Embracing Wikipedia

I wrote last week (Wikipedia goes undercover) about the increasing clandestine use of Wikipedia by students in spite of teachers' warnings that it isn't always academically reliable. The moral of the story for me is that if faculty don't completely trust sites like Wikipedia why not get involved to improve the shortcomings.

This is what is happening already at some universities and in particular the University of Denver according to an article in eCampus News, Journalism students turn to Wikipedia to publish stories. Journalism students there are given assignments to write new entries in Wikipedia that have to be thoroughly researched and referenced. As one student says about the assignment:

“I never considered how much research and knowledge actually has to go into a Wikipedia article to make them good sources. It was actually very tough researching the subject and turning it into a coherent entry for Wikipedia.”

Indeed if you are writing for a site that gets around 68 million visitors per month you can be sure that if you make a mistake someone out there will comment. One of the Denver teachers involved in this initiative comments on faculty suspicion of Wikipedia:

“One of the reasons I wanted to assign [writing Wikipedia entries] is to combat that view. I tell students to use it as an information portal … and you can see what information has been sourced and see that they’re reliable sources. Wikipedia can be a great resource.”

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Wikipedia can replace academic journals and reference works but it is definitely a great place to start if you want a good overview of a subject and links to further study.

Have we ever really paid for content?

With several newspapers like the Financial Times already setting up pay walls to hide behind and others like the New York Times planning to charge for content, there's plenty of discussion about the future of print media. Since readers are charged for reading the printed newspapers so should they be charged for reading the net version. I must say I have tended to sympathise with that argumenton the grounds that the income guarantees the survival of quality journalism. If everything is free then who will provide thoughtful and balanced reporting from the world's troublespots?

I've just read a fascinating article by Mark McLaughlin in the Huffington Post called Audiences don't pay for content that has certainly made me think again. Here he claims that we've never really paid for content but we certainly pay for the distribution. Once we've paid the TV licence or cable fee we can watch as much TV as we want. We pay for the fact that a newspaper has been put together and sent to us but the content has been paid for by the advertisers (in some cases, like the small ads, that's us too). Radio is even more generous, being free or bundled into the TV licence, and we can listen to whatever we want. We happily pay for the equipment but not really the actual content.

Internet is, of course, far from free. We pay sometimes quite hefty fees for our broadband access, landline and cellular, as well as the cost of all of our computers, gaming consoles and mobile devices. Should we then face further charges for all the net content we access? It's a bit like buying a TV, paying the licence and cable company charges and then being asked to pay extra for every programme we watch.

Can advertising bear the costs of all this content? Can solutions like iTunes or Kindle provide attractive distribution solutions that we would be prepared to pay for? Can some of the internet access costs be used to finance some of the content too? No clear answers are available but I can't see the pay wall tactics of some newspapers having any effect as long as someone else is providing the news "for free". We'll just stop quoting these sources. There's no point sending a link to an article that your friends can't read.

McLaughlin doesn't have any clear solution either but it's an article that stimulates discussion. There's also the question of how all this effects education and the debate between advocates of open educational resources and those who want the university's material and research safely locked away behind passwords and journal subscriptions. The future is open but probably not free.

Photo by rhondda.p on Flickr CC BY NC

Wikipedia goes undercover

There's a new study just out from the University of Washington by Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg called How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research. The study covered students on six campuses across the USA. They have found that 80% of the students in the survey use Wikipedia in their initial research even if not encouraged by faculty to do so. I suspect that results would be similar at many other universities and schools in different countries. The big question of course is why they do so.

The number one attraction I think must be Wikipedia's sheer volume of information and even more important its ease of use. It is often quite simply the best place to start to get an overview of a field. Some students in the study state that they do not cite Wikipedia as a source since they know that the teacher will not approve. They all seem well aware of the potential limitations of Wikipedia but choose to use it anyway. However few claimed to use Wikipedia later on in their research where they cite more established sources.

"Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility."

Why this clandestine use of the world's biggest ever reference work? Using Wikipedia is an excellent way of demonstrating source criticism and you can gain a deeper insight into the complexity of many concepts by looking under the discussion tab. Why don't more teachers get involved in making Wikipedia more credible or accept it for what it is and let students use it as a springboard to more knowledge? Despite its size it is still suffering from growing pains as many committed contributors debate just how free and open the work should be in the future. Those debates are however not apparent to the average user and it seems to be the default starting point for investigating a subject area.

I found no reference to the alternative wiki-based encyclopedia Citizendium which operates somewhat in Wikipedia's shadow but has ambitions to be more accurate and peer-reviewed as I understand it. Forbidding the use of these sources just moves the issue under the radar. Using social reference works responsibly should be a topic for class discussions. Wikipedia won't just go away if we ignore it.

Read a summary of the above report in an article in Campus Technology.
Also another blog post on the use of Wikipedia by medical students on Dundee e-MedEd blog.

Location location

We seem to love telling people where we are, especially if it's somewhere cool. Facebook and Twitter are full of such messages but with most mobile devices having built-in GPS we soon won't have to write our location updates - they'll be automatically included in the message (as long as we choose that option). For those who love to tell the world of their every movement there is a horde of location tagging services and the market leader of these seems to be foursquare.

I haven't signed up for foursquare yet. I'm tempted, at least to see what the fuss is about, but I am slightly worried it'll require too much attention and time to be worthwhile (however just writing about it here makes me feel obliged to get started). The idea of foursquare and a large flock of similar apps is that you check in to whatever location you happen to be in (especially restaurants and bars it seems) and preferably make a comment for the benefit of future visitors. Basically a sort of virtual guest book. There's also a competitive element in that you can win points and badges for being the first at a particular place or a regular visitor. Some restaurants and bars will even provide a free drink to anyone who shows they've earned enough points.

One interesting article about this trend is by M G Siegler on Tech Crunch (Check-in fatigue) where he attends a conference in Austin, Texas, and attempts to log his movements on all the available location-tagging services. This of course proves too much and by the end he's down to using the two main contenders for supremacy in the location boom, foursquare and Gowalla.

The main problem is that there are too many similar apps and little compatibility between them. Add in the fact that most location enthusiasts are also active in Facebook and Twitter and it becomes very time-consuming to keep all updated. We need interoperability between all these services to get any sustainable use from them. In the end you have to choose a small number of apps that suit you and stick to them even if it means disappointing some friends.But the ideal is some way of getting everything in to one platform.

The other article on this theme is from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Will your college be covered in virtual grafitti?. Here there is concern at how students are labelling various campus locations on foursquare with critical comments. When you "check in" to a particular department or building you can leave a virtual comment that other visitors pick up on their cellphones as they approach the location. That could include criticism of a teacher for example without the victim even being aware of the virtual grafitti. At the same time the university can carry out some official location tagging providing useful tips to visitors as they move around the campus. There are definitely opportunities for education here especially with location tagging and augmented reality.

Location based services are only just beginning to burst on to the mainstream market and there's a bit of a wild west flavor just now with hundreds of wannabe services vying for our attention. In the end we'll get some kind of order and interoperability but for now it's chaotic, confusing and very innovative.

Why is change so hard?

Why is it so difficult to integrate technology into education? So far we've used technology in the traditional framework of classrooms, lectures and teacher-lead discussion but seldom investigate how to use the net to make any fundamental changes to change the way we teach and learn. The main problem is the disruptive nature of change. One teacher or one school can try to innovate but if the system around them will not accommodate that change they will have problems.

Two articles this week have put this resistance to change into focus. The first is by Trent Batson in Campus Technology, Let faculty off the hook, where he claims that our whole concept of education (schools, teaching, classrooms) is so deeply rooted in society that we simply cannot imagine any other system. Society is built around our children going to school for around 6-8 hours a day and taught in groups of around 30 strictly divided by age. Parents expect their kids to learn the way they did and get worried if changes are made. Teachers who don't "teach" in the traditional sense will soon attract criticism. Furthermore lecturing is seen as being synonymous with teaching and if you don't offer it students may get uneasy and wonder when the real teaching will start. Politicians often talk about schools getting back to basics and see chalk and talk as the best method of teaching.

"It is one thing to use technology to improve on current practices, but another, and more challenging thing, to use technology to replace current practices and operate in ways that are completely new and counter-intuitive to us."

Basically net-based learning challenges such fundamental and deep-rooted traditions that the system simply does not know how to react. In the face of such a potentially disruptive force the natural reaction is to duck.

On a similar theme is a fascinating article on Education Next, High School 2.0, about an innovative new school in Philadelphia. Opened in 2006, the School of the Future aimed at creating a radical new approach to education using plenty of technology (Microsoft were involved in the planning process), collaborative learning and very little traditional classroom teaching. The article describes the painful process of the school's first few years where students' experience and expectations did not match the school's brave new ideas. The jump from traditional teacher-lead classroom teaching to net-based learning was simply too great for most students to handle. Parents too could not accept the lack of "real teaching" and the authorities could not accept the school's assessment procedures. The system simply could not cope with the disruptive element that the new approach offered.

One of Batson's comments fits perfectly to the case of the school of the future:
"We may have a new ecology of learning (we do), but we also have systemic incompatibility with the new ecology. The entire workflow on the academic side of institutions runs against the new ecology." 

According to the article the school is beginning to emerge from the chaos and is trying to merge some of the radical new ideas to a more pragmatic level and more adapted to the existing structures and expectations. This process is clearly going to take some time for all of us.

The problem with great teachers

A great teacher can decide your future career whereas a poor teacher can make you completely lose interest in a subject that you previously showed promise in. Many of us can trace our choice of career or subject area back to one teacher whose enthusiasm and attention gave us confidence and inspiration. Someone who somehow pushes us to try that little bit harder and shows us how to take charge of our own learning is a school's most valuable asset.

Many authorities today are trying to impose various types of quality control to weed out "bad" teaching, often judged on the basis of exam results. Good teachers get good resluts would seem to be a logical conclusion but, as ever, it's never as simple as we would like. Think back to your schooldays. My favourite teacher could be my best friend's hate object and vice versa. The same teacher who inspired me to top grades caused a friend to completely give up the subject. Many kids go through school on a rollercoaster of grades as they switch teachers from year to year and results fluctuate due to simple personal chemistry. It's tough on teachers too. Imagine taking over a class that has just had a year with the school's star teacher. How do you follow that?

Isn't the teacher-centred system basically rather too vulnerable? I don't think it's so simple as there being "good" and "bad" teachers; it's often quite simply a matter of personalities and compatibility. How can we reduce the vulnerability of the system so that students' learning is less dependant on individual teachers? Good teaching is sometimes in the eye of the beholder so we need to encourage students to find motivation in their own networks. Maybe the best teaching is guiding students towards collaborative learning where they motivate each other, either face-to-face or on the net. I still believe that the teacher's role is important but it shouldn't be so decisive. More motivators are needed to smooth out the rollercoaster ride. Building personal learning networks will ensure that there are always people who can motivate you even if your teacher of the moment fails to inspire.

Fly on the wall

Filming lectures is becoming increasingly popular at most universities. Sometimes they're shared on the net using platforms like iTunes U or YouTube Edu though probably the vast majority are hidden for all but registered students. The reasons for filming are generally to let students review lectures later and to allow distance learners access to the campus classroom, but when the lectures are open to all factors like marketing and recruitment come into force.

There's an article in The Chronicle, College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online. But Should They? that lists the pros and cons of going on air in the classroom. One factor that makes some teachers reluctant is the relationship between teacher and students that doesn't translate well when seen on a small screen. As one professor puts it:

".... I find myself playing devil's advocate all the time ... I don't want to be on the record saying something I don't even believe" if the lectures go out on the Web. He considers the classroom a "sacred space" that may need to stay private to preserve academic freedom."

I personally believe that the benefits of openness in this respect far outweigh the drawbacks but one aspect of the filmed lectures is a problem. It's the fly on the wall feeling you get when watching these recordings as a distance student. Since it's filmed "live in front of a studio audience" you as a distance student are simply not there. The teacher addresses the students in the room and has eye contact with them and seldom, if ever, with you. I've seen many filmed lectures where the teacher even moves off camera for a while or is very definitely off centre. This hardly makes the film compulsive viewing.

If a lecture is intended for an audience of distance students a greater sense of intimacy is gained if the lecture is recorded on the teacher's own computer and webcam or in a studio with no audience. That way everyone gets full eye contact. Maybe it's soon time to make most lectures web-based, even for campus students and spend the contact time in the classroom on discussion rather than lecturing.

Photo by Wen Chuan Tan, Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike Some rights reserved.

Context is king

An article that has won a fair bit of attention in the last week is Who needs a prof? by Stephanie Findlay in On Campus. It deals with students turning more and more to the lectures and course material freely available from top universities via iTunes U, Academic Earth and YouTube Edu. Many students prefer these resources to attending lectures at their own university or reading much of the prescribed course literature. If they can access all the top professors' lectures anywhere anytime what will the role of the regular teacher be? I trust that the headline of the article is a rhetorical question.

The issue here is the fundamental change in education that we're in the midst of, where the role of the teacher is shifting:

"To be effective .... they (teachers) must be “cognitive coaches” rather than conduits of information."

With information freely available everywhere it's context, not content, that counts. Admittedly some students can certainly thrive and learn in self-sufficient groups without a teacher but they are, I suspect, a small minority. The teacher's future role of filter/mentor/motivator/facilitator is much more challenging and rewarding than the traditional one of "sage on the stage" and I see a need for more teachers in the net-based future rather than fewer.

However it's vital that, as we embrace new technology in education, teachers receive encouragement and are rewarded for innovative initiatives. The challenges of adapting to a new educational environment are exciting and demanding but clear incentives, support and leadership will be required.

Wheel of fortune

Way back in the pre-net days of the eighties there was a controversial telephone service here in Sweden called hotline. You phoned a number and could talk to whoever else was there; purely random communication. Ideally you could meet someone new and chat about important world issues but there are no prizes for guessing what it was mostly used for. In the end the service was abandoned. There are certainly thousands of services like this around the world today though they're not free.

Now there's an updated video version of this called ChatRoulette where you just turn on your webcam and click to make video contact with someone somewhere. It's totally anonymous, you've no idea who you're watching and can never find them again. You can text chat with whoever turns up or even use voice. If you don't like what you see just click to the next person. You can't go back to anyone or save anyone. You just sit there looking at people looking at you.

There's always something fascinating about random events. We love wheel of fortune games and the suspense involved in not knowing what will happen next. This service demands absolutely nothing of you and offers an endless gallery of people; friendly, eccentric, funny, seriously weird, exhibitionist and some downright sick. No responsibility and total anonymity. Attractive? You bet.

This is probably the direct opposite of what the social web is all about; no collaboration, no connections, no responsibility, very little meaningful interaction. Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame condensed down to 15 seconds as we parade ourselves in front of our webcams. No-one cares who you are or what you do, you're just part of the ultimate peepshow. Probably very little relevance to e-learning but part of today's media landscape.

Read more about ChatRoulette in an article from New York Magazine, The Human Shuffle and also on Mashable. There's even a study of the phenomenon, ChatRoulette - an initial survey, that calls it rather nicely a "probabilistic community shaped by a platform which mediates the encounters between its users by eliminating lasting connections between them."

Net collaboration at its best

Over the last few years I've built up an amazing network of contacts all over the world thanks to various social media. Some days I spend more time interacting with people outside my university than inside and I often get involved in interesting projects with the most unexpected combinatons of people.

Two examples from the past week that show the power of the social web:

• Earlier last week I suddenly noticed a Twitter entry from a guy who wanted help translating a text from Swedish to English. That sounded right up my street so I replied. Turned out to be Rodd Lucier in Canada (whose blog The Clever Sheep I can warmly recommend) who had seen a Swedish brochure on how teachers can use Creative Commons and he wanted to use it with schools in Ontario. I know the people responsible for the brochure at the Swedish Agency for Education so the assignment was soon given the all-clear. Now I've done the translation and soon Rodd can produce a Canadian version for the schools he's working with.
  
• I have been involved in a project with the Belarusian State University in Minsk and a colleague there contacted me on Skype the other evening. She's involved in a project in intercultural communication which is using Second Life as a forum for learning. I was put in touch with a lady in France who's been working on the sim in SL. I've now been given instructions to test the Belarusian simulation and report any glitches. Another case of a simple contact leading to unexpected collaboration.
  

Of course all this is done in my spare time and is purely for fun but I never fail to be impressed by the way such opportunities just turn up on the net. Such global collaboration was unthinkable only a few years ago. The trouble is that many teachers have still not discovered the possibilities of opening up the classroom to global collaboration. Once you've tried it you'll never close the door again.

Digital black hole

It's been a while since I last wrote about the problem of digital preservation. The paradox is that while we have never had access to so much information there's a great danger that much of it will disappear without a trace. Will future researchers be able to access records of our everyday life? Who preserves all the communication going on in social networks? You may say that much of it isn't worth preserving but often it's precisely the everyday communication that can be most interesting. Who preserves all our photos and videos, especially if the applications that host them, like Flickr or Picasa, go up in smoke one day? Websites are preserved to some extent but the vast majority are not. Seemingly the average website has an average life expectancy of 75 days!

I was reminded of this by an article in The Guardian, Is copyright getting in the way of us preserving our history?, where the author sees copyright legislation as an added barrier to digital preservation. One problem area is that lack of archives for TV and radio productions. Getting permission to make these archives accessible on the net is not easy and without the permission of all parties nothing gets preserved.

"the vast majority of documentary films from the 20th century will be forever buried in a lawyer's thicket inaccessible (legally) because of a set of permissions built into these films at their creation".

Added to this is the fact that digital files deteriorate and must be reformatted regularly. Food for thought if you want to be able to show your family photos and films to your grandchildren. It's impossible to preserve everything but we need to consider carefully what types of net content should be preserved and ensure that it's done so in a format that will be relatively future-proof. I doubt if we'll find a format that is as durable as the papyrus scrolls of ancient Egypt.

From content to context

I'm in the midst of starting a project to encourage greater use of open educational resources (OER) and spending quite a lot of time discussing the opportunities and threats involved in sharing teaching material on the net. In Sweden at least, relatively few teachers are aware of the vast amount of resources that are already available on the net that may be reused and in some cases even adapted in accordance with Creative Commons licensing.

The main problem is that the adoption of OER involves a pretty radical rethink of the teacher's role. Governments encourage increasing competition between schools and universities with league tables to help parents and students choose the best school to attend. Little wonder then that many are reluctant to share their lesson plans and presentation material since doing so may give other schools an advantage.

At the same time and despite the competition, more and more teachers are collaborating on the development of materials and are using web based material in their teaching. The key question seems to be how far a teacher's role is defined in terms of content production. I think nearly all teachers rather enjoy producing new material and seeing if it works or not; I have at any rate.

But is it possible to be considered a good teacher if you never produce your own matrial and instead refer students to other people's lectures, lesson plans and learning objects? I'm sure it is possible today since teaching is all about providing context not content. We've always referred students to textbooks and articles so why not recorded lectures and other learning objects on the net?

There's a very good article on Campus Technology by Trent Batson, As we may learn, that uses the analogy of verb tenses to explain this shift. The production of content is seen as past tense, a finished article, whereas now the focus is on dialogue and creating context and that is described as present continuous tense

"To present “content,” something finished, is industrial age; to engage students in the active conversation in your field makes more sense now. Education is not about the past tense, but the present progressive"

Teaching should move from focusing on the production of content to the living dialogue around that content with teachers providing context and insight. Since this process of collaborative analysis and reflection is unique, he argues, there can be no problems with plagiarism:

"If you instead help students create the content of the course, there can be no plagiarism because no one else has ever constructed your disciplinary knowledge in exactly that way."

Maybe the answer is that we can happily share content even in a competitive education sector because the competitive element is the teachers' ability to provide meaningful context and guidance.

Name game

In my last post I concluded that maybe the problems we have in convincing people about the benefits of net-based education lie in our vocabulary. As long as we use words like technology, IT, technical or computer many people will simply think, "I'm not interested in all that technical stuff, it's not my business." We really want to discuss the way we teach, learn, communicate and collaborate but as soon as the dreaded t-word is mentioned you get referred to the IT department. When we start taking the net for granted we can maybe escape from the need to see it all as something technical. There's plenty technology in there of course but we don't need to know about it to use it.

I had a project several years ago about how to organise the university's support for net-based education. We tried to avoid the tech trap by using the term flexible learning. We spent a lot of time and effort writing a good definition of what this meant and creating nice diagrams but all too often we were met with confused expressions and questions like "you mean IT don't you?" Every time we mentioned flexible learning we were forced to define what we meant.

Even the IT people get stuck. For many people IT means simply cables, computers, servers and security, whereas today it is the basis for virtually all activities in the organisation. When you broaden the scope of the IT department to cover, say, media production or pedagogical support you really need a new label for the operation. The trouble is finding the right word for it and selling the new concept successfully.

My final example on this front is social media. It's an over-used term at present but it's better than web 2.0 which verged too far into techspeak. For me social media is a gigantic field covering all types of net-based communication, sharing and collaboration. However I feel that most people see the term as virtually synonymous with Facebook and discussions often centre around the perceived dangers of social networking and whether it has any relevance for education. There's so much to discuss but since everyone knows Facebook (and has strong opinions about it) it's very hard to get past that discussion and move on to more relevant discussion. If only we could find a term that encompasses the whole concept and is easy for people to grasp. It'll come, but it takes time to evolve.

Vital statistics

Tony Bates is currently writing a book on the integration of technology in post-secondary education and has written a blog post on the key factors used in assessing how successful an institution has been (How well has your institution integrated technology?). Case studies from 11 institutions in North America and Europe will be analysed in the book and the post lists the key factors as follows:

1. Are there ‘champions’ with power and influence in the institution who recognize the importance of technology for conducting the business of the institution?
2. Does the institution have an advanced, comprehensive technology infrastructure that enables all staff, students and faculty to access computers, networks, software and services as required?
3. Has the institution digitalized its administrative systems, and can staff, students and faculty access administrative information and services easily over the web?
4. Has the institution identified a clear, strategic rationale for the use of technology within the institution?
5. Has the institution identified additional financial resources or reallocated resources to support the integration of technology within the institution?
6. What proportion of staff, students and faculty are using technology and for what activities?
7. How innovative is the use of technology, particularly for teaching?
8. What level of support and training is given to instructors to ensure good quality teaching when using technology?
9. Are students learning better and getting better services as a result of technology integration?

He suggests that these questions be used by all universities and colleges for a self audit and I would love to see this being implemented. I suspect that only a few will be able to answer all these questions.

Most institutions have now plenty of technology in place with high speed campus networks and wireless access commonplace. Administrative systems are established and learning management systems relatively widespread. However, in many places the problem is that the infrastructure is in place without being part of an overall strategy for how to best exploit the power of net-based tools to improve and widen the reach of our education. The benefits of the expensive infrastructure are not realised since there is seldom any money to invest in traing staff to use it effectively. Often there is no "champion" in the top management with the risk that important strategic decisions are delegated to the IT department who tend to see the issue as a technical one.

"... it seems clear already that strong commitment to technology from the senior administration is a necessary condition for effective integration."

However, I would say that what is often missing is an awareness of what technology is being used for and a lack of research on its use. Question 9 picks up on this theme. We implement technology but seldom study the effects. Are we using technology in the right way? Are we being innovative and if so what can we learn from the innovators? Are students benefitting from our use of technology and if not how should we change our methods? There is seldom any real quality assessment of net-based learning apart from superficial studies of drop-out rates.

One of the main mistakes we all make (in this post as well!) is using words like technology and IT. What's happening on the net today affects all of society and is mostly about new ways for people to communicate and collaborate. The technology behind the tools we use does not need to be understood by the users. Most of us drive cars without knowing how they work and the same is true on the net. For many people, however, the mere mention of such terms turns them off because they're simply "not interested in technical stuff". As long as we use such terms those at the top of our organisations will automatically delegate the issue to the IT people. Trouble is what else do we call it so that people will understand?

Change management

I thoroughly recommend an excellent post by Adam Thierer entitled Are you an Internet optimist or pessimist? He presents a very balanced analysis of the whole debate about technology's impact on society. Will the social web result in a dumbing-down of public discussion or does it foster diversity and wider participation, is it the end of professionally produced content and news or the beginning of true democracy, is it wisdom of crowds or mob rule, is it empowerment or hopeless fragmentation?

Adam traces the history of opposition to technical innovation and states the case for both the internet optimists and the pessimists with plenty links to key texts over the last decade of debate. His conclusion is that cautious optimism wins the day on points. However he warns both sides of the dangers of ignoring the oppostion's arguments. Many of the sceptics' fears are highly valid and it's no good dismissing them by saying that they are out of touch with reality.

"The sensible middle ground position is “pragmatic optimism”: We should embrace the amazing technological changes at work in today’s Information Age but do so with a healthy dose of humility and appreciation for the disruptive impact and pace of that change."

He closes the article with a fine statement of belief, The pragmatic (internet) optimist's creed. Well worth reciting once in a while.