We keep finding ourselves using less and less paper in our lives, yet schools and workshops are still overflowing with it. If our students’ futures won’t be paper-based, we need to start doing as much as we can to get off paper now.

We’ve been running into school Internet filters more than usual lately, and the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better. When teachers and even administrators can’t reach basic tools like Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, or Wikipedia, it not only leaves students unprepared for the unfiltered world they actually live in, it also undermines the professionalism of educators. The only way students and teachers will ever really master the Web is by being allowed to use it.

We’ve liked Twitter since we first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy us about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.

Reflections on Clay Shirky’s "Here Comes Everybody," the changing role of institutions like schools in an age of easy group forming, and why we need to rethink information, assessment, and our own assumptions in the midst of an epochal change.

Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by a 30-year English teacher at an Alexandria, Va. school that just spent $98 million on renovations and technologies that none of the teachers want to use.

Reflecting on danah boyd’s distinction between social networks and social tools in schools, and why social networking sites themselves may not belong in classrooms even though social tools and network literacy do.

We’re big mind map people, and MindMeister has our minds a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that makes it easy to import FreeMind and MindJet MindManager maps, collaborate with others, track history, publish and embed maps, and even get Twitter update alerts—all while smoothing out that “publishing hump” much like Skitch and Jing.

A conversation with ourselves about why we use Twitter, what “tweeting” is, and how following and followers create a strange sense of presence and connection we can’t quite explain.

There are more educators using blogs, wikis, and Read/Write Web tools than ever, but the real shift isn’t just about publishing student work—it’s about networks, connection, and ongoing learning beyond individual projects and classrooms.

Andrew Keen at the Britannica blog writes something so diametrically opposed to our own take on things that it’s startling and, frankly, amazing on some level (as well as ironic). We do agree with one thing: this is a critically serious debate about Web 2.0, education, and the future of our information economy.