In Gardner Campbell’s piece “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure“, he discusses the future that he envisions for students to truly embrace the digital age. There are some parts of it that parallel the work we do in this class, primarily regarding the idea of giving each student a web server in which to “carve out” their own online identity.  Although WordPress.com accounts are a far cry from virtual servers, over the course of this semester we have used many online services to express ourselves on a digital canvas with our blogs tying everything together.  Through commenting on each other’s blogs and offering insights, we’ve also helped each other learn and grow on the internet.

As far as my current Temple University experience goes, this class is probably the most advanced as far as online interactivity goes. I would love to see the college go even further though. The world that we live in is growing faster than universities can keep up (it would seem) and I think that these institutions need to have the foresight to predict what may be coming next or at least offer classes that have technologies that are cutting edge. It was very engaging to interact on Twitter with my professor and classmates in this course. Not all Professors would want to use this tool for communicating with students, but I think more popular online services should be looked at while examining how to improve a class.

I feel rather privileged as a Communications major because the courses I’ve been taking have actually acknowledged and, at least in part, discussed up and coming online tools. My “Research for Journalism” class discussed, at length, how news is becoming more and more dependent on social media to find stories.  We looked at Twitter and other social outlets and how we can extract valuable information to use when reporting. Classes like these that actively incorporate digital tools into the curriculum are a vital asset to my learning. When I graduate college I expect to be prepared to be a journalist in 2013, a year which will most likely rely on the internet even more than 2012.

Campbell’s idea of giving students a virtual private server was a compelling one. Web design has always been one of my fascinations and hobbies.  Back when I was in middle school, 9 years ago, I started teaching myself the basics of HTML because I wanted to learn how to make a website for a guild I was creating on a site called Neopets. This started a long journey of learning HTML, CSS, and then eventually going further to study web programming languages like PHP on my own.  At my previous college I also took two semesters of Java which I found very interesting. I got started early on creating my online identity, but not everyone has that chance.  In a time so reliant on the web, I think students need to know how to carve themselves a space. They may not have a passion for web design or development, but at least they’ll know how to fend for themselves online by the time they graduate.

The internet has cemented its place in our lives and I think it’s time that universities and professors acknowledge its importance and strive to make their classes more technologically forward thinking. We may not be able to set up a standard of personal servers for college students, but I believe attitudes do have to change and both teaching and learning should follow the exponential growth of computers.

– Paul