“Yes, today you can chat with friends, collaborate on projects, read the news, play games, or share videos of your kids, all online. But you could do all that stuff offline before 1991. It’s just much easier and faster now. What’s different—what’s fundamentally different—is the size of your social space, and of course the size of everyone else’s. The Internet has made these spaces much, much bigger.”
This is an excerpt from What Is Good Teaching? — and it in addition to what he suggests above, Joshua Fisher makes the point that this is ushering in an unprecedented level of participation (a point made my others), and that unless educators address it, this level of participation will bring about Clay Shirky’s predication:
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This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.
Essentially, that we’d head to Idiocracy (2006). How can we save the world?
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