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Turns out, even the privacy-conscious Sarah Browns of the world freely hand over personal information to perfect strangers. They do so every time they download and install what's known as an "application," one of thousands of mini-programs on a growing number of social-networking web sites that are designed by third-party developers for anything from games and sports teams to trivia quizzes and virtual gifts.

People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they're set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that's not true if they use applications.

As a result, educators might do well to take heed of four of the more ubiquitous of these trends, which I'll allude to by means of these labels: (1) parallel computing, (2) cloud computing, (3) brain mapping, and (4) the "global dis-assembly line."

Humanity is developing a network-enabled, computer-assisted global consciousness.