FYI .... on "virtual classrooms"

This is not about urban geography per se--though there are implications one might infer!
But, this might be of interest to you because, well, here we are in a "virtual" classroom, and we can certainly expect more, and not less, online teaching and learning in the future.
As this NY Times report observes:

Champions of digital learning want to turn teaching into yet another form of content. Allow anyone anywhere to take whatever course they want, whenever, over any medium, they say. Make universities compete on quality, price and convenience. Let students combine credits from various courses into a degree by taking an exit exam. Let them live in Paris, take classes from M.I.T. and transfer them to a German university for a diploma.

If only it can happen easily :-)  A typical reason why this is not happening, given the level of technology we already have:

Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.
Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”

I have always believed that my online classes are strictly about education in that grander sense of it being something way above and beyond "producing workers."  So are my "regular" classes.  If anybody took a look at, say, the syllabus for this course, the work that I ask you to do in order to demonstrate your understanding of the ideas, the kind of feedback I give you, I cannot imagine them even remotely thinking that this undermines the grand idea of what education is all about. 

Now, I don't want to give any impression that my work is under criticism--far from that.  It is just that I always prefer using my personal examples; this way I do not then unintentionally insult/hurt others. 

As always, I welcome your thoughts on this.  I have been logging a whole bunch of ideas related to online teaching and learning, and am always looking to fine-tune my understanding.  (Of course, I do not want you to take you away from completing Essay 2, your work for other classes, and the final exam stuff I emailed you earlier!)

BTW, watch out for an email requesting you to complete an online evaluation of this course and the instructor.  While the university conducts such evaluations only during one term (Winter, I think), I almost always ask for evaluations every term: students deserve that opportunity, and I always want to know if there are patterns in student responses to the evaluation questions so that I can continue to improve the course and enhance student learning.  And, I will not get the results of the evaluation until early next term--so, there need not be any worry that evaluations might influence your grade for the course.