After watching Gardner Campbell’s essay, “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences,” and carefully read his article “A Personal Cyberinfrastructure,” it has hit me that I have been under a “Digital Face Lift” for quite some time now.

Sure we all have the ability to use a computer, search the internet and interact through it as well. But are we truly using its power to the fullest? I would say that some are and there are those who think they are (Like I once assumed).

To truly understand what Garder Cambell’s message is, we have to take a minute and realize just exactly what are we doing to take full advantage of the power of technology. When I first started my college journey a couple of Professors assigned us to use a website called “Blackboard”. I’m sure many people have used this by now.

If not, “Blackboard” is a digital classroom. Its where homework assignments are posted, grades are uploaded, and students can communicate with each other and there professors as well. How ever this is a great example of a “Digital Facelift”. Simply put, all that’s being done is, your taking the “Class Room” and putting it online.

Yeah the students can communicate with each other, but their limited to the amount of feed back they could actually receive as supposed to having your own personal Web Domain where millions of people can view and communicate with feedback towards what you are doing. Its funny because this is exactly what we had discussed in class the first day. Not only till I read and viewed Cambells work did it hit me that I have been under this “Digital Facelift”.

Cambell gives a great example that stood out to me, when he talks about the video game Little Big Planet. This game itself has been the only game to think outside the box and fully use the true power of technology and internet. Normal video games offer an online feature where you can communicate with friends, and meet new people as well. But your limited to just playing the levels that the online feature offers. Little Big Planet on the other hand allows you to create these different worlds and upload them as levels that other players from around the world can fool around with.

To take full advantage of Technology, we must break out of certain limitations. Create Domains so that our name and work are constantly traveling around the world, as supposed to just a closed off area. The creation of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc… have helped us to find a helpful answer for this “Digital Facelift” because with those sites our work, and thoughts can actually felt, read, viewed and understood by millions.

I’m thankful and excited about joining the DS106 team, because I was once blind and now can see. I look forward in continuing my “Journey to the Center of The Internet”.

I’ll leave you all with a photo that I took earlier today for the Dailyshoot.com assignment. The topic for today was “Make a photograph that illustrates the idea of connection”, I Labeled the photo “Keys to the Future”. This was prior to reading the article and viewing the presentation. These truly are the keys to the future, but we still need to learn to use them wisely.