Digital Learning Series | Rowman & Littlefield
Digital Learning Series
To the extent that education is the engagement of individual learners to knowledge, the Internet has changed everything because knowledge has moved to a new location. What is known by humankind is now located primarily on the Internet, and what is not there today will be soon. The great migration of knowledge into cyberspace has kicked off a technological revolution in education. Teachers have marched off to computer classes. Librarians have been retrotrained as technology specialists. The "crayon set" can type before they're in kindergarten, and coding is a second language for the generation of kids now in high school. Millions of dollars have been spent wiring schools, and millions more are being spent reworking the wiring to broadcast the Internet to mobile receivers. All the technological advances, both in equipment and user skills, have certainly been crucial to engaging knowledge on the Internet. But there is a further necessary component to the new education era introduced by the Internet. This book series swings the focus from the technology of connectivity to the digital form and substance of the knowledge engaged by learners on the Internet. Where is the information and how do we find it? In what form does it appear? How do we learn it? How do we teach it? These are real questions encountered every day in classroom teaching, independent study, and the preparation of online learning materials. We can answer these questions by realizing that the interesting challenges today are no longer technical. True innovation is concerned with creating learning resources in the digital milieu. It is technically possible to link to almost anything on the Internet, but how do we choose what to link to in order to create an effective learning environment? Teaching and learning knowledge in its new location require tools that are cognitively new, though no longer technically so. How does interactive multimedia connected to a stunningly rich context web make learning grammar or geography or genetics different from studying these subjects in an isolated classroom or book? How can I implement the advantages and minimize the disadvantages in my own teaching and learning? These and many other such immediate and important questions arise once we become competent on the technical side. The authors who have written books for this series are active participants in the challenges of engaging individual learners to the Internet, describing the reconnection to knowledge in our post-technology education world.

Editor(s): Judy Breck