Students will quite often bring up issues and topics and find resources that are not on the course outline but that are certainly useful for the course, which means that they're challenging the boundaries of courses. They're challenging the boundaries of knowledge that are constructed by the instructor and finding other kinds of things on the Internet and bringing them into the course in the context of this student-driven discussion over which the instructor has very little control. Something quite positive has happened inside the course through the online communications, and they don't want the thing to stop. The locus of his interest is not the computer alone, but rather the individual, and the individual's interaction with the computer and with others through the computer. He refers to Sherry Turkle of MIT, the author of Life on the Screen , who argues that the computer is not foreign to human relationships, but is instead a facilitator of human relationships.
People connect to one another and represent themselves to others through the machine.
The removal of the physical presence can be a great boon to communication. I've also had students express criticisms of my course and the way I teach online that they would probably not express in person. He finds that the range of communication is greatly expanded on the Internet, and although that range includes inappropriate communications, such as flaming and over-intimacies, such misuses are infrequent and are less of a problem than the media sensation over it would have us believe. The physical problems associated with computer use, especially with pointing devices, are ones that Cuneo himself is coping with. And I really believe that, in terms of the effects of the computer, of the technologies, on us, and especially on those of us who use them an awful lot.