For my entire professional career, I’ve been a teacher of one sort or another. My first position out of college was started as an internship at the legendary Kodak Center for Creative Imaging and ended as an instructor and lab manager there. As desktop publishing was becoming a business reality I worked as a corporate trainer teaching veteran print publishing professionals learn the new technologies that were transforming their world. It was clear to me that as we moved further into the Information Age that one’s ability to succeed would be tied into one’s ability to communicate information effectively. We needed a new understanding of literacy that was more than just reading and writing text written in English. It needed to encompass understanding, creating and communicating with text and image, audio and video in print, on television and on the Web. This struck me as huge and important and I wanted to do more than be a corporate trainer. I wanted to help shape the future. So I started working as adjunct faculty in the New Media Department at the University of Maine in Orono while working on my Master of Education in Instructional Technology.
Meanwhile, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) started providing 1:1 laptop computers to students in Maine’s middle schools. This had the potential to be one of the most necessary and beneficial things to happen to Maine in its educational history, and I had the opportunity to get involved with it. This led me to work for the Seymour Papert Institute. Seymour Papert’s philosophies on technology in education and his Constuctionist learning theories were profoundly influential on my own teaching methodology.
Callithump! is really my own Constuctionist learning project to teach myself more about creative economies and about the role of physical publishing in the post-Internet world. What I learn I use to become a better creator and a better teacher.
So now I’m going to start sharing all that I’ve learned about technology in education because there’s a huge amount there!
