The concept of life-long learning – a term used all too glibly – is now more important than ever.
I think life-long learning has always been important. Each era has faced new challenges and uncertainties in their own right, and so I think it's a little bit of an over-exaggeration to say that, now, life-long learning is important, when in the past people could just get a degree and then coast along the rest of their career.
Professionals do something for pay; amateurs do something out of their passion or love for it.
Or maybe professionals do something out of their passion or love for it, too, while amateurs just haven't gotten the chance to get paid for it yet. This reminded me of this article: https://hbr.org/2018/06/when-did-the-u-s-stop-seeing-teachers-as-professionals . There's also a level of accountability within a professional class.
blogging practices may also be helpful in controlling the amount of cheating
True; I hadn't thought about this. One thing he doesn't mention, though, is the privacy concerns that come with public blogs. I am more guarded about what I share online than I am in-person or behind a password-protected space (but maybe that's just me...).
there may be powerful ways to blur the distinction between formal and informal learning, where both the formal and the informal turn on the social life of learning.
I don't think this is new to the digital age. I think we have always been blurring the lines between formal and informal learning, and social learning has always been a part of both.
Digitally literate kids often develop a knack for intuitively finding things on the web that many of us labor to find
So they find the stuff... but do they know what to do when they find it? Do they know how to identify what is useful and true and what is just internet noise?
For today’s students, who are used to multiple windows being opened on their desktops and multiple things happening simultaneously, this space seems second nature.
Does it, though? This sounds a little stressful to me. Again, I could see this being an occasionally useful exercise, but there's something to be said for helping students to focus on one thing at a time, and for helping students to figure out how to learn through methods other than screens.
Let’s all search the web right now and see how many counter examples can be found for each position
This sounds like a great way to get off track.. I could see including this type of thing in a classroom every once in a while, but all the time would be exhausting for students and instructor.
Tom Friedman’s recent book, The World is Flat
For every "the world is flat" article out there, there are plenty more that offer evidence that globalization isn't as deep or as rapid or as transformative as we may have been led to believe. Local connections are still more important. This article is a little dated but still makes some compelling points: https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/14/why-the-world-isnt-flat/
But today’s students also learn in ways that are different from how we learn
Do they, though? People are still people. I'm not sure they are learning differently - the tools and environment that they are in might be different, but that doesn't make the students themselves different.
Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams,
Again, opportunities for personal connection = more opportunities for learning. And, creates opportunities for learning by doing/performance.
"engagement streams"
Creating a personal cyberinfrastructure would give students the opportunity to actually personally engage with material, and make their own meaningful connections.
But that wasn't progress. It was a mere "digital facelift"
Why the term "digital facelift"? Maybe because, many people in higher ed using Blackboard, other LMS just as another tool in the toolbox to do things the same way they've always been done; so LMS made things easier and organized... but, it didn't actually involve "thinking the unthinkable" or maximizing the creative potential of digital tools.