Facebook Online readings

In the first website reading it discussed Facebook and a study done of undergraduate students and the amount that they use Facebook daily, and how if affects their studies. The results concluded that students who use Facebook have a lower GPA than students who do not use Facebook. This suprised me that there would be such a significant drop in GPA just due to the fact that some use Facebook and some don't.

Based on the other two readings, do you feel that if undergraduate students continue to use Facebook, the overall intellegence of college students will decrease. Do you think that there is a way to overcome these studies?

seeley brown chapter 8

From the reading on page 221 do you agree with the reading and think that "learning is a matter of absorbing or cramming in information. Yet in good colleges students also get extensive access--access, that is, to a variety of different types of community." Do you feel that all schools should provide their students with extensive access? Another question that I have is on page 231. Seeley Brown uses the term "developed university". I'm unaware of what that means.

I was surprised to read that the more conventional schools that are leaning towards alternatives and tending to keep everyone but the students "tightly bound together." I did not expect this because it would only seem logical to keep the students close and not have them distant from each other.

chapter 5 reading/response

In chapter five of The Social Life of Information, on page 119, the term epistemological, which is used in the context of a form of debate, caused me to not understand the context of the section of personal dis-function. On page 127, Brown discusses the central properties of the community of practice. As I continued reading, I was surprised to find that while getting the job done, people that were involved in the task, ignored division of rank, which then lead to forming a single group around a shared task.

On page 16 in The Social Life of Information there is a list of things that are predicted to "disappear" with the continuous spread of technology. The following that made the list really surprised me; television, universities, politics, government, and so on. Even with the abundance of technology in the world today, I did not expect television and universities to be affected by it.

One question that I have is based on the the list of things that are supposedly "going extinct", which do you believe truly will disappear in years to come?