As probably everyone who is reading this post knows, my performance in this class has been very poor. Jim Groom addressed this issue with me in an email and I replied to him saying I would “catch up” on my work. He told me that this course wasn’t about catching up. I understand what he means much more now that I have watched Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences” and read his article “A Personal Cyberinfrastucture”.  I was approaching this class like all the ones I have been in before. Classes have a linear structure, a start, an end, and things to do in between. They tell you exactly what you’re supposed to learn and how you are supposed to learn it.  The idea of a personal cyberinfrastructure, the main idea of ds106, challenges this. It is not linear, it is infinite. Its like expecting to take a sip of water and falling into the ocean. It goes in all directions and doesn’t stop. Students are teachers and teachers are students, and everyone has input. I can’t catch up because it is not about catching up. It is about growing together with a community of people and communicating with them about what is happening right now. The best way to catch up is to dive in. Here I go, weeks late.

Campbell says no more digital facelifts, no more shallow attempts to enter cyberspace. The word “facelift” implies a cosmetic, superficial, literally a skin-deep fix.  The term infrastructure, on the other hand, connotes something much deeper, something pivotal to the function of a being; a building block. Something that, if changed, would radically change the way something works on the inside, without necessarily changing the way it looks on the outside. Or maybe drastically changing the way it looks on the outside, making it look better.

Gardner talks about the reluctance of (some of) the teaching world to move past paradigms and expand the way students learn and interact.  All I could think of was teachers in high school. Around my junior or senior year of high school, my school got Promethean smart boards in every classroom. Here was this really expensive piece of technology, and all the teachers were doing with it was treating it like a blackboard and a projector. This is the definition of a digital facelift; they took something and moved it into a more technological space, but didn’t change anything else. Like Campbell’s example of newspapers moving online, the full potential could not be realized because no real progress had been made. The same is true for UMW’s use of Blackboard and Canvas. Their names alone indicate the limited innovation offered by the spaces. I would argue, like Campbell, that these spaces have stifled innovation.

Creating a personal cyber infrastructure does not require you to reinvent the wheel, but it definitely makes you wonder if you should. Makes you start at the very beginning and think of new ways to get to where you are going. Be brave and dive in. Think its too late? Here is what Jim Groom thinks of that.