For a long time in my high school days Modern English’s “I Melt With You” was my favorite song. It’s hard to explain the attraction we have to certain things. Such is the case with this song and the video below. Perhaps it’s because I thought I was in love and felt the song captured how I felt about the other person. Or maybe I imagined myself as the lead singer of the band. Who knows?

But through the years, one line from the lyrics has stuck with. That line is the title of this post and is also the idea I’d like for you to keep in mind as we work through the final “Surfin’ on Sunshine” section of the course.

While preparing for today’s introductory discussion of Gardner Campbell’s Personal Cyberinfrastructure, I spent some time reading a more recent blog post he wrote entitled “Computers in The University”. In it he offers quotes from William Blake and J.C.R. Linklider. Just as the song from Modern English appeals to me on a deep and inexplicable level, so too do the thoughts of these two creative thinkers. I’m still trying to process Gardner’s blog post and hope to share these thoughts on my personal blog in the coming days. I’d also invite and encourage you to spend some time digging in to what Gardner has to say in his post.

As we turn our attention to this final section, I am going to ask you to think deeply about the future: your future. I would like you consider how what you’ve learned to date about the relationship between cyberspace and society will play out in the world in which you now find yourself: university students in the year 2012 preparing for life and career in the 21st.

Since we have just a limited number of time together (7 more lessons after today), I’d like to share with you the revised workload for our Surfin’ on Sunshine section. The point totals for blogging and ds106 assignments will remain the same (10 and 15 points respectively). But the number I will ask you to will be reduced. I also have specific topics for you to focus on for your blogging.

I will explain these revised requirements in class today and then present them as a blog post before our next meeting.

In many ways, I feel that this course is really just beginning. I’m very excited to see how you all respond to ideas we will be bouncing around in the coming days.

For those of you who’ve worked through Gardner’s essay and are ready for the next challenge, I’ll invite you to check out the video we’ll be dealing with next week. It is from a talk given at UMW last week by Bryan Alexander. In it, he proposes four views of what education will look like in the year 2012.