First of all, I would just like to say that I found this reading difficult. The author seemed to jump around a lot and spent more time on describing comparisons to situations in education than to the actual issue in education itself. It also seemed that the topics of discussion jumped around between chapters where something discussed in chapter 1 might come up multiple times again in the following chapters. There were also a ton of lists of adjectives in this book that reminded me of reading family names at the beginning of the Odyssey. Very tedious.

Chapter one of this book talked a lot about the definition of the institution. The main focus was about how you can no longer use the traditional meaning of institution in the context of the Web 2.0 ecology. The author begins discussing the implications of the institution as a mobilizing network and focuses on “…the fluid networks that operate within, through, around, across, and outside traditional boundaries of even the most solid and seemingly unchangeable institutions.”

Chapter two focuses on participatory learning and customized education. The author finds that it is difficult for educators to come up with a way to meet the individual needs and interests of all students while getting students to collaborate with others who have an entirely different set of individual needs and interests. His solution to this problem is using social media in the classroom. The author also spends time in this chapter talking about plagiarism, fair use, and authoring. He finishes chapter two by briefly talking about classroom gamification.

Chapter three is about the results of interacting with these technologies, with a large emphasis being on trust. Probably the biggest takeaway from this chapter is “In short, learning is shifting from learning that to learning how from content to process.” This chapter talked a lot about ideas we have discussed in depth during our week 8 and week 9 readings.

I would agree with most of the author’s notions of how institutions and pedagogies must respond to emerging technologies and practices. I think more time could have been spent on discussing these ideas in the book rather than discussing ideas of things to compare them to. While this may be discussed in later chapters in the book, I thought the author should have spent more time talking about inequalities and how they impact obtaining and using this technology in the classroom or university.

I think that changes we should be attentive to as educators and learners are how institutions that are already using these new technologies are faring. For example, there was The School of the Future from Philadelphia, PA. What happened to that school? Did they fare well in their approach? I understand that this book is around 10 years old, but I’m sure at the time there had to be some data from the school? There were also the NYC Museum School and the Institute of Play. How are they doing now? Are they still even open? Did their educational model work? I also think we could follow individual classrooms and teachers in our own communities, not just huge institutions, to see their successes and failures. These educational trends have been around long enough now that there are people out there applying them to the educational setting. I think we should be attentive to these institutions and individuals to see what changes they are bringing to their classrooms and communities.