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.

Oh, I can hardly bear to go on… in fact I can’t, so I’ll finish here, except to say that that such an interesting overview of a slice of ed tech history has rarely, if ever, been followed by such a reactionary, limited and incomplete ivory-towered, condescending and ill-informed argument (if you can call it that).

When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection – or around the world, for that matter – can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product.

As it turned out, this was one of the best courses, online or onsite, I have ever taught. Not only did I witness enormous engagement among almost all of the students, but the level of learning was much higher than in previous years.

The feedback from the students on the course was very positive, better than I had received for the onsite course in previous years. One of my favorite written student comments was, "… I don't know how this course could be taught as effectively in the classroom."

The ability for teachers to understand and add value to the comment ‘back channel’ is a key skill for the ‘connected teacher’. Anyone can swap an writing pad for a blog, there is no value in that. The back channel is the conversation, and is the heartbeat of thought.

I can’t think of another way in which teachers can get such immediate access to the ‘thinking’ process that is playing out in front of them.

<p>The above example demonstrates the power of the wiki to make collaboration more inclusive and knowledge construction efficient, distributed and fast. If you think about this visually, the email/Word scenario has limited periods of creativity separated by the logistical and socially sensitive task of combining edits:</p> <p></p><div align="center"><img src="/download/attachments/54/ch1-lowproductivetime.jpg" border="0"></div><p></p> <p>The wiki completely changes this by shifting logistics to the shortest possible segment of time at the outset, leaving a much greater period of time for collaborative creativity and knowledge construction:</p> <p></p><div align="center"><img src="/download/attachments/54/ch1-highproductivetime.jpg" border="0"></div>