Learning and teaching is fun. For many educators, using media to facilitate the process of learning and teaching is not. At best, teachers making choices about buying and then using the equipment can be confusing. At worst, institutions trying to make plans to integrate state of the art display and presentation equipment in renovated or newly constructed facilities can be stupefying. Dollars are at stake. Personal credibility is at stake. Success and failure are a very public affair.

For over twenty five years MIE staff members have worked with hundreds of academic institutions of all types: K-12, Community colleges, Universities, both public and private, large and small, to help them envision, plan and execute the development of new media rich learning environments. Always on the search for new ideas, it became obvious that while there are many useful resources available regarding media in education, mostly via the internet, they are scattered about. Further, one typically is forced to wade through a lot of marginally useful or useless information to get at it. In order to find most information on the internet, there is no card catalog. Google, of course, is useful, but it takes time to use it to prospect for the nuggets of gold. Perhaps, a colleague would point out a website that was a good resource, and you yourself might pass it on.

Many of our most useful inspirations for creative ideas to use or implement media, or the ideas themselves, have come from the many gifted educators, both the teachers and administrators we have worked with.

Our Mission: To create a comfortable environment where educators can develop skills in using state of the art multimedia and other advanced technologies in a typical classroom environment.

(Honest consultants will admit they have learned most of what they know from their clients.) And indeed there are numerous success stories, many great examples of institutions who have created wonderful smart classrooms, fantastic distance learning facilities, great digital libraries, exciting learning commons, etc.

So, we find ourselves in the position of knowing about how media should be used in education, recognizing that it is difficult to find good, concise useful information about how to do it, and knowing further, that there are success stories that would be instructive in helping other to be successful too. Moreover, we know there are numerous organizations which provide educators the opportunity to get together and share ideas, and have their own repositories of information. And, there are newsgroups that can be sifted through to get information and ideas.

If we could just find a way to combine all these great elements into a single focal point, where useful, distilled information and good informed conversation could co-exist, just mouse-click away. Media in Education seeks to become that focal point.

Our mission is to provide a place where information and ideas can be easily shared. A place to find a useful technique, get new ideas, ask questions, meet new people, and most importantly, to learn about media in education. Many clients we've worked with have envisioned Learning Commons of various types.  We envision Media in Education as a web-based virtual Learning Commons.

Our target primary target audience includes the following:

• Teachers

• Administrators

• AV Technical Support Personnel

• Institutional Facilities Personnel (who renovate and build new classrooms)

• Architects (who design learning facilities)

• Students

Media in Education has been and hopefully always continues to be a work in process, both as a website and as actual tools of the trade.