Well, I had a lot of fun looking at some of the sites that offer gadgets, start pages, bookmarking, etc... However, I really enjoyed the Ning networking site. In fact, if you click on SJA AP Literature and Composition, you will see the networking group I created for my AP Literature students. I will also create a network for my regular senior British Literature class, but this was a start. Eventually, I would love to create a network for LAGSA, my university's Liberal Arts Graduate Student Association, of which I am a founding member.
I really think this is present state of education: net-education. I know that universities and many high schools are already using it. Soon, the physical classroom will be a distant memory, a fossil. It may well be that within the next 5-10 years, educators will be moderating discussion from home via Podcasts and networking sites. I really don't know how I feel about that, since I am a firm believer in the daily "physical" interaction with the kids (I put "physical" in quotation marks since I am referring to the ability to see the kids with one's own eyes, without the use of a screen). Using both in tandem would be ideal, and I hope that education never loses that "physical" connection that it offers today.
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Futurists have predicted for the past few years that education as we know will be become obsolete and will move online or into blended environments. I had the opportunity to take a blended course back in 1993 (ancient times in Internet years) and the pedagogy of participatory environments provded by blended courses definitely compels students to assume responsibility for their own learning. Everyone is forced to participate, which doesn't always happen in face-to-face classroom environments. In a traditional classroom, introverted students tend to not participate as much as the more gregarious ones. In online courses, everyone if required to participate in the conversations.
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