This review of PBS's Digital Nation is a reblog from my own blog, buried yesterday in an announcement that our "Reimagining Learning" competition was opening yesterday.  I got carried away.   For those who have emailed me confused about where I offered my comments on the PBS special, I'm reblogging here.   Feel free to add your own comments and opinions below.

Of the half dozen comic strips in last Sunday's paper mentioning cell phones, the Internet, or a social networking site, they all relied on the common trope that these technologies are overly complicated, packed with needless features, and too hard to learn.

ISIS 120S-01, English 173S-05: This is Your Brain on the Internet (HASTAC Tag 1SIS 120)

This is Your Brain on the Internet is an experimental, innovative, adventurous, non-traditional, multidisciplinary, student-led, contract- and peer-evaluated course open to any student fascinated by how we come to know the world and how we may or may not know the world differently in the Information Age.  It is not for the faint of heart.  If you are not up for what John Seely Brown calls thinkering (thinking while doing, project-based thinking, evolving and progressive thinking), this is not a course for you.

This semester I'll be teaching a Writing 20 here at Duke organized around Utopian science fiction from the latter half of the twentieth century: Star Trek, The Dispossessed, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Dollhouse. (A longer description can be found here.) In keeping with the themes of the course that consider the digital as a possible space for Utopia, I've decided to move from the Blackboard discussion forum to a public blog housed with Duke's new WordPress project.

For those following our course online on the HASTAC site, here's my opening welcome post to the students.  To find all of our posts, remember the tag to search for is ISIS 120.

If you are interested in the content and conversation in ISIS 120, please follow me and my students in the course on this HASTAC site.  We will be using the tag "ISIS 120" on our posts and that way you can easily find all of the different posts we make.

The Comics Curmudgeon gives us a new blog worth laughing at.

Boing Boing has gotten a lot of eyes this week with Cory Doctorow's post on the leaked text of the "secret" Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement...

On Oct. 29, 1969, UCLA student Charles Kline sent the first message over the ARPANET, the computer network that later became known as the Internet. Though only the "l" and "o" of his message ("login") were successfully transmitted, the interactive exchange ushered in a technological revolution that has — as anyone alive long enough to witness the shift knows — revolutionized human interaction.

If the twentieth-century paradigm for the brain is the hardwired CPU, I would argue that the new paradigm for the twenty-first century brain is the iPod or iPhone, with 75,000 possible Apps (and counting) available for downloading, some created by developers, others by users, all in constant need of updates and customising. There's an App for just about everything in the twenty-first century brain because a changing world needs a brain that is not a product but an interactive processor.