The Future of the Internet !

On March 11th I attended a lecture that was given by Jackie Regales. The topic of interest was especially about The Future of the Internet: Utopian and Dystopian Possibilities. She started of the lecture explaining how the internet was first used by the government, under the control of the Dept. of Defense and gradually worked her way into the advancements in which technology has come to. Further into her discussion I became very intrigued with two topics she had discussed and they were the future of schooling online along with Google Health. I learned that many institutions such as MIT are thinking about creating campus education online. I say this because they have seen a greater increase in online classes which sparked their interest to make everything available on the web. Currently, as of now, there is no fee to register or sign up, but as soon as classes were to begin and tuition had to be paid, they would send you the bill. I find that online education isn’t really the best thing to do. I say this because there are so many ways to get by with cheating and not really learning the material as if you were to go to class in person. The other topic that sparked my interest was Google Health. This topic brought upon many pros and cons. First off, online medical files would be very easy to store and save a lot more time and energy, where as paper files that came day in and day out would create hassle and chaos. Patients would be able to put their own medical information on the files such as blood type, allergies, medications, etc. So, if you were to go from doctor to doctor, all they would have to do is simply pull up your medical file and look it over. Zeroing out the transfer and faxing of information. Even though this seems like a good plan for the future, there are still precautions that do not allow us to go through with this. No one is positive that personal information would be kept private. Therefore, you run into the issue of identity theft and stolen information that could cost you. Overall, I enjoyed the lecture by Jackie Regales and learned new and innovated information that we could possibly see in the near future.