An iPad in every pot!

It is a constant source of amazement/amusement to me to see what passes as news now-a-days… But I find it particularly insightful when items from academia hit the popular press. A local university made splashes this past spring announcing "An iPad and a chicken in every pot!!!" – Well maybe not a pot, but I tend to mix my political slogans as much as my metaphors… But they did plan on handing out a shiny new toy to every student. In the end did the University have ANY plan to integrate those devices into the curriculum??? Well, it sounded good at the time….

This brings me to Harrisburg University. Yes, that Harrisburg. They have hit the free publicity mother load as they trod as close to that fine line of censorship as they could. Those rebels, I tell ya. They had the audacity to block most all Social Media sites for a whole week for people accessing the Internet through their networks – all in the name of research! No matter that similar experiments have been done in various forms and sizes at schools across this land for the past decade or more, and even longer than that if you count non-internet addictions (Pavlov's dogs anyone?). So this one hit the press – all the way to the UK (I swear the Guardian will pick up anything to fill space….) But why this one? Why now? Is it because of the Facebook movie about to come out? Is it touching some raw nerve of 'we have a right to be distracted; you can't take THAT away from us'???

Ah well – maybe it's something I just can't wrap my head around. Like how the Pirates have gone from three consecutive division titles to 18 consecutive years under .500 – or how anyone believed Joaquin Phoenix was actually trying to carve a pseudo-Amish niche in the Rap world – some things are just unexplainable.

So here are 4 links to stories with different slants on the whole she-bang. The final one is the 'I'm Still Here' catch – seems Harrisburg U was just trying to get our attention. Yes, they do hold a sold out conference on how to leverage social media and other legal and political ramifications of the channel. An iPad in every pot indeed…

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/09/harrisburg

http://live.drjays.com/index.php/2010/09/20/could-you-go-a-week-without-facebook/

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/a-gratuitous-experiment-in-censorship-harrisburg-u-bans-social-networking-for-a-week/

http://www.harrisburgu.edu/academics/professional/socialmedia/index.php

After all that – Please update your blogs with your personal ruminations on the following –

What qualifies as a social network internet site? How many do you belong to? What do you 'get' out of it? What does it 'get' out of you? How important has Facebook/any other site become in your life?