me.

I'm determined to get on the technology committees at my content organizations: IRA and NCTE so that I can have a voice about research that investigates technology integration in the schools.

I got a lot of support from Ian Gibson (president of SITE) after I presented our paper on online assessment.