Alan Levine
Mr. Levine is recognized for expertise in the application of new technologies to education. A pioneer on the web in the 1990s and an early proponent of blogs and RSS, he shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog. Among his recent interests are new forms of web storytelling (including 50+ Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story, pechaflickr, and the StoryBox), as well as leading and teaching the open digital storytelling class, ds106.
Most recently he was instructional technology specialist at the University of Mary Washington, following leadership positions at the New Media Consortium and the Maricopa Community Colleges. Currently he is exploring new options under the banner of his own creation – CogDog.it
When possible, he enjoys the peace of a little cabin in Strawberry, Arizona. His interests include digital photography, bending WordPress to his whims, and randomly dipping into the infinite waters of the internet.
On September 15, from Noon until 1 pm, in the Rady Room (Rm 601 in Nedderman Hall)
Alan Levine delivered the following public presentation:
Title: Do You Ever Wonder What Happened to Wonder?
Abstract:
In another era, a book called “Enquire Within Upon Everything” embodied the best technology to organize, via a crude hypertext system, a collection of knowledge. In the hands of a young boy growing up in the 1960s, the book inspired a spirit of magic, wonder, and the vision of an open portal to the world of information. When that boy grew up, he invented the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web was it “being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.”
As a space of both discovered and undiscovered potential, the web at this moment beckons as a seemingly infinite place where we ought to revel with that same sense of wonder. Our educational careers begin in kindergarten, where we instinctually know the value of sharing and fear not what we don’t know. Somewhere between there and graduate school, we lose track of wonder, worrying more about theft of intellectual property or questioning the value of what we do. The ecology of an Enquire Within Upon Everything open web undermines this attitude and rekindles that sense of wonder. It’s all about creating more potential serendipity. Let’s celebrate stories of what happens when educators share something openly on the web.