By Mark
I came of age with the internet. I'm fond of telling my students that when I had to do my senior project I had to use these things called a card catalog and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. I had to actually touch materials to use them in research. I had to learn keyboarding on a manual typewriter with ribbon and correction tape...and I'm only in my early 30s.
But by my first year at university, the internet had exploded. Since then, I have learned that I am what is known as a "digital native," perhaps because my father brought home a PC Jr. when I was about six.
I'm all for utilizing the "Web 2.0" as a resource for education, even though I find the moniker kind of obnoxious. I'm on my computer essentially every minute that I'm not with a student or caring for my family. I know that the wired universe (or better stated, the wireless universe) demands new skills sets of our students and "multiple literacies" unheard of twenty years ago.
I begin to grow uncomfortable, though, when people start to talk about classrooms which exist wholly on the internet--especially on-line schools for teenagers.
