These days, this seems to be the sticky note that I see on my desk most of the time. When I was younger, I was taught not to fall victim to the tyranny of the urgent. But now it seems everything is important, I really wonder how we differentiate?

I was doing my reading for my E-Learning course.

"An 'AHA' moment occurred for me in my ESL composition classroom a few semesters ago. My students were into Instant Messaging (IM), Blogging, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Gaming. It suddenly dawned on me, an avid technology user and consumer, that I was no longer on the cutting edge." (Malley, Susan B., 2006)

That was how I felt when I was going through all the possibilities that Web 2.0 holds for education. A lot of these tools have been around for a while, like wikis, blogs, search engines etc.. But I have never thought of using them to the fullest of their potential in an education aspect. I have always limited active learning to simulation conditions, especially in the area of gaming, and this 2 days had opened my eyes to great possibilities with some of these very basic tools. I had thought I was pretty "up-to-date" for someone my age, but this generation is running so much faster than we can even imagine.

Come to think about it, many times when we get some technology that is really "cutting edge", do we really make full use of them? I remember in those days when I was an administrator for IT equipment in a school, I found it really funny that we were issued new, cutting edge lap tops with the most up-to-date technology, USB ports, firewire etc..but the OS installed was Win 95, because the network was running on Win 95. Most of these hardware was left unused. To me, the laptop never realise its full potential.

As I design my lesson this round, I remind myself constantly, and thanks to a good friend, who reminded me that what's most important is the purpose of the lesson, that the technology I employed need not be top of the rack, but it must definitely fulfilled the educational purpose. The purpose of education? To nurture "thinkers", who will become creators of knowledge.