Online Learning and Online Life

As we bring technology into schools, we have to recognize that new tools will change the way the organization operates. I recently reread Release 2.1: A Design for Living in the Digital Age (1998) by Esther Dyson of EDVenture Holdings. This pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube book has a lot of great insights into why we go online and how to think about the governance of online spaces. There is a lot of food for thought about privacy, security, anonymity, and other important issues that many schools face when they start allowing and encouraging use of Web 2.0 tools for learning. Her rules at the end of the book are a great guide for online interaction, but would also make an excellent guide for establishing a learning environment–whether online, face-to-face or some combination:

• Use your own judgement
• Disclose yourself
• Trust but verify
• Contribute to the communities you love or build your own
• Assert your own rights and respect those of others
• Don’t get into silly fights
• Ask questions
• Be a producer
• Be generous
• Have a sense of humor
• Always make new mistakes

If this list intrigues you, I encourage you to check out Release 2.1 and read her blog on the Huffington Post. I found this post Don’t Cry for Me, Microhoogle, on user-control of data and privacy a very interesting take on how new ways to gather and organize data are changing how online systems behave. Think about what might happen if students controlled their data and could consolidate it on the fly rather than relying on institutional transcripts…