Note from Judy, August 2007: Inspired recently by what Reme, star of the movie Ratouille, said, “I am a cook,” in my seventh decade: I am a blogger.

Blogging is a way to sprinkle ideas informally and to exercise my instincts as a generalist, as I describe in this blog post.

Reme’s sketch is from Disney movie concept art on the Ratouille website

JUDY BRECK BIO

Judy Breck writes about opening educational resources and mobile learning on her blogs GoldenSwamp.com and Learnodes.com. In 2005 Howard Rheingold invited her to join the posting team at his blog SmartMobs.com where she now posts several times each week. She also writes blog articles at iCommons.org, a cultural satellite of Creative Commons.

She has recently served as guest editor of a special issue, on the theme of Opening Educational Resources, of Educational Technology magazine. The issue was published in November 2007. She is Contributing Editor of the magazine.

Judy is the author of five books about Internet learning. Her fifth book is: Intertwingled: A compelling story of what is possible. The new book, with a Foreword by Howard Rheingold, is avaiable on Lulu.com. Her fourth book, published February 2006 (with a revised addition to be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in 2008) is 109 IDEAS for Virtual Learning. The book has a foreword by John Seely Brown. The third book, Connectivity (2004) explores the small world networks as they affect human relations and learning.

She was recognized by the Industry Standard for her leadership (1997-2001) at the Wired Superstar award winning HomeworkCentral.com, an open content learning website that received 4 million monthly page views; it was absorbed into bigchalk.com and then ProQuest.

Judy has been in the trenches in political affairs, education and the Internet — and among the generals as well, dealing with the White House, schools chancellors and principals, and the invention of Internet content. In blogging and books, she proposes that all three areas are under profound change. She believes all the news is good.

She completed a major in political science at Northwestern University and a BA at the University of Texas in El Paso (1958). She spent the first half of her life in West Texas and the second thus far in New York City, and considers both of them as home.