A Wall-e Future

Are we going to be spending so much time in our own virtual worlds that we will start to neglect our real world? It is so easy to create an avatar or Mii to our liking, but what about our bodies? We can hide behind our virtual identity in our virtual worlds, but what happens when we have to physically go and be part of a discussion? Is our future one of personal isolation with virtual collaboration? Will our planet go to shambles because we are spending all of our time in a virtual society? I love the world of the web, but I also enjoy getting out once and a while and having that actual face time with the world.

Student Blogs

Giving the students a chance to express themselves on the internet is a good idea. Sometimes just knowing you have an audience can make you perform better. Just the idea of more than a teacher reading your response can be motivating. My students love to share their responses to the daily questions I ask them. I think it would be interesting to have my students answer these questions in their own blog, and then have their peers respond to them. The hurdle will be having continued laptop access everyday to do this...or do we just not do it everyday??

An Isolated Collaboration

Finally we can create an environment and all have a hand in it...but never meet one another. Wiki's, google docs, blogging, and other web 2.0 "steroids" are creating a convienent world of click to touch screen users. I am on board for using web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and many businesses are on this train and staying on it. The way of the world is the web. Anything is possible, so the reality may be that one day we will do another cycle of times. But from the looks of things, the tech savvy future is here, and by the time you read this blog, a new technology has been invented.