Redefined: Teaching, Learning, Thinking

One can learn through being taught. Can one be taught to learn? In the article "Rigor Redefined" the writer Tony Wagner spent time further examining this question. He conversed with business, non-profit, philanthropic and education leaders. Once he had a better idea idea of what skills graduates will need to posses in the real world, he observed classrooms to find out if the schools here in the U.S.A  are efficiently teaching the skills business leaders  are looking for. What he learned over the course of his journey was a little surprising. 

When talking to Clay Parker, president of the Chemical Management BOC Edwards, Wagner was some what taken aback by Parker's responses. Parker first stated he looks for someone who asks good questions that are relevant and will move the discussion forward. The problem Parker said is that you can't tech people how to think or learn.  This blog, this personal learning network, is forcing me to work my thinking ability. It isn't necessarily teaching me how to think per say, rather it is enhancing my ability to think. It's making me push and connect my thoughts. The pln's I write weekly challenge me to state my thoughts, yet ask relevant, intelligent questions. When teachers hand the reigns of choice to the student the student is able to learn what is going to be important for their future. The outcome of this method is (according to Wagner's studies) very effective. Students have always been able to think what they want about what they are taught. Now some are able to choose what they are taught. 

Retink Life.

"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." - Bill Gates

         "The machine is us/ing us." by Michael Wesch and Gates quote have similar interpretations. Both talk of the future of the internet. Our future isn't going to be the same as our past. The future is never really the same as the past, but our future is "The future." We have the technology to do possibly anything. We are the the initiators of this new age, the age of technology, and electronic gadgets.

          While watching the video I was, lets be honest a little bored. I thought to myself "I've heard all of this before I've heard that the future will be different, I've heard that we are we are the most connected people yet because of the web." What captured my attention and made me think were the last few seconds of the video. I was interested in these last few seconds because I had never heard or thought about how we will have to rethink a few things; copy wright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family and ourselves. If we are creating the "Global Village of Tomorrow" like Gates suggests we will indeed need to rethink "life." Our new village, that is web 2.0, will have its own set of codes and conducts. It's own set of rules and its own way of life. We will need to learn a new way of life for this new way of living. No one can tell us how to figure this one out. We don't have older generations to answer the questions we may ask. We are the creators of this Global Village. We find ourselves in a position of authority. Authority over how we will run things, authority over what the future will hold. We are the "Founding Fathers", of Web 2.0, so to speak. If we don't make it a safe and useful environment who will? The way the future will be run is up to us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1

Silver and Gold

       The definition of antique is a collectible item of high value because of it's considerable age. No wonder a first century A.D., rare, Roman helmet sold for nearly $3.6 million. I read and admired pictures in the slide show "Pictures: Rare Roman Helmet sells for $3.6 million", by National Geographic. As soon as this incredible piece of history was found it was taken to Christie's Auction House, in northwestern England. Aitken, an employ at the auction house, said "When the piece came to the auction house, I examined it first hand, I saw this extraordinary face from the past staring back at me." 

       This story shows the weight of time. Time is valuable, it doesn't last. We try to do everything we can to stop ourselves from growing old. There's songs, surgery's, and books on staying fit and prolonging youth. This article makes clear that there is value and beauty in aging. I'm sure that in it's day the Helmet was pretty, but now the Helmet ,that may have been taken for granted, is a thing of wonder. 

         We take pride in our inventions, lets face it we, the human race, have come a long way. We may often forget the significance of our ancient ancestors and their inventions. Yes, everything new is nifty and amazing. History and the wisdom  our ancestors left behind, is precious. This comparison reminds me of a song we would sing in girl scouts: "Make new friends but keep the old one is silver and the other gold." Technology is the new shiny "silver friend", we'll do anything to get our hands on it. It will teach us new ideas and take us to unexplored realms. History (the artifacts left for us to find) is the "gold friend". It is full of passed down knowledge and will will remind us of who we were, who we are, and who we have the potential to be. The absolute best part of the little song is " make new friends, but keep the old." Just because we develop new technology every day doesn't mean we have to forget the lessons we've already learned. History doesn't need to disappear with the advancement of technology.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/photogalleries/101011-roman-helmet-sold-history-pictures/?now=2010-10-11-00:01

Enduring Voices Project

Latin, at one point in history was one of the most common languages. Latin is now an extinct language, what could this mean for any modern present language? I read the article "Lost" Language Found by Anonymous.  Nearly 80% of the worlds population speaks only about 1% of its language's. The language and the knowledge, that went with that language die when the last person who spoke it passes.

The Enduring Voices project went on a expedition to northern India to study two rural languages and found a "new" language called Koro. Although Koro isn't really new it's new to linguists, and it became one of the 6,909 known living languages. The distressing part of this discovery is that Koro is only spoken by 800 people very few of which are under the age of 20. This language is practically dead, most linguists consider half of the worlds 6,909 languages endangered. 

After i read this article I looked up the Enduring voices project. They're connected to national geographic.The goal of the Enduring Voices Project is to "Document endangered languages and prevent language extinction by identifying the most crucial areas where languages are endangered and embarking on expeditions." This is probably one of the coolest jobs I've ever heard of. These people travel to some of the most exotic locations on earth to look for and write about endangered, and new languages. The linguists who journey on these expeditions are extremely gifted. They can pick up what knowledge the languages hold just be listening to them and analyzing them.

Being a linguist hasn't always been a career option. If it had been maybe we wouldn't have so many lost  languages or have so many ancient languages that we don't know and possibly never will know and understand.  This career doesn't just preserve language it preserves life. Not that linguists are saving lives they are just preserving lifestyles. They are preserving the older ways of living that may be forgotten when the language goes extinct. The Enduring Voices Project makes me think of the poem "Forgotten Language" by Shel Silverstein: 

"Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed.
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers. . . .
How did it go?
How did it go?" 

If we weren't working on preserving languages future generations could be placing one of our modern languages in the place of Silversteins and saying to themselves, "how did it go, how did it go."

Bread crumbs through a forest, to digital footprints.

In the children's story Hanzel and Gretel, bread crumbs are left so the potentially Hanzel and Gretel can find there way back home. In our society today some parents would like if their child left digital footprints to be left. Not for the child's sake, but for other people(who may be searching for that child's)sake. Will Richardson the author of "Footprints in the Digital Age" says he would like his daughter to be Googled well. He believes that someone in her future will search for her and come up with unimpressive results(if in fact she isn't well Googled).  This idea of his gave me a somewhat unsettling feeling. I don't necessarily think that at young ages children should be exposed to so much that they are Googleable.  It takes away that simplicity and innocence of childhood. Parents shouldn't want their child to be Googleable, especially when there are so many creepy people out there on the web. I know that Will Richardson's daughter is 11, but that's still young.  I realize that in his article he talks about older kids. Being well Googled at a certain age is great. When I meet some one new I often find myself "Facebook stalking" them. "Facebook stalking" may be the younger generations version of the Google search. 

Will Richardson also makes the good point that whatever we write on the internet is able to be copied and sent. People can twist our words any which way they want to. This is one of the main things parents and educators find so hard to understand. They didn't grow up with kids texting there friends all day and night. Nor were they updating their status on Facebook with every new thought. This constant writing and posting of copyable information leaves a lot of room for cruelty.  

My favorite part of Richardson's article  was when he used the analogy of children driving a bus with teachers in the back going any where they please without any direction. Richardson points out how this generation, my generation, are the first children ever to lead such a huge technological shift. We need help and direction, but where can we get it if we're the leaders of this shift? Our elders can give us some advice but we, the children, have to figure out this new way of life. This lifestyle is allowing us to become the most connected generation in history. It's not our parents or educators job to make us "Well Googled." It's ours.

H2O; Have it. Keep it. Clean it.

Energy, we're always hearing about ways to conserve it & transform it to fit our needs. The article "Light is the Bright IDEA for Transportation" by Josie Garth Waite, is all about conserving energy in transportation. We hear about hybrids all the time, they're a pretty common idea in our 21st century world. Yes, hybrids are modern and cool looking, best of all Eco friendly. Yet even hybrids have there downside. They cost a lot of money, especially the larger ones. Bright Automotive is the company creating the "huge" hybrid van they named IDEA.  Bright has been working on this project for a couple of years now. Back in 2008 they asked the Department of Energy for a loan of $450 million. That was before the economy started going down. During the time of the low economy Bright set aside the IDEA project for about a year or so. Finally they are picking up the IDEA, and starting to work on it. Though they have started working on the IDEA project, research analyst Jacob Grose says "even if they have the best technology around, it's a long road ahead."

I agree with many that making our planet eco friendly is essential to making sure later generations will have a world that can sustain life. The industrial revolution of the late 1800's & early 1900's started this "pollution era." Before the Industrial  Revolution we were much more agricultural as a whole. Now we depend on planes, buses,& cars for travel. For food, we depend on processed & factory created foods. We're in the process of destroying the natural resources that Earth has. We need to focus and ideas like IDEA, naturally grown foods & cleaning up the debris we have littered all over our planet. Ecologists have been working on getting this message out to us, the public, for a long time now. We need to "Save our planet." I know how cheesy and sometime annoying the Eco-fanatic slogans are, but they have some truth to them. The truth in them, is the scarines. The theories of Global Warming and the Ice Caps melting scare me. I'm afaid for later generations, we're destroying their world. My children and grandchildren will have to live in what is left. We are selfish, we're living the way we want to and not thinking of the future of the world. Will our successors know the beauty we have the opportunity to see every day? Or will the just see the piles of rubble we've left behind. I'm scared that our planet will end out looking like the Earth shown in the Disney movie Wall-e. There was nothing there except loads of trash. Does a load of trash sound like something you would like to leave your great-grandchild as a home? We need to come together and be green to save our planet.    

Destroying or Creating

"As we come to rely on computers to meditate or understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." That final sentence is the ending point in Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google making us Stupid?" 

This article made me think, a lot. I believe that the way we are using, maybe even abusing the Internet is going to ruin the way we think, read and write. I know technology is progression which is mostly good, but not always. We aren't reading anymore to immerse ourselves in the words or the meaning of the story, we're reading to make sure we're informed about whats going on in the world and peoples lives. I'm not saying that informational reading is less important than reading novels or other stories. I don't think that we have to "dump" one way of reading for another.

We're loosing the richness in the way we talk because of the way we communicate over text and aim. In Shakespeare's time the way words were cherished made them beautiful, ever day speech was almost poetic. We're so lazy now we definitely don't cherish our words, most of us use slang words on a regular basis. Texting and other forms of typed conversation have made our brains want to get the information out as quickly as possible. We don't take the time to say talk to you later we just write ttyl, that's a prime example of laziness. 

Google is promoting this robotic almost mechanic way of thinking and processing information. We're loosing our depth. I'm sure Google would love to see our desire for leisurely reading and concentrated thinking to be diminished. This is already happening in newer generations. How many kids would pick up a book over their Nintendo? Very few. We're going to start relying completely on technology. I think that would alter our society in a really big way. The same connections and relationships we have will cease to exist in their present form because of email, facebook, text message and skype. The way we read and think is already being changed by online resources like Google. The only reason this is happening is because we're lazy. We've lost live the drive to be scholars and poets and further our thinking process. Many say why care, we have google to research then ponder our questions instead of our own minds. What will happen to our children and their children? Will books become foreign objects to them? Will paper and pen become forgotten tools? What level (if any level) of thinking process will future generations have? Yes, technology is helpful but in the long run will it ruin us or create something that?