It is hard to believe we finished “Digital Habitat: Stewarding technology for communities” back in 2009 (after working on it off and on for 5 years). Seven years later the book is still selling on Amazon.  And we hear that people still actually use it, even though the whole technology ecology has changed so much. […]

Last week Nancy White and I were in “the hot seat” for the Networked Learning Conference. We decided to talk about blind spots – those things that are right in front of us but for some reason we just don’t see them. Actions built on untested or aged assumptions. Actions based on our own preferences […]

It has been a while in coming! People have been asking about an e-book version of Digital Habitats since it was published almost 3 years ago! It seems logical, given that technology is a central theme of the book. Especially when it’s been assigned as reading in a class or workshop and people have scruples […]

These days we are all pulled in many directions, including conversations and communities that pique our curiosity or compel our participation for one reason or another. The conversations about communities of practice are a case in point. Nobody can follow them all, or read everything that’s written about communities of practice. Google says there are […]

Technology for Communities Before and After the Current Big Thing The Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and I are doing a presentation about Digital Habitats at The eLearning Guild on December 21, 2010 (10:30AM to 11:30AM Pacific Time) as part of their thought leader webinar series. Here’s what we said we’d talk about: Technology stewards, who […]

Jerry Michalski put out a call for past author / presenters to show up and talk about what’s changed since they talked on his weekly phone call in observance of the 300th call.  I offered to talk about the very simple mix of tools that support the Yi-Tan community (yes, I think of it as […]

Recently I finished a remarkably useful book: Mizuko Ito, et al.  Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).  It has some common ancestry with ours, since the first authors of both Hanging Out and Digital Habitats were at the Institute for Research on […]

From my perspective we wrote Digital Habitats as a call to action (and reflection) more than anything else.  So it’s a bit ironic to see it used as a textbook, at least for me, being so skeptical about exactly what kind of learning is going on in schools.  But actually it’s pretty cool.  Of course […]

Kathy Milhauser mentioned that she assigned Digital Habitats to students in a course on globally distributed project teams. That got me thinking about the difference between a project team and a community as far as their digital habitat is concerned. Of course there are many project teams that have spawned communities and many communities that […]

Tags: projects

You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, you’ve got to know how to use it and talk about it, too. To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s […]

Tags: chat, skype