chapters 1 & 8

There were several things that I learned after reading chapters 1 and 8 from the book The World is Open by Curtis Bonk. Particularly, the acronym WE-ALL-LEARN stood out of the reading. This stands for the top ten educational openers for people to better understand the 'web of learning'. For someone like myself, who feels somewhat overwhelmed by all the different options for integrating technology into education, this organization is helpful. W-web searching in the world of e-books, E-learning and blended learning, A-availability of open source and free software, L-leveraged resources and OpenCourseWare, L-learning object repositories and portals, L-learner participation in open information communities, E-electronic collaboration and interaction, A-alternative reality learning, R-real-time mobility and portability, N-networks of personalized learning. This framework was created to 'divide up online resources in such a way that educators, trainers, teachers, freelance lecturers, instuctional desigers, and others would' benefit as opposed to avoiding the web. The idea of electronic collaboration and interaction was introduced as having taken 'a highly competitive focus, in schools and in industry, toward the need for greater collaboration and teamwork skills.' Some benefits of collaboration include the sharing of ideas, talents, resources, networks and products. The author gives several specific examples of collaboration such as mobile phones, e-mail, web conferencing, woice over internet protocol and internet. These tools help people with annotating and sharing documents, syncing team calenders, project planning, presenting and discussing. I found the authors real life examples of collaboration helped to keep the text relative.