Thing #20 -- Special Treat

Wow. That's my initial reaction to Professor Walsh's "The Machine is Us/ing Us" -- a crash course, indeed, it covered just about everything we've been looking at in this '23 Things' course. Actually, what I thought about the first time I watched it was, 'amazing, I understand what they're talking about!' And that is due to the Technology 101 class I took at Wayne State, which covered html and xml, as well as the ground we've covered in '23 Things.'
Is this for a general audience? Sure, it's on youtube, after all. But the main point I think is about education. I rabbit-trailed into the ethnography blogs and viewed the video about students and learning, which is also very popular in the 'blogosphere.' I agree that 19th century teaching procedures just don't work with 21st century students and life. I fully agree that education needs to reinvent itself to teach students how to learn, not just how to parrot the teacher.
The file sharing questions in the last 'thing' apply here, as well, as net 2.0 challenges us to redefine copyright, privacy, and commerce, and therefore the laws that currently govern them.
Perhaps I may presume to disagree on a minor point--at the very end of the video, Walsh et al was suggesting we redefine everything, including family and ourselves. Frankly, some things don't change, regardless of the technology. I am me apart from my machine! And the nuclear family is still the cornerstone of civilization, regardless of opinions to the contrary. Technology has been changing and upgrading since the discovery of fire and the invention of the spearhead, but people are still people.