Social Bookmarking: It’s not just for breakfast anymore

There is an awesome list of the Top 100 ToolsFor Learning 2011 that showcase some of the GREAT tools that are out there. I decided to revisit and update an article I wrote last year on Diigo and give some additional background to social bookmarking.

So...this Top 100 list is a pretty neat list of tools. I went through the list and counted 74 of the tools I have actually tried out (although on a regular basis, probably less than half of that are things I use). Some sections I had never even heard of! Noticeboard and Online Stickies, Social Media Dashboards, & Curation Tools…so some exploring to do later. (I have no idea what a curation tool is, and apparently Word doesn’t either, as it comes up misspelled. One that jumped out is my old friend, Diigo.

Diigo. I have used Diigo now in my professional and personal life for two years now and had no idea what “Diigo” meant until I decided to write this post (and this is my second blog post on Diigo). Pronounced “DEE-GO” and is an abbreviation for Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff. (That is from the Diigo site and not really sure why it isn’t Diigos…the “s” for “Stuff”) Diigo is under the list, Social Bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking? Social bookmarking refers to the ability to save bookmarks online, but also organize, manage and SHARE those bookmarks. It goes back to 1996 with the launch of an online service called itList. For 1996, it was pretty advanced. It allowed users to create public and private lists. From there a bunch of companies came and went, but in 2003 social bookmarking went mainstream with the launch of Delicious, known as del.icio.us. del.icio.us (notice the clever use of the suffix .”us”) allowed for “tagging” with bookmarks. Tagging is just a form of labeling that helps organize bookmarks and also search for them. Yahoo! purchased del.icio.us in 2005 and it became the social bookmarking standard. In 2010, Yahoo! announced that it would be discontinuing the service and floods of people left to the up-and-coming service, Diigo. Diigo had been around since 2006, but with the announcement of Delicious shutting down, people flocked  to Diigo. Probably helped that Diigo soon implemented a tool for Delicious users to import their bookmarks directly in to Diigo accounts. Delicious wasn’t discontinued, however, and it is number #24 on the Best Tools list. Want a GREAT introduction to Social Bookmarking? The clever folks at the Commoncraft Show (one of my favorite tutorial sites) have a short video on Social Bookmarking! (they have videos on many, many technology topics…wonderful group).

Why use a social bookmarking site? In a blog post I wrote in March, 2011, Social Bookmarking Changed My Life (…well, my teaching) I wrote how I was introduced to the wonderful world of social bookmarking. I never had heard of itList (until I researched this blog), but I remember when Delicious came out! I thought it was ridiculous. Why would I want to share my bookmarks online? Good grief, it was 2003 and I had a Friendster account to connect with people! I wasn’t thinking it through, though. I was, for lack of a better word, foolish. Instead of using Delicious to sort the hundreds of bookmarks I used for work, I instead, hand coded those bookmarks in HTML in websites. !!! If I had been using Delicious, I could have hand coded ONE link: that, to my Delicious account!  I grew up, though, and finally started into the wonderful world of Social Bookmarking when I joined McREL. The instructor, Elizabeth Hubbell, instead of giving out a list of bookmarks, she instead gave her Diigo Links: http://www.diigo.com/network/erhubbell. That list led the group to ALL the workshop links, categorized  into lists and searchable by tags. I could “follow” Elizabeth and when she found interesting bookmarks and indexed them, I would have access. I finally figured out why I would want to do social bookmarking, and within minutes I had my OWN Diigo account (http://www.diigo.com/network/islandandy).

Diigo is a fantastic tool for education, and it’s FREE, although, as with most free services, there is a “premium” service that costs some coin. Education accounts, however, have some of the premium services, plus classroom services, and does not cost a thing. So how do I use Diigo? Well, I do a lot (LOT) of workshops in the United States and the Asia/Pacific around educational technology and in particular, McREL’s ClassroomInstruction That Works (nice plug, eh?). There are 9 instructional strategies, so for my workshops, I have 9 instructional lists! For example, when covering “Setting Objectives,” the first instructional strategy, I have people go right to: http://www.diigo.com/list/islandandy/settingobjectives. To make it easier, they click on it from a workshop website built in Google Sites (#43). So this is what it looks like:

The Setting Objectives list has 16 items in it. Rather than type out 16 URLs on the website AND annotate them, I use Diigo.

How easy is it? Pretty dang easy. Most of the web browsers have Diigo support so you can use it right from the browser. I use Firefox and it has a Diigo toolbar.

I wanted to add the itList information to a Diigo list, Social Bookmarking. I clicked the “Bookmark” button and up pops a window. From here, I can name the site, annotate the site and add it to a list or group.

When I have finished, the “Bookmark” button is now red, telling me that it is a website that I have in Diigo already. I can still click “Bookmark”, though, and edit the information, add to a list or group, etc.

Diigo is pretty slick! But wait! It gets better!

Groups are another feature of Diigo that are great for educators. No one person can keep abreast of the sheer massive amounts of information available on the web. Diigo allows users to participate in groups. Instead of one person finding information, it can be hundreds of people finding information. I belong to several Diigo groups: Web Tools forTeachers, Google in Education, Cliff’s Notes on EdTech, and Cliff’sNotes on Instructional Design. I even started my own group, iPad for Education. It has 199 members from all over the world, and all interested in using iPads in education! Think about that. I find a lot of information I save to Diigo on iPads in education, but this is 199 people helping me find information! Sure, not all of it is great, and not all group members contribute. Overall, though, I get a lot of great information from others and I share some, too. Groups can be public or private. My group is private, so people have to request membership (I want to keep out spammers), but the information is visible to everyone.

As an educational leadership tool, it is wonderful. A group of 2^nd grade teachers all create their own list within their school to share resources. A school has a new 1-to-1 laptop program, so the principal sets up a school group around 1:1 computing. A C&I director sets up a group for the district. It isn’t just around education, either. Health care, IT services, etc would all benefit from sharing resources through a social networking site like Diigo.

Want more information on Social Bookmarking? Well, in researching this article, I created a Diigo list: http://www.diigo.com/list/islandandy/Social-Bookmarking

By the way, I wrote this article in Word (#42), researched it with Google (#15), used Wikipedia (#11), saved it to Dropbox (#6), and posted it to WordPress (#4). With the exception of Word, all free, and all available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection…and could have used Open Office (#61) as a free alternative to Word. Flat.

The World is Flat 2012

When I used to hear “the earth is flat”, what normally came to mind was Christopher Columbus freaking out the crews of three little ships heading across the Atlantic, or even the infamous Flat Earth Society, often lampooned and now themselves sellouts to the global marketplace. Since around 2005, though, I think of Thomas Friedman’s, The World is Flat. First released in 2005, then again in 2006, and finally again in 2007 (Version 3.00): The world is flat; The earth is flat; Flat globalization. The list of “flat” goes on and on and on. While Friedman is the target of many attacks, one thing is for certain: he may not have started the conversation on globalization, but he took it mainstream. He owns the “the world is flat.” Soon after the publishing of the first edition, education followed suit and the “flat schools” and “flat classrooms” discussions occupied the conference scene (I had quite a nice presentation circuit in education conferences in the Asia/Pacific in the mid-2000’s with it, so thank you Mr. Friedman). So why resurrect a discussion on a book that was last updated in 2007? Because while a lot has changed since then (a scant five years), the discussion (and predictions) are still happening!

The first exposure many educators had to idea of “the world is flat” didn’t come from reading the book, but from a PowerPoint presentation posted on YouTube in 2006 now in a Wiki called Shift Happens. The presentation was originally for a faculty meeting at Arapahoe High School in a suburb of Denver. Since that original posting, it has been viewed over 5 million times (I still use Did You Know Version 2.0 in educational technology workshops, too). A high school faculty presentation starting a world wide educational movement rather speaks to the idea that the world might indeed be a tad flat. Shift Happens. The idea that the world is changing very quickly and that geography isn’t nearly the barrier it used to be. Sounds flat. Also inspired by the first version of The World Is Flat, two teachers (both Americans) linked their classrooms in the United States and Bangladesh and from that experience created the Flat Classroom Project. Friedman went on in the next editions of the book to mention their project (in chapter 13). 2012 and the site is still up and active and used by educators all over the world. “How flat is your classroom” is a question (and title of the article) from Education Leadership and goes on to provide resources for “flattening” the classroom. The idea that “the world is flat” is now education mainstream, too.

This first chapter in the books is “While I Was Sleeping.” So what happened while Friedman was sleeping, and more importantly, what has happened since 2007 when he “woke up”? Friedman starts the book with a journey to India. He is amazed at the business from America being outsourced there, and not just call centers. Call centers were obvious – even in 2005 Americans were getting used to the idea of speaking to someone from India to book a flight or get technical help hooking up a printer. But there were also software developers, accounting firms, and even virtual personal assistants. Pretty incredible. He broke down what he calls three stages of Globalization (1.0, 2.0, and 3.0) and gave explanations on how it was possible that Americans could do business inexpensively with India in real time. Globalization 3.0 is our current stage and has been made possible by the huge investments by the United States in telecommunication infrastructure. All pretty interesting and for the time, not something the mainstream was talking about. So what has happened since then? There seems to be an industry of “the world is not flat” authors, dedicated to pointing out that the world is NOT flat. That is not to say that Friedman was right on every point and many of the disagreements others have are well founded. Soon after the publication of The World is Flat, Atlantic Monthly followed up with a 2005 article, The World Is Spiky. Clever name and some good points that the world, while leveling, is really “spiky” with concentrations of people and resources in only parts of the world. In seven years, though, some of the major premises of the article, especially on the world economy, are now wrong. The author states, “Together New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston have a bigger economy than all of China.” Certainly not an accurate statement in 2012. What could have caused this shift to happen (pardon the pun)? Even in an op ed article from a few days ago, The World is not flat, a professor vehemently disagrees with Friedman. Introducing the article he writes, “Thomas Friedman is wrong to say in his celebrated book, “The World is Flat,” that the world is always within one’s reach, or just a click away with the use of a mouse.” Taking the view of The World Is Spiky, the professor describes the millions of people living in poverty that do not have access to the resources that create a flat world. While I agree with the professor on his points on poverty (and misallocated resources), I don’t think Friedman meant “the world is flat for every single person in the world.” Here is the irony with that article: it was written in the Philippines and I read it in the United States. Flat. More irony? Friedman wrote about Indian call centers taking McDonald’s drive through orders in middle America in 2005. In trying to find out if this trend was still happening (which I never did), I read that Philippine call centers have overtaken Indian call centers for American clients. Yet even more irony? I read two articles on this. The first from the Times of India called Philippines beats India to emerge as leader is call centre business, and the second from the New York Times called New Capital of Call Centers…both written by the same author in India. Just five years from the last publication and shift happened again…this time from India to the Philippines. NBC’s short lived sitcom, Outsourced, about an American working in an Indian call center might be resurrected to have the same show take place in the Philippines.

Plenty of critics have come out of the woodwork to take aim at Mr. Friedman. In a scathing article, Friedman Aflame, National Review takes aim to say, “Tom Friedman claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea and making it meaningless (Goldberg, 2010).” Harsh criticism while the article acknowledges in Friedman’s own words that he doesn’t really believe the earth is flat (in the sense of true globalization. He states, “Of course the world is not flat. But it isn’t round anymore either. I have found that using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before – which is what is happening in the world – really helps people who are trying to understand the essential impact of all the technological changes coming together today (Goldberg, 2010).” National Review doesn’t like Friedman. Big shock, but the attacks come from scholars, too. In a historical analysis, the author of The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of the empire, takes on Friedman as if he suggests that the world is moving to a level playing field and will reach some sort of equilibrium. “Friedman’s arguments in his book and on his cover reflect a very powerful and prevalent view of globalization, a view that is similar to and derived from other grand narratives that are presented as inevitable and unlinear…I hope in this paper to destabilize and problematize the image of the inevitability and unilinearity of today’s flat earth (Domosh, 2010).” Did I miss something in Chapter 1 of Friedman’s book that somehow told me that the world was flat throughout history and was certainly flat today? No. Did I need to read 18 pages to figure that out? Although it was an interesting historical perspective, why call Friedman out on this (a good title, perhaps?).
A good example to see the flattening world is to look at shifts in education. In 2004 a hedge fund manager, Salman Khan started tutoring his family over the Internet using YouTube. It took off to become a hugely successful non-profit of the Khan Academy  with over 3,000 tutorial videos covering a huge range of topics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers up entire courses for free through it’s OpenCourseWare project . Just last fall, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun created a free class, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and over 350,000 people from all over the world registered! It has led to Stanford creating a new program, Staford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) http://see.stanford.edu. Not to be outdone in the flattening of education, Harvard has is now offering free online courses, as well. Some in academia (the scholarly world of ivory towers) admit that their world is not flat yet, but moving there, as Peter Felten did in Teaching, Learning, and Globalisation(sic). Regardless of what we think of flattening (in terms of education access), it is happening.

In Terrie Norris’s, The World is Flat – And That’s Okay, (from a completely unrelated field from mine), in the trade journal, Professional Safety, she mentions how her own field and how information and access are coming from many other places than just the United States. Her own contact book and social networking like LinkedIn are now international (Norris, 2011). My own Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are full of people from the United States (my home), but also countries from all over the Asia and Pacific. I regularly Skype and conduct webinars to places halfway around the world as just a daily part of doing business. For myself, the world is flat. I recognize that not everybody has equal access to information, and even in America I know there are “information deserts.” The world is flat, but that doesn’t mean it is fair.

Works cited (that didn’t have web links):
Domosh, M. (2010). The world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire. Progress in Human Geography. 34(4), 419-435.
Goldberg, J. (2010). Friedman AFLAME. National Review,  62(4), 38-41.
Norris, T. (2011). The world is flat – and that’s okay. Professional Safety. 56(11). 1-1.

Cloudless in the Clouds

Cloudless...my worst part of the 7 1/2 hour flight to Honolulu from Guam was not the seat time, but rather the lack of connection to the Internet. Like being pulled from the matrix, I was faced with not having every question, thought, & whim in my head answered instantaneously. I was in an information wasteland. The price of being unplugged, of being 30,000 feet in the clouds, was I no longer had access to the cloud...the repository of knowledge and entertainment...my connection to the world. Like an information junkie, I needed my fix: what a cute pic of my friend's kids on Facebook (I haven't talked to them in twenty years, but hey); I wonder when the first commercial non-stop flight took place between Hawaii and Guam?; my ear is still blocked from diving two days ago, I should look that up... The list goes on and on, interrupted by the occasional gourmet meal served up in a cellophane wrapped plastic tray and restroom breaks. The drawback to being an ADD-type-of-person with a sense of Internet entitlement. I get annoyed when I am not jacked in getting my info dump of stuff (for the most part) I can live without. Kind of like being given a seat at the world's best buffet and instead of enjoying the finest meals, hunkering down with Spam, canned peas, & Twinkies...and then gorging on said Spam, canned peas, and Twinkies. I just don't deserve to be in the cloud most of the time. Hey, don't get me wrong. I do use it for productive things, too...helping educators find useful tools for the classroom is important...but for every Ying, I seem to have 2, 3, or 4 Yangs. I need balance, Grasshopper.

I realized I had a problem when I was hiking the final ascent of a mountain top in Wyoming with my children a few weeks ago. A gadget junkie, too, I was tracking the whole affair with a GPS (since it is important to electronically track ones distance and elevation on clearly marked trails with signage). At the peak I did the obligatory pictures (digital SLR AND digital point-and-shoot...yes, I have a problem), logged the elevation and peak in the GPS, and wondered about the time. I don't wear a watch, but had my smart phone in my pack, and I use that as a watch...so out it came. Here in back country Wyoming, at 12,000+ feet I got a signal! So I took away spending time with my children (precious time) to actually look at what email came in and then take another pic (with the smart phone, so at 3 cameras now) and posted it to Facebook. Yes-I-am-that-lame.

Almost every where I go I have information access...mountain tops in Wyoming to even all the main islands of Micronesia (and a few outer islands, as well). What do I do with said time on, though? Every thought becomes a quest for an answer. It will be even worse when my iPhone 4s is delivered next week, too! Perhaps then I should relish the time in the air (123,647 miles this year to date), and view it not as a curse, but a blessing. Already some airlines are offering wifi service on some flights. Once that happens I will be lost yet again to information overload. So now, on this plane, I will enjoy some solitude.  I will instead enjoy some reflection time, some writing time, get in some reading...and wonder about things the way I used to...before I had access to all the answers in the world.

Some thoughts on social networking & how I view the world through it

Not having television service I am sometimes out of the loop on things unless I happen to be jacked-in to the Internet. That was the case Thursday night. I was out of the loop (unplugged), so I missed all the news coverage of the horrific earthquake in Japan and the subsequent tsunami warnings for the Pacific Islands & US Pacific Coast. Instead, I was on the US mainland watching “Grownups” via Netflix-Instant.  I woke up Friday morning, and jacked back into the world and found out the terrible news. I spent the rest of the morning finding out what happened to friends/family throughout Micronesia via Facebook, emails, & Twitter; getting the news reports linked from Facebook & blogs about the tsunami approaching Hawaii; and reading blogs about the earthquake/tsunami in Japan. When the news that the CNMI and Guam were given an all clear, I was still asleep. I quickly found out that Palau, and FSM were ok (main islands). However, I was really concerned about the outer islands of Yap and Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands (low lying atolls, most between 3-6 feet above sea level). Even small tidal surges can wipe out crops and the fresh water lens, leaving the populations devastated. Through a discussion forum and on Facebook, my friend Clark Graham on Chuuk was able to report out on the status of the outer islands and that they were ok, and soon after reports that the Marshall Islands were fine. (Clark’s discussion post on Chuuk Reform)

This isn’t new news, of course…using social networking & the Internet to spread information has been widely reported for years (and most recently throughout the Middle East). The true power of social networking became apparent to me, personally, when I was Twittering during the Honduran unrest a year and a half ago. A father of a girl that was on a mission trip in Honduras picked up my Tweets and figured out I was at the same hotel as his daughters group. He emailed me to check on her safety, as the phones were out (but Internet was up???), and I was able to tell him that her group had left the hotel earlier to catch a plane out back to the US. Some guy I never met, didn’t know his daughter or the group, but via social networking he was able to get the info he desperately needed. I was reminded of the value of social networking again yesterday when I was the one searching for information.

This afternoon the Facebook postings and Tweets are back to the normal, random (and often pointless) musings I am used to seeing, but it is good to know that it is there when we need it (really need it). For those in Japan, and those Japanese abroad still searching for answers about their loved ones, I hope they can find what they need, as well. Far too many of their stories will not have a happy conclusion like mine did today. Through social networking and the Internet hopefully some minds can be put at ease through the instant stream of information that surrounds us.

Social Bookmarking Changed My Life (...well, my teaching)

This week I saw an advertisement for a book (yes a book) on the best websites for fill-in-the-blank. Hmmm. A book on good websites? Another great example of the old guard holding on to the past…still hoping that some Boomers out there think that this is a good idea and will plop down over thirty bucks for free resources. Sure, the sites are cataloged, researched, annotated, and have nice descriptions. But a book? …and not just a book, but an expensive book? Rather than go into the obvious here (if you are going to sell a product on websites, wouldn’t it be better to sell it as an app so you can update/modify/change sites as they change), I am going to talk about the wonderful and free world of social bookmarking. Besides, anybody in 2011 that would buy a book on websites isn’t reading this blog (and probably think blogs are marshy areas in cold, temperate climates). Ah, I am digressing. (Is that getting blogged down?) Anyway…

So, social bookmarking. Free online services that allow you to not only share your bookmarks, but find other bookmarks on a variety of topics and interests. Here…go to to Wikipedia if you want more on social bookmarking. I had dismissed social bookmarking for years, actually. I remember hearing about this new service called Delicious and how I could save my bookmarks online AND share bookmarks online. As is often the case with me, I dismissed it as just ONE more thing that was neat, but I didn’t need. Why would I need it? Share my bookmarks online? I already shared bookmarks with myself across platforms & computers through web browsers, and that seemed good enough. Then I started sharing a lot more bookmarks with colleagues, students, clients, etc. In the “old days” when I shared bookmarks, it was usually through a website. I would copy & paste the URL into a webpage, give it a name, and write a description…voilà! Bookmark shared via website…people could access it…life was good.

As with all things “web” the static webpage I created was hard to keep current. Sure, a few web links here and there were easy to keep track of, but what about dozens or hundreds of websites? Ack. Each semester with each new class there were more and more and more changes. In the world of educational technology, things just kept evolving and moving on! THAT is when I FINALLY saw the light (and the point) of social bookmarking:

1)   I needed easy/fast way to change/add bookmarks

2)   I needed to keep current in my field without surfing the web 24/7 for new & engaging websites to share in classes/workshops

A benefit I found later was the organization these sites provided. I could place sites in a list. The example here is from a list in Diigo: Practice. This list has 59 websites related to “Practice” as it relates to skill in K-12 classrooms. The list is also public, so I can share it online with anyone (private is also an option to share with selected people, or even just yourself).

Bookmarks can be tagged, too. So one bookmark could be useful for music, reference, lessons, and practice. So if was looking for a good website on any of those topics, that site would pop up.

There are a lot of great social bookmarking sites out there (Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Diigo are among the most popular…and free). I have settled in on Diigo, though. Diigo seems to take social bookmarking to the NEXT level by adding in features like leaving notes on sites, caching websites, saving sites to read later, etc. There is also a wonderful (and free) account for teachers to better utilize Diigo in the classroom. Just one of the ways Diigo has changed my teaching and the way I deliver staff development is I am now part of several networks on Diigo that share web resources on a variety of topics in my interest areas. Rather than pay for a static book on websites that may or may not remain active by the time of printing (or be current by the time of printing), I get annotated web links from many professionals that I can review and comment on…and best of all, add to my bookmarks to share with my networks. And vice-versa. When I find great things to share, my network can benefit and share those on, as well. All in real time, current, relevant, and free. Just how I like my education resources.

For my Diigo lists go to: http://www.diigo.com/list/islandandy

The iPad2. The silver bullet we have been waiting for? Maybe.

I just finished watching the blog-cast of the unveiling of Apple’s iPad2. Normally I don’t go in for such things…especially since not only was it not a video stream (blog-cast?)…I just don’t care when Apple releases something (or care enough to stop my day and watch). This was different though (pardon the pun). The iPad2, I think, has the potential to really, really change education. So, there I sat in my office watching the blog-cast, YM’ing my friend in the office (she was also watching) and Tweeting and ReTweeting the goings-on of the event. Yes. Ubernerd.

So why the excitement? I have an iPad right now. Love it. Use it for word processing, web browsing, games, movies, music…even all the books I read now are on it. I haven’t pulled my laptop out on an airplane since I got it! Even so, while I think it is great for me, I didn’t run and jump on the iPad in the classroom bandwagon. It wouldn’t allow video-out for most applications, was very limited on productivity for schools, and inputting files could be cumbersome. I thought it was great for me, but just not quite there yet when it came to the classroom. Or should say, rather, advocating for all classrooms…as classrooms across the country are doing great things with it. The price point per student didn’t really excite me. If you could afford it, super. But really, a laptop was around the same money and had a lot more options (multimedia for one).

That changed with iPad2. Video-mirroring, cameras, lighter…all for the same price as the original iPad. Ok, nice. BUT, but got my interest was the increase in productivity tools (iMovie and Garage Band for one), and the interactivity. The potential to be always-on…jacked-in is there. Finally a digital tool for the digital natives. This has the potential (POTENTIAL) to be the big game changer in education. A device the size of a slim paperback is a window to creating knowledge, as well as intaking knowledge. Wow!

There is a lot of potential here (notice, I keep saying potential). I have been an educational technologist for well over a decade and this is the first time I have thought, “we just may be right about there!” I am an early adopter of mobile technologies (yes, I had a Newton and my first mobile phone was the size of a large purse)…and I like to figure out how to use mobile technologies in the classroom, too. That doesn’t mean I was on a bandwagon to put those technologies in ALL classrooms. I am wondering about iPad2, though. Seems this could be the precursor to the Holy Grail of ed tech we have been waiting for…textbooks are now “textbooks” and studying crosses lines into entertainment. It has the potential (POTENTIAL) to rewrite how we look at ed tech. It COULD replace textbooks, multimedia, and computers for students...all in a cheap & portable device. It COULD become the center of their learning, entertainment, and communication...all crossing borders into the other.

 

I have seen a lot of great ed tech squandered over the years, and seen the systems (education, government…and especially the business of education) usually get in the way. This is so powerful, though, I think the students might actually make it work in spite of the efforts to ensure their failure. Game on.