Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 1

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional."


I learned (or had reaffirmed) that...

• ...Humans are so social that every tool and technology will be explored for pro-social uses. Computers were invented to crunch big numbers and the internet originated in an effort to improve the survivability of the U.S. Military’s networked radar systems; but look how we use them. (500,000,000 active users of Facebook!?!) We tend to describe Web 2.0 in terms of participation, but the better word may be sharing.
• ...A power-law distribution is an amazing thing. I long ago adopted the Pareto Principle as a valuable lens through which to view organizational behavior. But the related PLD is a mind-blowing extension!
• ...Once you take the plunge and set you thoughts out there in a public blog, it is really (really) nice to have readers. I have to say that my posts that required the most contemplation and effort seemed not to garner any comments. They tended to be the ones where I tried on old hats in sociology, economics, and anthropology. At least I had fun. (A liberal arts education is its own reward!)
• ...Even though I often suspect that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, Benkler makes a strong and reassuring case that all this connectedness is good for society, that it promotes democracy and inhibits corruption. (My immediately previous blog post notes that Twitter and SMS were harnessed to fight election fraud this week in Kenya.)
• ...Even more than I had suspected, privacy is undergoing a distressing transformation from basic expectation if not foregone conclusion to a highly-qualified concept that is almost theoretical. When all aspects of modern life--your work and play, your location, your history, everything you’ve written and much of what you’ve said—is all internetworked, then only your thoughts are private. (And I’m sure that even that realm is under assault.)
• ...Produsage is shaking up the old information infrastructure in some very interesting ways. The recording and movie industries, as well as the publishing houses, are trying desperately to throttle what new technology makes possible and how it is used. They are going to lose, at least so far as their old ways of doing things. They are under pressure to evolve or die.
• ...The ease of producing coupled with the never-ending news cycle has led to the amateurization of much of our modern news media. We are gaining lots of eyes and ears for collecting news, but we are losing the hard-won professionalism and responsibility that characterized much of the journalism profession of my youth. The recent Shirley Sherod incident should cause us all to cringe.
• ...The most significant legal decisions of the next ten years will have to do with ownership of personal data. The bottom line will be, who owns “you”? What do you have to “give up” in order to benefit and participate in networked society? (Okay, I didn’t “learn” this so much as surmise it.) Before the next year is out, I predict that some data aggregator will attempt to sue someone for providing false information in registering to use some Web 2.0 tool.
• ...I agree with boyd that we can best serve our children by preparing them for the networked world rather than trying to protect them from it.
• ...My classmates are very smart and insightful. I really enjoyed reading their blogs (yes, really!) and I learned so much from their responses to the produsage assignment—this is the point where I wish the class could meet and debrief it all. I’ve seen some very clever ideas that I wish to learn to emulate.
• Okay, here’s an embedded measurement: if you made it this far, give me a “high-five” or an “Amen” (depending upon how southern you are) in the comments section. Come on, help me find out if this has been a game of solitaire.

Part 2: How I think I’ll use all this….