A Message to the National Collegiate Honors Council

Several of us from the Fall 2010 Digital Civilization course have been invited to present at the 2011 National Collegiate Honors Council in Phoenix Arizona regarding our innovative course.

Our course was generally organized around historical periods and topics, but also around three general principles of digital literacy:

1. Consume
2. Create
3. Connect

We thought we would start with a kind of platform for learning in the digital age. Here are educational ideas we stand for:

• If students do not publish their process of learning, their products of learning will have diminishing value (Gideon Burton)
• 50 brains are better than one, even if that one has a PhD (Daniel Zappala)
• Self-directed, as opposed to teacher-directed learning, is the key to successful undergraduate education (Kristen Cardon)
• If students do not become digitally literature by
  1) consuming information intelligently;
  2) creating ways to effectively synthesize and share information; and
  3) connecting people and ideas both in person and online, they will not reach their potential in the digital age (Ariel Szuch)
• Formal education is useless if it is not seamlessly integrated with social media networking and social discovery (Jeff Whitlock)