digital Tag

We live in a hyper-connected age; ours is a technology saturated society of instantaneous messaging, vast networks of streaming information and a deluge of images that give a vertiginous tinge to life and leave an overwhelming sense of relentless acceleration.  Yet, for all of the allure of our digital devices and the promise of continual connectivity, something is missing.  Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, when the hope of a machine-aided utopia first took root, idealists and inventors alike have promised that technological advances would bring productivity and efficiency to the workplace, automation of distasteful, burdensome tasks and an...

The central educational issue this article intends to illuminate is how to conflate education in the western intellectual tradition and Open Educational Resources (OER) to make such an education available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. An education in the western tradition abounds with timeless ideas, old books, and scholars, and by nature it is slow to adopt a new influence especially if it seems hypermodern. This longstanding mistrust regarding the use of digital technology to educate youth in great ideas can and should be overcome for great advantage while assuring achievement of the intended ends of a classical education. Recent advances...

Confluence Courseware is an effort to reverse current cultural and social trends and use digital technology not as an ends but a means—as a tool to promote genuine and significant human conversation. Using great works—including influential and important texts from all of human history in the creative arts and literature, religion, philosophy, the natural, applied and social sciences—Confluence Courseware is an attempt to utilize the more beneficial aspects of our technological society, while mitigating the more deleterious cultural consequences, so that we may remember our cultural heritage and re-engage in timeless conversations which center around what it means to be human....