In the morning session,  there was some interesting discussion (and also a bit annoying) about the role of the "expert" and someone taking offense to Weinberger's comment about the Web encouraging disdain for "experts".  AKMA and David weren't going to say it,  but I will: it FIGURES that at a place like Vanderbilt,  you'd have some rather "elitist" mentalities defending the role of "expertise",  and another person expressed oppostion to "The Web is good" idea.  Dave's response was "Is the world good?"  Which is what I usually ask people who emphasize the negative aspects of the Web. Yes,  there will be manipulation and in-authenticity,  and evil and perversion....and so it is in the world. 

Both presenters , in presenting an overview of their views of the role of the Internet in education ,  presented it as a "widening" of the sphere of influence,  and a widening of the "accessibility" to the public for "contribution" to the body of knowledge.

In the afternoon,  the focus was Weblogs in education,  which interested me further still.  AKMA talked about his class (or classes) at Seabury-western where he requires student weblogs.  The thing AKMA celebrated about that was how students are talking to each other more about their work,  and about what they think of each other's ideas.  WIKIs were described and explored (as "Social Software",  which David pointed out as being a relatively new "discipline").  WIKIs allow for a kind of free-for-all editing of pages,  and an easy interface for creating new links that create new pages and extend the "Web" for that topic.  We also discussed messaging and chatting and commenting during a speaker or professor presentation.

I asked if AKMA and Dave could illuminate "TrackBack" that is a feature on Movable Type and other Weblogs, where comments about a particular posts can receive "pings" from other weblog software (which have the feature)  that a post has been made that points to that entry,  thus extending the notion of Comments (usually a place on the blog in question where a reader who has come to this blog can post a comment about that entry.  Trackback does not require the commenter to navigate to the entry and "Leave" a comment....but "Notifies" the post (usually in  a link provided below the post,  and usually right next to the link to the local "Comments",  indicating that on another page that opens up,  there will be one or more links to blogs that "blog" this particular blog.  A "distributed" discussion is thus possible. 

Someday,  hopefully soon, the Church can wake up to this "revolution" (as I see it) in the idea of what a discussion is;  what dialogue is;  what EDUCATION is.