"Out of clutter, find simplicity.
From discord, find harmony.
In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity."
-Albert Einstein
“The digital outcast is not somebody who doesn’t have access to the technologies; s/he is somebody who, after the access has been granted, fails to actualise the transformative potentials of technologies for the self or for others.”
-Nishant Shah, Research Director of the Centre for Internet and Society in India
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-From the speech, “Citizenship in a Republic” (1910) by Theodore Roosevelt
A Vision of Students Today
Information R/evolution
H I T - Hokanson's Instructional Technology
Let me start off by saying that these videos are really well made. They’re absolutely incredible, and entertaining to watch. I’m really impressed.
I’m a college student, and I found the information in the first video very interesting. I’d like to think that I don’t spend quite that much time on facebook, and I know I don’t spend nearly that much time on the phone, but I have friends who do, and I’d say all of the rest of the information is pretty accurate (though I’m jealous of the girl who gets seven hours of sleep each night. I’ll be lucky if I get five tonight.) However, despite all the distractions it provides us with, I don’t know where I would be in college if it wasn’t for my technology. It has made countless progects and homework assignments so much easier. Personaly when I bring my laptop to class, I use it for notetaking, not facebooking, and being a slow and sloppy writer but a very quick typer I really appreciate being able to have a computer in class. Also, as your second video illustrates, it’s really nice not to have to take the time to walk to the library and search through the shelves whenever I need to do some research, I can simply spend a minute on my computer and I can find anything I want to know. Technology may not have fixed all my problems, but it has certainly eliminated a few.
The videos are amazing. If the statistics are even close to what they portray then I think they have relevance. Which ties in really well to the next video, and how information is changing.
When I think of how colleges and universities were viewed in the early part of last century they were the holders of information. The people had to apply, be deemed worthy, and pay to access that information. Is that how we look at these intuitions today? Are colleges really still in the business of selling information? Or is it skills? is it a diploma?
If they are still providing information as their chief commodity do they do that much better of a job than an individual can do on their own to justify the thousands of dollars that they charge?
Kyle