Isn't that the reason we save them?
The bulk of my daily activities are devoted to questions of integrating the internet into education and into the learning process (and no, they're not the same thing!). I've been doing, or trying to do, this for well over five years. It's not making me rich, but there's a living in it, and if the truth be told, I love what I do.
Lots has changed over those years, and not only the various jobs I've held and projects I've been affiliated with. Though I doubt that we're really any closer today than we were back then to knowing how best to integrate the internet into the learning process, among other things, it's no longer a pioneering effort. Everybody not only wants to get in on the act - it seems as though that's what they're doing. So what's changed is basically two-fold: many technological developments offer us a wider range of internet use, and many projects over the years have permitted us to better determine what works and what doesn't. The paper I found was my first attempt, of five years ago, at defining how we might define and operate online courses and an online school. I was happy to find that paper because it offered me an opportunity to see how much my own thinking has changed, perhaps even developed, though I find that I'm no in rush to read it.
That paper quoted from someone else's attempts in the same direction - a project which seemed to me at the time among the most interesting and promising. I knew that its funding had been discontinued almost four years ago (even remembering the name of the project and finding it in my bookmarks demanded quite a bit of effort) but since a phoenix-like return had been promised, I was curious to know whether it had seen any new developments. I rather easily succeeded in finding what seems like a current e-mail address for the former director of the project, and then was a bit surprised that a couple of weeks went by without receiving an answer. Just before posting this column a response showed up in my inbox.
Go to: Reflections of a Spring Cleaner.