Wow, Jim, you certainly have some really good thoughts here, and I appreciate your raising them.

A few thoughts about a few of your comments:

“So you may have a very interesting theory there.” I wonder if anybody has looked into this? As you mentioned, there is a lot to do and stay busy with in NYC, and employees and students are no different than the rest of us. Why have a virtual community when I can have a physical one?

“Web 2.0 has an underlying logic of progress and new and better and shiny, it begins to cramp any sense of the ideas and people that are key to what we do. And as corporations jump on the bus, the push to centralize and make all these things that much simpler and easier reframes them as less an object of innovation than one of efficiency and convenience.” I wonder if this is something only corporate, or if academic institutions do the same thing to try to streamline, maintain their networks, maximize on economies of scale, and try to have a single message to get across to a faculty often still content to continue business (teaching) as usual (in other words, in the same way as they learned)?

“technology intersects at points with teaching and learning, and may provide specific set of possibilities, but it is the people behind this ideas and the ability to frame your own space in a distributed discourse that remains far more important than any notion of ease, affordable, and logic of centralized design –something which I personally see further dulling the value of a term like Web 2.0 –and further forcing those folks who were not using it to see it as just another thing they should do.” I agree. The last thing we need to do is turn off more users (learners). I wonder if the technology gap between early adopters and the Tipping Point (thank you, Malcolm) is itself growing so large that educational technology folks are becoming more academic in that they speak a language and use technology disconnected from the world (that is, the world of mass use)? I think I may need to develop this thought a bit more in another blog post.

I am glad, Jim, you are helping me to push my boundaries here.