Judy Breck writes about opening educational resources and mobile learning on her blogs GoldenSwamp.com and Handschooling.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: Intertwingle: 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). After four decades in New York City, she returned recently to El Paso, Texas where both sides of her family were 19th century pioneers.

Intertwingle takes place in the future when, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it, "every human being on the planet will have access to every piece of information on the planet." Judy Breck uses whimsy to shake us loose from obsolete concepts that are crumbling schools and dumbing down kids. The characters in the stories are thirty-somethings whom we meet living in the future. Howard Rheingold muses in his Foreword: "How might the world of 2030 look if enough people were to understand the possibilities that coming technologies enable, and to create or repurpose our social and political institutions to take full advantage of mobile-learning? What if billions of people were able to attain more of their potential -- something we're going to need in order to solve the problems we've created for ourselves?" Ted Nelson, an information technology prodigy said: "Everything is deeply intertwingled." Judy Breck tells a compelling story where everyone lives happily ever after in the intertwingled mobile tomorrow.


To find out more about this book and about "handschooling", please visit handschooling.com

    * What is known by humankind has poured into the open internet and there, following network laws, emerged as the intertwingularity.
    * Established education has held the internet at arms length, attempting at best to organize and judge some of the online knowledge, but not deigning to recognize or engage the intertwingularity of knowledge formed naturally in the network.
    * Education practice has continued to divide and disconnect human knowledge into standards and grades, continuing the increasingly dark art of shoehorning knowledge relations into standards and curricula (instead of letting them intertwingle).
    * Opposite to education's standards and curricula, the interwingulatity is emergent from the knowledge placed online by experts and authorities in knowledge fields, and is naturally vetted by network laws (think how Google puts the best stuff at the top).
    * By being individually owned and operated, the mobile internet browser has became able to connect its owner to the complexities of interrelation of human knowledge - the intertwingularity.
    * The intertwingularity has created a global knowledge commons where everyone who connects to it literally learns from the same virtual page - with very big time implications for world understanding.
    * The future of learning has become not about what we do in schooling: it is now about how soon we engage our learning generation with the intertwingularity.
    * We can connect individual kids to the intertwingularity right now through handschooling. Let's do it!

"Owning an individual mobile device with wireless broadband browsing activates handschooling for the student it belongs to.

Handschooling can happen in classrooms, on school buses, at home, in a village with no school, in a slum with no school, for children schooled at home, for girls not allowed to go to school - and in any other situation where a youngster's curiosity motivates him or her to connect to the internet to learn something."