I’ve been working on text2cloud for coming up on a year now and I’m finally in a position to write up some brief accounts of the lessons I’ve been learning as a result of taking on this project of learning in public. 

Unlike the majority of the posts that populate the site, these “lessons” will be brief, direct, and informational.

Because I spend the majority of my professional life working with teachers, I know how much pressure everyone feels to bring technology into the classroom and also how much everyone over-estimates students’ abilities to work productively in online environments.

I write not as a techno-enthusiast. Color me techno-curious: I figure that, if there are a billion websites worldwide, building them can’t be that hard. So, I’m willing to flounder around with this stuff to see how it can help me understand how reading, writing, and thinking itself is evolving as a result of the proliferation of handheld devices capable of instantly publishing and globally distributing whatever enters the mind of the person holding the device.

But my driving interest is not in the technology itself. I’m a teacher and I’m interested in thinking about education after the end of privacy. 

I don’t have any overarching organizing plan, so I can’t promise any clear rationale for the order of the lessons that will appear here. The first two lessons were suggested to me by my recent writing on plagiarism, which some folks tweeted about.