Life lessons from a digital watch

David Warlick's blog called "Reasoning Our Way In..." brings up an interesting point in our education. He begins by explaining the relevance between a digital watch and life. How he has a regular watch that does the one thing it's supposed to, and it does it well. However, digital watches have a ton of buttons that in different combinations cause a whole bunch of stuff happen that maybe you didn't really need or want to happen. He compares this to life because sometimes we don't know what to do, and we have to try different things and reason our way through it. Life doesn't come with instructions, we have to figure it out for ourselves. Are students learning those skills nowadays?

We are sort of just told what we need to do, and how we need to do it. A lot of the teachers are realising this predicament, and have sent us off on our own a little bit. In a way we are sort of teaching ourselves. We are learning from our mistakes and taking control of how and when we learn, if we want to learn. In elementary school the teacher would tell us how to do everything, and it was even so in middle school. Now we are in charge of our education. If we don't get something, it is our responsibility to get help so that we can. The teachers aren't going to hold our hand through our entire learning career, we have to learn how to walk on our own. I think the teachers at Arapahoe are doing a great job of teaching us that skill that will be so important throughout our entire lives.

He also mentions that we as youth are always ready to work through problems, but not remember how to do it. Is this a basic skill that we will need to learn? If so, then how should it be taught? Is it enough to just get through the problem? Or to learn how to do it for next time incase it should come up again? I think that it's up to us. Clearly this skill can't really be taught in school, so it's up to us to decide for ourselves. We need to ask ourselves, do I want to learn from this experience, or figure my way through it again? Is this a skill that we need in our lives? Maybe so. But it's up to us to change the way we think through problems, because our schools aren't going to.

The Jackson Legacy

The second article I read this week was about Michael Jackson's kids and how they are coping with the loss of their dad and role model. The article was named "Tidbits:Jackson's Children Learn to Be Kids Again." This may not seem like anything that can improve my learning, however, I think it helped me to think deeper and put myself in there situation, which I think helped my learning strategies. Anyway, Michael Jackson's kids have suddenly been orphaned and are now cared for by Jermaine Jackson. This is a huge change for them, and even though they care for their uncle dearly, of course they miss their dad a ton. Parents are irreplaceable. They are role models, teachers, and they are understanding and loyal. These poor kids have lost all that he was to them. Sure they have plenty of other role models, but none as important as their dad was to them. This makes me think about Michael and his life. He was an amazing person, dancer, and singer, he was a legend, but all that didn't matter his last few years of life. His last years were full of horrid rumors, he couldn't get any privacy from all the press, waiting for him to make a single wrong movement. It's sad that it takes someone to die for the world to remember who they were. Michael was so influential to every artist who ever was, is and will be. That goes back to Mrs. Comp saying that one voice can change the world. Michael was one person who changed our standards of who we are today through his dancing, his music, and his personality. He is a true role model in every one's lives, and will live forever as the Jackson legacy.

High Quality Not So High

This week I read an article by Mr. Fisch called A Low-Fidelity Education. Basically, what the article said was that the standards for everything from consumer products, to education is becoming "good enough." We have lowered our expectations of what we need and have, so that it's almost not even worth it anymore. He mentioned several times that we want what we want when and where we want it. Its easier to go on the internet and pull information rather then wait to ask your teacher about it the next day. Even though they may have a better answer, its easier just to do it this way. Well if we don't seem to need our teachers and the face to face contact, then why should we go to school? Mr. Fisch said that by the year 2019, "over 50% of highschool classes will be taught online." That's sort of scary. Highschool is as much an educational purpose as it is a social purpose. It's not just about learning, but to also get involved in activities, make friends, go to dances and school functions. If we have online highschools, how are we going to do that? Think about it. We would sit at our house all day on the computer, not talking to anyone, just reading. There is no emotional bond between you and your teacher or classmates, and that's pretty sad. That's what makes highschool fun. Being able to walk through the halls and see all your friends, and sit next to that person you never really got to know, and have that oppurtunity. If we went to online highschools, we wouldn't know anyone. We wouldn't have friends, and we lose that social skill that is ever so needed in our life. We wouldn't know how to act or talk around people, and maybe I'm taking this too far, but highschool helps give us that skill, and without it, how would we survive in our own world?

Thoughts of Two

The New Literacy by Clive Thompson and "The Machine is Us/ing Us" by M. Welsch, are two very different points of view on the topic of technology. In The New Literacy, the author looks at technology as a good thing. Some of the points I agree with, and some I do not. There is a part that talks about how texting improves writing because it gets students to write all the time. However, the students don't really write when they text. There are spelling, grammar, structure, and organizational errors. I wouldn't even consider it writing. We have almost created our own language with acronyms and shortened words. Do you honestly think that jk lol ttyl g2g bi... etc. is actually considered writing? If anything, I think that texting is hurting our skills. I will be writing a paper and accidentally incorporate lol, or something like that into it, if you ask me, I don't think that's a good thing. The other thing that struck me about the article was that they used Stanford Law Students as their studies. Of course Stanford students are still going to have wonderful writing. If you're going to Stanford, you are not going to let texting ruin your ability to write. If they had tested other average students, I think there results would have differed greatly.
In the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us," Welsch describes the use of technology in a very different way. Although his video is hard to find what he is trying to say, I think that he would disagree with Thompson's article. In his video, it almost seems as if he's trying to say that machines are becoming too important in human life. That we, us, are becoming like the machines themselves, in a deeper content. Think about it. We run the machines. We organize everything we do on our computers. The computer is being controlled by us, but in a way, us by them. Everyone has a face book, everyone interacts via technology. Like Mrs. Comp says, that when she was in school everyone just used the computer and the internet to extract information, but now, we are using it to interact with other people and create our own information for others to see and think about. Like the video says, the machines are linking web pages, photos, videos, information, and people. We are being linked by technology. That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. Either way you look at it, machines truly are using us.