SIM

Part III of three part series on Educational Landscapes looks at some of the new strategies I call on in my teaching. Many of these approaches are mediated by recent advances in mobile and social media. III. Beyond Participation: Engagement To help focus discussion on active, positive change, I’d like to draw on Eric Gordon’ [...]

“It’s probably not even a book,” one Emily Carr design student shared, during last week’s briefing on the power and potential of the ebook. As a content partner and SIM centre collaborator, I’d been invited to attend Jonathan Aitken’s upper-level design class to discuss a larger ebook research/production project. The first meeting was about learning [...]

This post originally appeared on SIMCentre.ca.

Today I got to be a (tweeting) fly on the wall in Jonathan Aitken’s ebook design class. Somewhat to my amusement, Jonathan began by explaining how old people like us used to read in linear way, where you flip through pages in order. The explanation seemed less amusingly superfluous once a quick show of hands revealed that the vast majority of students had read fewer than 10 books in the past year. (OK, I’m not doing that much better myself, but I have kids — useful not only for their steady supply of amusing Facebook anecdotes, but as an iron-clad excuse for not reading more.)

Once we got into discussion mode, what was really interesting was how reverently these not-very-book-consuming young people talk about the role and value of books. Some representative comments:

Todd Essig has a thoughtful post about how social networks have affected the process of saying good-bye in our culture. Now that the hospital where he works is closing, he anticipated more than the usual end-of-school-year good-byes. Instead, he’s seen less: as one of his residents observed, “there has been more ’see you on Facebook!’ and ‘I’ll follow you on Twitter‘” than actual goodbyes.

While social networks promise to help us keep in touch, that same promise may deprive us of a meaningful good-bye, Essig writes: