one key factor has to be eliminated. 3 letters. LAG.
Otherwise a new disorder may be the result of the new technology combined with lag. can you imagine what that would be like? much more than just spilling coffee and unfinished thoughts spoken.
Well I went down the street to our new pizza place recently. Sitting out front was a guy and girl about 15 glued to their iPhones twiddling around. They looked up and gave me a dirty look for about one second before looking back down and continued twiddling with their iPhone screens. Internet in 10 years will probably be a completely dehumanized internet "welfare state" where most everyone has nothing to offer but a dirty look at anything human or real is my best guess.
That's depressing George, but I'm sure you're right. The consolation - and it's minimal - is that students are surely picking up alternative skills. They are very good at finding information and assembling it. But yes, they do not need to develop the critical skills to assess it.
That's the big problem with Wikipedia of course; not just that it's full of errors, but that users approach it in a credulous and uncritical way.
Thinking about what has changed and what may change, I remember that in my last year at school the English and History teachers were at pains to explain that the texts which we were studying, particularly in History, were not in themselves particularly valuable, in terms of our immediate educational needs. The factual knowledge that we gained from them would be largely irrelevant, it was material that we would probably revisit later when we were better equipped. The teachers' role there and then was to prepare us for university by enabling us to "read the big book", develop critical thinking and the ability to appreciate what we were reading, and then express the results in structured argument and in reasonably lucid prose.
I hope that over the next 10 years we will see movements and efforts to re-establish those skills or their equivalents in relation to digital information. At the moment I see none. Information - No need to think, it's all on the Net! Write an appreciation (the term was used for what I suppose could be called a critical study) - Hang on and I'll download one.
I suspect that the technology has outpaced the development of teaching methods and that a generation of school students are being disadvantaged by not being taught either the skills of the old technology, or how to deal with the new.
Mr R, you point to the potential for multiple "rogue" Internets and sub-Internets to emerge, some as walled gardens. That's a threat that could work against the vision of a powerful Internet described by D. Hagar below.
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Has China stolen a march on the West, developing an Internet architecture that is not only based on IPv6, but is also inherently secure from both internal and external attack?
Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
The apartment and house sharing service, Airbnb, now requires members to verify their identities by demonstrating a presence on the web, and by either scanning a government ID or entering detailed personal details. Other enterprises should take a close look at Airbnb's verification policies.
Facebook advertising is a lightning rod. It seems neither brands nor consumers are 100 percent happy about the social media site's policies, placement, or procedures. But the real controversy about Facebook ads and promotions is over whether they work.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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