Moore's law provides that the computer's advancement is exponential and it has no other direction but to increase computer power. This may not be such an understandable gibberish for many educators, but for scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts alike, all it says is that we could expect more things that our computers can do for the future.
But how are things in the educational world? The OLPC Project has been trying to break wave to put a suitable, economical, and powerful form of computing unlike any other in the hands of the public. The Project aims to provide each child from a Third World country to have in his fingertips a computer that should help him learn more and communicate through the Internet. Such a project would not come into fruition if not for the fast-paced advancement of computer technology. However, one would think that with such an advancement, we should be progressing intellectually both as educators and as students.
How would you assess the current situation? Are we overestimating the value of advanced computers and rely on it to further education? What are your thoughts regarding the use of such technologies in the hands of our school children? Why do we use bleach with white socks?
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
It Doesn't Take THAT Long
If you were asked to define learning, how would you define it?
An experiment done (check here) showed how one can mechanically define learning as a conditioned response to a certain stimulus. How would you relate this then to something as complex as students in a classroom and the subject matter involved?
In a sense, have many teachers simply "conditioned" the minds of students to attain who they are or to become what they are, such that they feel only the teacher knows and they are simply receivers of knowledge? What should the role of such an established mode of learning in this modern society?
Who do you think would win in a beauty contest: Jezebel or MariMar?
An experiment done (check here) showed how one can mechanically define learning as a conditioned response to a certain stimulus. How would you relate this then to something as complex as students in a classroom and the subject matter involved?
In a sense, have many teachers simply "conditioned" the minds of students to attain who they are or to become what they are, such that they feel only the teacher knows and they are simply receivers of knowledge? What should the role of such an established mode of learning in this modern society?
Who do you think would win in a beauty contest: Jezebel or MariMar?
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Wired Mind
A farm made up of human beings in fetal position, in liquid, with at tube used to feed through the mouth. All eyes are shut. All are dreaming. Dreaming of a life that they think they are living. Dreaming of a life they think is real.
Such was the reality that was introduced to us by the film The Matrix. When human beings are being controlled by "machines," electronic entities of their own making. Through the dream-like state the continues to fuel the mechanic existence, the human beings are unaware of the circular fate that awaits them - the endless dreamworld that they are now in.
I was awed by the premise of the movie and how it treats the seeming state of humanity as it is now. Like the movie's inhabitants, people now are also wired, glued in fact, to an entity as enigmatic and mechanical as the film's antagonist - the Internet.
Here we realize that we are now a part of a global society that is run by electronic information. We are defined by the vague e-mail addresses that we provide, we are described through the social networking accounts (Friendster, MySpace, Multiply) that we continue to fill with scraps of what we think is our humanity. We share information like it was perpetual, from the songs, to the videos that each of us talk about in virtual chatrooms.
Has this generation become a slave of its own machinations? Are we now living the movie that we think is still fiction? Or have we realized living in our own dreamworld is better than facing the real problems of disease, war, famine, hunger, and brokenness and depresion?
If you were asked to define the Internet based on your own experience, what would it be? What should it be? Seriously.
Such was the reality that was introduced to us by the film The Matrix. When human beings are being controlled by "machines," electronic entities of their own making. Through the dream-like state the continues to fuel the mechanic existence, the human beings are unaware of the circular fate that awaits them - the endless dreamworld that they are now in.
I was awed by the premise of the movie and how it treats the seeming state of humanity as it is now. Like the movie's inhabitants, people now are also wired, glued in fact, to an entity as enigmatic and mechanical as the film's antagonist - the Internet.
Here we realize that we are now a part of a global society that is run by electronic information. We are defined by the vague e-mail addresses that we provide, we are described through the social networking accounts (Friendster, MySpace, Multiply) that we continue to fill with scraps of what we think is our humanity. We share information like it was perpetual, from the songs, to the videos that each of us talk about in virtual chatrooms.
Has this generation become a slave of its own machinations? Are we now living the movie that we think is still fiction? Or have we realized living in our own dreamworld is better than facing the real problems of disease, war, famine, hunger, and brokenness and depresion?
If you were asked to define the Internet based on your own experience, what would it be? What should it be? Seriously.
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