The video, No Future Left Behind speaks to me more than any of the other exhibits for this section.
If I would add ten years to the students in the video, it would be just right for the college where I teach. I am in the middle with my students. Some of who after two classes still cannot save files properly much less operate Photoshop. Others blow me away with their phenomenal knowledge of the Mac and amazing graphic talents. On the faculty and administration side the divide is even greater. As the oldest digital immigrant on staff I deal with a Chief Technology Officer that is willing to buy a T3 line for the campus but won’t allow students or staff to use FaceBook. He is afraid it will take too much bandwidth. He also figured out Adobe CS4 would run on thirteen-inch MacBooks instead of the fifteen-inch MacBook Pros the students used to get with their tuition. Our campus director really wants to have a virtual tour of the campus, but is dead set against doing it in Second Life. He cannot imagine students could take a campus seriously when we represent ourselves as cartoons.
So where does that leave me as a faculty member? I have discovered tools that work around the system. Wonderful things like public proxy servers to get around the blocks. I hold office hours in iChat and Skype. My students post their work on Facebook and the class critiques them there. I use ScreenFlow to create video critiques of all projects. So where can I go from here? I am hoping to create new educational models for content delivery, and am now teaching all new faculty members how to use the internet and our learning management systems. It is a perfect cover for subversive activities like Web 2.0.
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Where does this leave you? On the cutting edge where things are going to be tried and some will fail and others will be glorious victories, and then you'll move on to the next thing. And that's the story for those of us in the trenches like yourself, we push the technology and build something that the powers that be can't imagine because they don't work at the level where things need to work now.
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