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

by Judy Breck, John Seely Brown

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.

352 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 2005