As a a future educator, I was interested to hear what Campbell had to say. At first, I believed that Campbell wanted to transform technology as we know it and I was uncomfortable with his views. Campbell scared me off with his mention of microchips and avatars, but upon our class discussion, his views became clearer to me. I watched the video again after our discussion and I realized that I did agree with the basis of his argument.

Campbell argues that rather than using technology to its full potential we have only implemented a “digital facelift,” in which it only appears that we are using technology to its maximum degree. I agree that technology could be put to great use in the field of education. By providing a space where students can place their ideas, work, etc and discuss them with people from all over would be great contribution to the world. I have already seen this with UMWBlogs, which has been implemented in several of my classes. It is a good supplement to class discussion and readings.

The part that struck me the most was his discussion of the recurcsive practices, narrating, currating, and sharing. Campbell says that students come to college “believing they have nothing to curate” and that they only have “transactional exchanges with professors who mark their work,” while they should start their life’s work in college. I did come into college believing that the work I do here, like my senior thesis will be the start of my life’s work, but I didn’t think this was a rare belief. This sounded like the problem high school education faces, rather than college. I haven’t had any experience of only having a transactional exchange with my professors. I have found that people’s perception of college was positive, and students just viewed high school as something they had to do in order to get to college or whatever step they wanted to take in life. In high school, my classmates and I couldn’t wait to get college because we found that it would be more meaningful and a better experience.Perhaps this is because UMW is small and I am able to have relationships with my professors, and because I went to high school where the majority of students planned on going to college, and I may be wrong.

Campbell discusses implementing this at the collegiate level, but I am curious about technologies that will transform education before that, and get students more interested in learning before they go to college, and allow more students to go to college. I think something like this would be difficult to implement in high schools , but education does need to be revamped and students need to get excited about education again, and it is not going to happen if educators keep doing what their doing now. A lot of changes need to happen in education, and cyber infrastructure could be a start.

A lot of people will shy away from things like this “bag of gold” because it requires change, which can be difficult to implement and a lot of people aren’t comfortable with. I’m not saying that this couldn’t work, but I think it’s fair for people to have concerns and like all the other reforms that are trying to be implemented in our education system, it will take a while and need a lot of support.