What's Wrong with the Web?

Will Richardson posted something very poignant for me today- he was addressing a recent article in the New York Times called "Texts without Context" and he lists major issues with the internet today, by summarizing some of the issues in the article:

* Copyright and intellectual property are no longer respected
* Plagiarism is rampant
* Originality and imagination are being lost
* We are losing our ability to think deeply and creatively
* We now just want immediate gratification
* Information overload
* Further polarization of political views
* A loss of the ability to read extended texts
* An impatience with nuance
* A loss of focus in a world of distraction
* The sense of immature entitlement on the part of social media users
* Decrease in overall quality of work
* “Cyberbalkanization” or a growing comfort in the echo chamber
* Loss of serendipity
* Loss of an objective reality (i.e. the debate over climate change)
* The end of authorship
* Groupthink
* Etc.

Wow! This is very similar to a lot of the issues that I have been discussing with my classes (ECI 832 and 830). A lot of these points have been discussed through the chat room, forums and on the blogs. The comments that have been made, and there are only 5 so far, have been interesting as well. Some people blame our society, that we now all have forms of ADD and our attention spans (or lack of) have caused these problems. Some say that education is the key to solving these problems, which I think is a pretty broad answer and as we've been asking- How?? How can we solve these huge issues? Can we use these issues to our advantage? Does knowing what the issues are give us an edge to be able to reach learners in a more informed way?

My head actually begins to spin when I look at that list because I've really been intensively involved in looking at them for about three months now and it's all getting a bit blurry- I'm sure those of you who are also in the two classes or any other technology course are also getting a bit battle fatigued. This is what I will be thinking about for the next little while, but it is nice to actually have a nicely constructed list to work from.

Until next time...