Our professors are beginning a new romance. As young people continue to use emerging technologies in their personal lives, a large number of educators are finding ways to meaningfully integrate technologies in the classroom, and are falling in love. And why shouldn’t they?

There is soo many shiny, pretty tools including blogs, Wikipedia, podcasts, Twitter, and Youboodtube. What makes these tools so compelling is the nature of communication on the web. As our friend Bryan Alexander writes, “Web 2.0 has led to an explosion of user-generated content” or as our other friend Tim O’Reilly says,  ”[Web 2.0] harnesses collective intelligence.” Global interaction never felt so good.

Our infatuated friend Bryan shows us different techniques of storytelling and what makes a successful story. With the web, storytelling has expanding beyond our traditional definitions. A single photo is as rich of a story as Dickinson, and you don’t need to be Dickinson to have your story heard. The web enables us to share and create our own stories with anyone, including our professors.

Moreover, digital storytelling (hey ds106) extends beyond the classroom. This creative work provides students a foundation for what we’ll call 21st century literacy, which includes digital literacy (e.g. blogz), technological literacy (e.g. code), visual literacy, informational literacy, etc. Digital storytelling is exactly what students want to learn, because so much of what we do in ‘real world’ involves these skills. The situation is analogous to the education shift to using software programs in the classroom back in the mid-90′s.

Now we just need more professors to get bit by this love bug.