Reading the Universal Digital Library

As online teaching grows, we are always looking for good ideas and project partners to help foment the acquisition of knowledge and memes on the internet and in the virtual classroom.

The Universal Digital Library is an ambitious project we fully support:

Up until now, the transmission of our cultural heritage has depended on limited numbers of copies in fragile media. The fires of Alexandria irrevocably severed our access to any of the works of the ancients. In a thousand years, only a few of the paper documents we have today will survive the ravages of deterioration, loss, and outright destruction.

With no more than 10 million unique book and document editions before the year 1900, and perhaps 100 million since the beginning of recorded history, the task of preservation is much larger. With new digital technology, though, this task is within the reach of a single concerted effort for the public good, and this effort can be distributed to libraries, museums, and other groups in all countries.

This is an ambitious project that is slowly winning its goal of indexing every printed page in the world and we cannot wait to read every word!

Kindle in the Classroom

The greatest power in the new Kindle ebook reader from Amazon is the grand possibility of its use in the classroom.

Imagine how easy it would be to deliver up-to-date and of-the-moment textbook information to students?

You could all browse the morning paper together.

Course materials can be emailed and uploaded to the Kindle automagically.

The beauty of Kindle is -- even in the virtual classrooms of Boles University -- we can still use the same traditions and memes of Kindle learning as other on campus classrooms.

Kindle clarifies and evens out the blurry line between traditional teaching and virtual learning.

Kindle makes the virtual real and the real virtual -- and in that combination of ingenuity and inspiration -- comes the real purpose of us all: To carry forward the learning of others so that we may begin to transform memory into meaning in our current lives and to then warn others in the future against the perils of what we already know.

How the iPhone Changed Education

We love the iPhone because it will change education and online learning forever.

SMS messages will be used as a chat client.

Classrooms become virtual as lecture NOTES are taken in real time and lectures are provided on iPods and research materials are watched on YouTube Video.

Students can search the WEB from their hands.

Instructors can time exams with the CLOCK and average grades with the CALCULATOR.

Add a bit of future iPhone Internetworking and suddenly you're all in the classroom from disparate parts of the world.

We iLove it!

Safety and Online Learning

In light of the terrible Virginia Tech tragedy, we cannot help but realize one massive strength -- that some think is a weakness of Online Learning -- in that our classrooms are virtual and intensively interactive.

Distance Learning has no doors or rooms or dorms -- we are in the ether of the world -- and we educate through flying bits and bytes from afar while being right next to the eye.

Others claim Online Learning is too impersonal and impractical in a human sensation -- we argue Distance Learning is safer, cheaper and more modernly precise on so many more human levels than traditional classroom learning.