In nineteen seventy seven when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in junior high school one of my teachers predicted the future of education. He claimed that when our kids were in school the desks world recognize the particular student and automatically mark them present or absent, every student would have their own computer terminal at their desk tied into the master classroom computer and all the students information would be stored on punch cards. Punch cards looked a lot like a Scan-Tron forms but were thick with holes that the computer read. Of course this was back when only NASA and big companies had computers, they were huge and slow and one needed a engineering degree to operate one. I image things will change quite a bit because of new technology, some bad changes but mostly good. Probably the biggest social change is that technology is making the world smaller and better known. Even if a person living in La Verne California has never met a person living in Baghdad Iraq, they can still read each others blogs and maybe by some miracle have a little less hostility toward each other. Hey, its a start. Students having laptops is certainly a wonderful thing. Anybody remember encyclopedia books, or having to run to the library to do research? All that is now at our fingertips and with a Wi-Fi equipped laptop we can access it almost anywhere. I like to imagine in a perfect world students from anywhere in the world would be able to attend a virtual classroom at any school, anywhere in the world at little or no cost. Students in third world countries with Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program could attend a virtual classroom at Harvard, MIT or even ULV.
Your high school teacher had a very interesting prediction and we are not too far away from his vision. With the whole idea of attending a virtual classroom would make his prediction a tad bit off though. Having virtual worlds gives a whole new perspective on things. Students would not even have to leave home and public libraries would become obsolete because everyone is doing their research using online sources. Probably, in the future, there might not even be a reason to leave your house. Everything will be done online. Even today, people do their grocery shopping online, something that has been done since the beginning of time without the access to the internet. I just find it incredibly amazing as to how far technology has come and the possibilities of where technology will take us is endless. Who knows what will happen in the future. We can only make our predictions right now and see what will happen in due time.
ReplyDeleteOh Vince...your not that old...ok maybe you are! lol I remember when the encyclopedia what the new cool thing. People went door to door selling them. That seems like a million years ago. Well I don't know about a desk being ablt to read who you are but I know it would be cool if you did attendance by a finger print or scan of it at that. I believe that that is where we should be but we haven't quite gotten there. I thing that blogging is a wonderful way that people can communicate without spending tons of money calling on the phone. I have learned that blogging is a cool thing and fun to do. I even showed my 21 year old cousin how to do it! The future has so much ahead. I am so excited to see what is to come. I really hope I am alive to see the miraculous things to come!
ReplyDeleteI think that your teacher wasn't too far off with his idea of the future. Before coming to La Verne, I got a degree in graphic design and at that school we actually did have computers at each desk that we would work at and send our work to the main computer at the professors' desk. I think that with technology today, we will see more classrooms like this sooner rather than later. I think that you are right in the assumption that blogging can help lesson hostilities. I think it's great that people can have what is pretty much an online diary for the world to see so that everyone can get an inside look into other people's insights and beliefs. It's far better than just reading facts from textbooks.
ReplyDeleteI think your teacher's predication was or is going to be pretty accurate. Since you went to school before technology began to have a major impact on education, I think it is very interesting to see how much school has changed. I also think your theory about how blogging can help lessen hostilities between nations. I agree with you because I think if people make friends with others around the world, then nations might have more sympathy for one another.
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