Thing 23

The material that I have covered over the last ten weeks has helped me focus my thoughts on the most effective ways of sharing Web 2.0 tools with students and faculty in order to create a collaborative and conversant community. I appreciate the flexibility of digital texts and the simplicity with which most can be communicated nearly instantaneously. There are of course inherent dangers in un-mediated communication as anyone who has ever sent an impusive email no doubt has discovered. I am somewhat anxious about the disrupted rhetorics and governance to which Dr. Welsh alludes in the final video and definitely feel that the only hope of privacy in a Web 2.0 universe is to bury oneself in the crowd. This will lead to myriad blogs this year that are vaguely familiar (nearly all narcissistic and nearly all trite). The blog becomes the medium and the message, and the blogger one of many mouthpieces for the spirit of a digital age. As we have witnessed in the fractious debate over health care, our social mobs are riotous whether they meet in person or online. In education, we hope that we can teach digital citizenship that will temper the passion of zealots and awaken the virtue of the silent. There are too many opportunities for cowardice in a virtual world. Something about the screen allows our children to bully and demean each other in a way they rarely would do in person. There are too many false heroes in a virtual world. Our students succumb inevitably to the temptation of borrowing/stealing the work of others in order to appear brighter than they really are. I think this particular danger should inspire us to design online tasks that reward authenticity and that validate creativity. My generation (Xers) was probably the last of the rote learners and possibly the last to share a common cultural language. The future belongs to a generation that must learn to speak in their First lives as impressively as they do in their Second Life, across cultures. My plan is to continue to invite students to connect who they are to what they do. Integrity must be critical element in every assignment so that it becomes a shared expectation and practiced habit. My big takeaway from this exercise is a renewed sense that teachers , guides and coaches are needed more than ever in increasingly adult-free spaces so that learners might find models for lifelong learning on the razors' edge of the digital revolution. Web 2.0 edges are sharp, but democracy and culture hang in the balance. What is currently being negotiated in our schools is not so much the tool we shall choose to inscribe our history but the language with which we will articulate our realistic hopes.