109 Ideas for Virtual Learning: How Open Content Will Help Close the Digital Divide(Digital Learning Series)

109 IDEAS For Virtual Learning reveals the online knowledge venue that today's generation uses to learn while playing along at school to receive promotions, diplomas, and degrees. Calling that venue "the virtual knowledge ecology", Judy Breck describes the networking of open content for learning online where knowledge is fresher, authoritative, and more compelling than at school. In this book, she provides her eyewitness account of the decade-long, ongoing cascade of what is known by humankind from traditional resources into the Internet and explains the network mechanisms that interconnect the knowledge once it gets online. Breck says the resulting virtual knowledge ecology is causing students worldwide literally to study from the same virtual page. The author forewarns readers to expect emerging good news as the virtual knowledge ecology opens the way for a global golden age of education in which students learn more and teachers are respected professionals. Breck contends that literacy and learning follow naturally from the Internet interfacing what humankind knows. A boy or girl's hands can now hold a wireless device mirroring enlightenment from a new virtual venue into his or her mind.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Section 1: Approach Chapter 3 Section 2: Attitude Chapter 4 Section 3: Access Chapter 5 Section 4: Aggregation Chapter 6 Section 5: Adapting Chapter 7 Section 6: Action Chapter 8 Appendix 1: The Cyberschool Cascade Chapter 9 Appendix : URLs for Web Pages Mentioned in the Ideas

About the Author :
Judy Breck, a digital interface tool inventor and web author and designer, became a passionate advocate of online learning as she led the content development of the largest open learning knowledge website during the Internet boom. She has taught high school in Texas, coordinated a partnership program in New York City schools, staffed White House education symposia and mentored inner city high school students.

Review :
Judy Breck is onto something — something big. If you are interested in the future of knowledge and learning, her big idea will be useful to you. For millennia access to much of the world's knowledge has been limited to the rich and powerful. The Internet creates the opportunity to reduce inequalities, if the information on the Internet is open and free. Judy Breck provides a comprehensive and compelling introduction to a rapidly growing worldwide movement to make this opportunity a reality. This collection of ideas urges educators and planners to throw out some preconceptions—uncomfortable as that might be—and embrace the changes and the startling potential of the Internet. The book's a great read and is certain to drop some useful seeds into your mind should you open your mind to it a little. Anyone planning or making policy for education will be inspired and informed by this book. Judy Breck shifts the focus both from fixing what is broken and from bogging down in technology - saying neither is necessary. Her vision of globally networked knowledge dynamically moving within the internet and individually through students' mobile computers and minds returns the adventure and joy to learning. In the world she shows us, a child in a rural village anywhere will literally learn from the same pages as the most privileged scholars on earth.