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This story really sums up what it is to be a student right now in this century. I am actually a student of Professor LaMarre's and in this very class. My generation really does not know what it is like to be outside of this instant communication with friends and other people which has really deteriorated the true relationships people used to and were forced to build with one another. The ability to escape from everyone is impossible. I went to Mexico for 3 weeks over winter break to study and was not able to escape my parents need for me to be in contact through email or text... interesting to think about what it has done to parent/child relationships and especially our interpersonal relationships with significant others.

I moved to U.S. 2 decades ago. I came from a 3rd world country (it was at that time). But I had learned how to use the abacus, and do simple mulitiplication in my head. I'm sorry to say this but Americans are FAR behind on REAL education. While you guys play party games in schools and pass that as education. It is quite pathetic what America pass as an education in the public system. By the time I had caught up with English in my 2nd year in American school, I had realized how stupid American pubilc schools are and how inept they are. By 1st and 2nd grade I was memorizing simple mulitplication and division in my third world country. In U.S. kids don't even know what division is until 3rd grade. We didn't have Stadiums, auditoriums, computer labs, track and field track, swimming pool. We didn't even have central heat or air! We got our excercise out on a dirt field with some swings, bats and balls. What's the next generation going to do for a learning experience? "Walking to the mailbox" ??? Because in a few decades, America will be so fat and obese that it will be a revelation to all the fat americans, what it was like to actually walk to the mailbox.

Large corporations then profit from this interaction by collecting and selling this data.  Social participation is the oil of the digital economy. Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.  

The revenues of today's social aggregators are promising but their speculative value exceeds billions of dollars. Capital manages to expropriate value from the commons; labor goes beyond the factory, all of society is put to work. Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for speculative profit.

Free Software and similar practices have provided important alternatives to and critiques of traditional modes of intellectual property to date but user agency is not just a question of content ownership. Users should demand data portability, the right to pack up and leave the walled gardens of institutionalized labor à la Facebook or StudiVZ. We should ask which rights users have beyond their roles as consumers and citizens.

Collaboration is another major hallmark of the Net Generation. However, Tapscott said, we have a tendency to squander or prohibit this strength in schools and workplaces.

"What do we do with this collaboration-geared generation? We stick them in a cubicle, supervise them like they're Dilbert, and take away their tools (i.e., blocking sites like Facebook and Youtube)." Tapscott calls this creating a generational firewall. "It says, 'We don't get you, we don't understand your tools, and we don't trust you to use them.'"

We can’t just throw technology in a classroom and expect good things," notes Tapscott. We need to move away from an outdated, broadcast-style of pedagogy (i.e., lecture and drilling) toward student-focused, multimodal learning, where "the teacher's no longer in the transmission of data business; she's in the customizing-learning-experiences-for-students business."

The first comment made by a student was that students don't like, and will become unmotivated to do work, when a teacher doesn't have a plan, is unprepared, and "wings it" each day for lessons.

they like it when a teacher posts the homework ahead of time so that they can start it early if need be.

they absolutely hate when teachers don't get work or tests graded and back to the students in a timely fashion.

The data suggest that 80% of professors, with little variance by age, have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare or Google Wave. Nearly 60% kept accounts with more than one, and a quarter used at least four. A majority, 52%, said they used at least one of them as a teaching tool.

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it.

We typically assume that the internet is turning kids into narcissistic, vicious cyber-bullies, but a growing body of research indicates that the opposite is true. New research suggests that spending time emailing, texting, and Facebook-ing might actually help both adults and kids become better friends and people

the more time college students spent on the internet, the more empathetic they were both online and off

Forty-five percent of 3,777 teens surveyed reported being bullied, but fewer than 20 percent of those said it had occurred online or via text messaging or phone. Almost 40 percent said it had happened in person. And two-thirds of those bullied online said they didn't even find the abuse upsetting.