Continuing with Warlick and Friedman

Frankly, Warlicks' "future" technology story (pgs 1-9) is, on one hand, rather interesting. I love the thought that students could create from a variety of sources and produce a wonderful technological production, like the students did, yet, on the other hand, I find the use of the name tag chips to be eerily like the "Big Brother is watching you" warning, evoked by author George Orwell, in the novel "1984". To think that people could keep track of your movements within a school building, at any given moment, through a chip embedded on a name tag - well, I have to say that privacy no longer exists anywhere. Not even in the restroom!

Freidman's chapters refer to the world becoming flat, and while this is true, it is also reflective of the name tag scenario I mentioned above. In some respects it is getting a lot harder to maintain any kind of private life. People in India line up for the telemarketing jobs that we, as Americans, consider beneath a good majority of us. What this then means is that a lot of people in another country, now have an opportunity to explore our lives. They have access to a lot of our private information - such as social security numbers, date of birth, address, telephone numbers, basically you name it and they might just have it. It's kind of a scary thought to know that someone outside of our country has our information. While most are likely not to use the information for anything other than their job, what about those who chose to do something else with it? Could this become a new form of terrorism?

Recently, I received an interesting e-mail about ordering pizza in the year 2010. It is almost as scary as the name tags above.

How does this effect our students? Well, I can see plenty of good here, but I also can see plenty to be wary of. Do we want our students to have all their work out on the web or should it just be for the school district only? I think these are serious questions to ask ourselves when we are looking to do technology related programs. I understand why school districts tend to limit the sites that students can access, but at the same time it also limits the learning process, but then again how much do we want to expose our students?