In the past...
Information was scarce. If you wanted to know something, you asked your
teacher or someone in your community. If you wanted more than that, depending
on where you lived you could go to the library and maybe you’d find just enough
information to leave you thinking “is that all there is?” Usually you’d give up
at that point.
In the future…
There is already an information overload. You can find out anything
about anything…and some of it might even be true!
In the past…
There were very few news sources. You had the morning and evening news
programs on whatever basic TV channels you could get. The newspapers all got
their stories from the same two or three sources, usually the Associated Press
or Reuters. Some magazines or news shows had more in-depth reporting and novels
were even written about intrepid, courageous journalists risking all to get the
scoop. You read or listened to answer the 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why and
how.
In the future…
Anyone with a cell phone can photograph, tweet, blog and post whatever
they consider news, from a child who got bit by a dog in Pifo to suicide bombs
in Jerusalem. They also add their own point of view to their photo, tweet, blog
or post. Your job is no longer only to find out the 5 Ws because that’ll be
everywhere, but to analyze the source and critique the content and find the
same news written from other perspectives if you want the complete picture. In
political speeches, the main job of reporters is fact checking: if a politician
quotes a number or a source, s/he instantly has an army of amateur and professional
reporters fact-checking his/her every utterance…and woe betide them if they are
off by so much as a single misattributed word or figure!
In the past…
In common conversation, spoken language was unlike written language
because of the difference in time delay between the sending and receiving of
the message. A letter took days or weeks to arrive.
In the future…
With email, instant messaging and the nearly 24 hour surveillance we put
on our social networks, we can receive an answer in minutes or less, which
makes written conversations happen almost in real time.
In the past…
Reading books was considered a vastly superior way of spending one’s
time compared to staring at the “idiot box”, but both were fairly passive, and
even solitary activities. You read, you thought, you went to bed. No wonder
many kids hated it.
In the future…
Via social networks, wikis, and other online communities, you can
interact in a much more meaningful way with your reading material, which itself
has become far more multimedia. The Harry Potter craze in the first decade of
this century not only succeeded in making kids andadults read novels the size
of doorstops, it also spun off into an incredibly successful movie franchise, a
series of online games (some multiplayer) as well as wikis, fan fiction and fan
sites visited and participated in by millions of people worldwide (here we
have, among others, www.facebook.com/HPotterEcuador). The author J. K. Rowling
has her own website http://www.jkrowling.com/. Internationally there are many
charities and volunteer organizations done around Harry Potter themes (check
out the Harry Potter Alliance http://thehpalliance.org/tag/charity/)
In the past…
The teacher’s job was to pour information into her students’ heads…and
the students’ job was to pour it all back out onto the exam paper. Any form of
co-operative learning was called cheating (“In the real world” my teachers used
to say “Johnny won’t be sitting next to you giving you the answers and then
what will you do?”)
In the future…
The
students have all the information they could possibly want literally at their
fingertips…if they know how to find it. The teacher has now becomes the
navigation guide. In one study, American students found it difficult to locate
Iraq on a map, but when sat in front of a computer and told “find Iraq”, not
only were they able to do so, but they were able to find street views and
aerial views, they were able to focus in on specific locations, use satellite
imaging and more. The older generation unused to such possibilities calls this
cheating, “taking the easy way out” and worse…but this is the future.
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