transparency

What do you think about transparency? Well, everybody likes transparency, from politics to private life it gives us the feeling of freedom, honesty, confidence. But what is the other side of the coin when this transparency crosses the boundarys of being our own choice and it gets nicely "imposed" to us; all for good causes of course: saving the whales, making the world a better place, being transparent enough to "help" others.
Google gives us again the possibility to be "a good person".
maybe having a Tofflerian "third job" doesn't bother us but shouldn't it be as long as it doesn't "harm" us?

Change

Reading the news today I found out that Google was closing Lively, its virtual world browser application. It didn't strike me more than that because I was not the biggest fun of this application to which I had found several bugs, difficulties to connect and no special or original features. But, since it wasn't a bad application either, in my lab we were thinking of using this tool to support collaboration and community building among our distance master students. For different reasons, it finally never happened.

We have been using for more than a year Pageflakes with our students. But for the last month it wasn't working anymore in Geneva. So one of the main tools used in one of the courses, with all the information and work that we had done with it was inaccessible for unknown reasons. Now it miraculously works again so everything got back on tracks.

As far as I am concerned, that raises some issues about criteria for choosing and using web2.0 tools for teaching or even for personal use. But as Toffler said once "change is not necessary to life, it's life" and the laws of consumption seem to rule these changes.