<p>The purpose of this project is to support a personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning experience. Central to the study introduced here is the <a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/coi_model.html">model of a community of inquiry</a> that constitutes four elements essential to an educational experience: </p> <ul> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/cognitive.html">Cognitive Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/social.html">Social Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/teaching.html">Teaching Presence</a></li> <li><a href="http://communitiesofinquiry.com/sub/methodology.html">Methodology</a></li></ul>

"It's interestingly changing the way in which people are educated. You just need to ask intelligent questions, and you can get answers anytime, anywhere, in real time," Taylor said. "Education becomes no longer a fact-based learning process, it's search-based, cognitive. It's kind of like what happened to math skills with the calculator."

Well-constructed social environments provide an excellent opportunity to model high tech learning in a safe online environment. In other words, experienced learners can share their experience with new learners.

Seventy percent of the jobs available in the workforce will somehow be related to the acquisition and manipulation of digital knowledge. Workers will need to be able to access information, evaluate it for its worth, use it in creative ways, and be flexible enough to change their work product as the information changes. Ninety percent of those jobs will go unfilled if this need is not addressed today in the schools. The time is now.

<strong>Radio WillowWeb</strong> is a podcast for kids and by kids from the students at Willowdale Elemetary School in Omaha, Nebraska.

<a href="http://www.photobus.co.uk/" target="_blank"><strong>aniel Meadows</strong></a> defines digital stories as "short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart." The beauty of this form of digital expression, he maintains is that these stories can be created by people everywhere, on any subject, and shared electronically all over the world. Meadows goes on to describe digital stories as "multimedia sonnets from the people"

The study showed no difference in information recall between the different module lengths and formats; however, as module length increased, participants were more likely to not complete the modules.

You can also limit who gets to view a notebook by selecting different email addresses. This could be beneficial in a classroom context, when a student just wants to share access to their notebook with a few partners and the teacher, but not the entire class or the world.

Overall, however, I am VERY impressed with the Google Notebook tool and the possibilities it presents! I think it has HUGE applications for educational research, particularly because it permits such easy harvesting of links, quotations, and images with the date and originating URL/website included in the notebook clipping.