Technologies surround us; there’s no escaping them. They make our lives at once easier and considerably more complicated. We can travel farther faster and the jet lag is only a minor inconvenience, most of the time. At the moment technology innovation is accelerating at a pace that makes it almost impossible to keep up. We don’t have an answer to that problem but we hope to make this site a useful aid in trying to staying current. We’ll provide pointers to potentially useful tools, and examples of how those tools are being used in education. Our primary focus will be what’s going on in Syracuse generally and specifically at SU, but we’ll also pay attention to what’s happening outside the local area. We want to benchmark ourselves and find out what works for others and what doesn’t. Learning Aesthetics isn’t just about technology and media; it’s about what people do with technology and media. We encourage comments and submissions from everyone. We expect some differences of opinion; what works for one person won’t for another. You’re even likely to 
discover some local disagreement; what I think is a great idea may strike my colleagues as just plain dumb and while we’ll keep things civilized you can expect to hear from them. New technologies level the playing fields; for good or ill Google is the student’s main source of “fact” and Wikipedia gets more hits than Britannica. In the final analysis each individual has to decide what’s relevant and what’s true; in terms of education that’s undoubtedly a good thing but it’s also a challenge. We have in a sense stepped with Alice through the looking glass into an environment of soundbites, RSS feeds, and YouTube where we find,
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty , ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’
Learning Aesthetics isn’t a road map or a Baedekers, it’s a journey and a journal which we share as consumers and as producers.
