As residents of the greater Rochester area, we are surrounded by leaders in the printing industry, both offset and digital; RIT, Xerox, Kodak, Nexpress and Colorcentric, to name a few. As Instructional technology educators, we are teaching in the middle of the fertile crescent of digital publishing with a rich pool of resources for our students right in our backyards.

Digital Publishing has become mainstream and RIT's School of Print Media is on the forefront of inventing, teaching, and training, while setting the printing standard for the rest of the world. The School of Print Media has several highly successful degree programs with an excellent rate of employment after

We have all had the opportunity to install a piece of software, join an online community, or otherwise click through the End User License Agreement without ever reading it or understanding it. One such instance that has come to my attention recently is that of Twitters Terms and Services. A few weeks ago I found that this was part of their Terms of Service related to who owns the content:

One of the things that I have noticed that there has been a lot of talk about over the past few years has been learning communities. I have always thought that this is a great subject, as well as something that works, whether formally or informally organized. It seems to me that a learning community can take a formal or informal context in its creation, but by the end there is a formal relationship that is created. In regards to this the other part of a learning community is the value you add.

So why write about it? I am not sure why I want to write about, other than to share some observations that I have had in this regard. Where I have seen learning communities of different structures and why are they powerful. I tend to tell stories to make a point since I feel that over the years that my writing has become more disjointed. So here we go...