When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection – or around the world, for that matter – can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product.

Oh, I can hardly bear to go on… in fact I can’t, so I’ll finish here, except to say that that such an interesting overview of a slice of ed tech history has rarely, if ever, been followed by such a reactionary, limited and incomplete ivory-towered, condescending and ill-informed argument (if you can call it that).

Heck, as an absolute amateur in everything I do I've noticed that, in this day and age, being expert is not about getting more and more knowledgeable about a narrower and narrower field. It's all about being as clued up on the reasoning behind a wider and wider range of fields. Expertise has been redefined. It's just that academics like Keen have trouble swallowing it. There, folks, is the real digital divide.

"To put it into perspective only two to four percent of the world's botanical and zoological species are in serious danger, whereas it's 50 percent of languages. The language crisis hasn't attracted the same degree of public awareness".

Before mass media, ordinary people painted, wrote poems and short stories, sang and played the piano. Then mass media not only took over all our discretionary time, it intimidated us with its multi-million dollar production budgets, its worship of celebrity and its stranglehold on the public consciousness. With web 2.0, the staus qou has been re-established. People once more feel empowered to be creative again; no more just voyeurs of the supposedly clever and talented.

In the conversation economy, dialogue rules.

You can also limit who gets to view a notebook by selecting different email addresses. This could be beneficial in a classroom context, when a student just wants to share access to their notebook with a few partners and the teacher, but not the entire class or the world.

Overall, however, I am VERY impressed with the Google Notebook tool and the possibilities it presents! I think it has HUGE applications for educational research, particularly because it permits such easy harvesting of links, quotations, and images with the date and originating URL/website included in the notebook clipping.