The paper seemed to beat around the bush in what it was trying to say; avoiding the statement that truly needs to be said, which is that ‘the entire educational system needs a overhaul’.

Teachers, Professors, Administrators, and at large the general public are starting to lose grasp of the world they live in; much like that of someone that has created their own world. See one of our former presidents and his trip to the grocery store and being amazed at the self checkout lines. His amazement comes from the fact that he had not shopped for himself for many years. This analogy is the same alienization that students feel from the majority of their leaders and teaching professionals. They are so disconnected to that of what the world is changing into, because of the small shell they have created for themselves, thus you see tremendous amounts of resistance when it comes to changing the paper and pencil method to the touchscreen and stylus that is the future. Then again to put it simply institutionalization of education has created a largely false belief in the perfection that is our country and learners are finding out how these things are effecting them and what truly is being hidden this is especially true with the freedom that the new learners have with the integration of the web, free information (which it seems everyone is trying to change), and of course the ability to have everything at your fingertips. It is no longer about memorizing formulas and the specific procedures that are easily googled or binged, but the way to understand, comprehend, exploit, use, and abuse the things that have been discovered already and push into something that no one could expect on innovation and discovery.

Cookie cutter models no longer work, or are being bent out of shape to say the very least, less then 20 years ago it was almost unheard of for students to take college courses in high school, yet today, we have people going to college with more then 1/2 of the ‘college’ learning already taken place, through high school. Does this mean that we are getting smarter? or does it mean that we are teaching to the bottom denominator and those that have the desire to excel do so, but you have a problem, how does that push those that are lower on the totem to excel, where does the middle group that can’t quite reach excellence, or wouldn’t reach excellence without the push that is no longer there.

I digress, the concept of a ‘digital facelift’ as suggested with this paper is unclear exactly what it is pertaining to; when I hear or read those to words, I think about a re-skinning of the same that we had before with a slight loss of freedoms or restrictions we had before. Facebook (no pun intended) has gone through, a handful of major changes that make me hate it, while making it grow into a new monster of the internet, that first step was releasing the restrictions on registration. Once upon a time it required a .edu email to register, it is no longer that way. More recently they are no revealing your past, what you may have pushed out of your mind, or attempted to change who you have been, the change I am talking about is the new ‘timeline’ feature. It allows for freedom of more information. This is taking the feature of deletion away. It is hard for you to remove people you don’t like, had issues with etc, without others being able to take note. So you have a new look, hurray, works ‘better’, hurray, steals some of your privacy, no such a hurray. Then again sites like facebook have never been very secure and there are many backdoors and roundabout ways to get to things that may be hidden.

This eve of exponential knowledge and use of the internet which the paper references where everyone will have their own domain/webspace etc. Is an interesting concept, but when does it get to the point of diminishing returns, due to the fact that there is so many options? I know if I allowed myself, just as if you were to allow yourself, you could become lost in the vast options that are available on the internet for days, weeks, or even months; should we grow this into a monster that is impossible to rein in?

I spoke of many things, and reference very few things. Then again, go google it, I bet you can find it.