Gardner Campbell’s article on A Personal Infrastructure and talk on No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences explains the importance of a digital outlook in the classroom and how many people don’t take advantage of “the bag of gold”, aka the internet, that is readily available to everybody.

Campbell advocates for change for a digital experience in the classroom where students can create their own identity on the web, which allows for students to manage and update their personal digital life. This is exactly what this ds106 course is all about. I think that learning about the tools that are available to us, like “the bag of gold”, are important because our technologies are advancing so much every year. It’s so weird to me seeing kids in elementary school with cell phones, especially since I didn’t get one until I started driving. But kids are learning in a new way to communicate through text messaging and facebook wall posts.

“Just as the real computing revolution didn’t happen until the computer became truly personal, the real IT revolution in teaching and learning won’t happen until each student builds a personal cyberinfrastructure that is as thoughtfully, rigorously, and expressively composed as an excellent essay or an ingenious experiment.”

I don’t know if I agree that we need an entire digital facelift that involves chaning the way we learn inside and outside the classroom. Concepts like ebooks and online classes don’t appeal to me. If I am going to spend hundreds on textbooks and thousands on classes, I would like to receive a tangible book and classroom. With this “bag of gold”, it is important to understand it’s limits and where something has gone too far. What I do agree on is that the “bag of gold” is a precious resource that everyone receives and should spend it the way they would like, which creates your online identity.