A vision of Students Today

Holy blog land Batman!

Wow! That is the only way I can describe this video. I identified with everything in this video. The Kansas State folks have shown a few things that I think we will cover in our podcast later this month.They basically showed everything that is good and bad about technology. In this day and age we worship technology. We act as if we are so advanced and yet we continue a decline in western civilization that no one has seemed to notice until now.

We act as if all these gadgets are going to make us the people that we saw in blade runner and the fifth element. We are supposed to be forming into these technological gurus who know everything about computing devices and guess what, we've succeeded! We are now the most self centered, tech junkie, must-have-the-newest-gadget,multi tasking, shallow shells of what human beings used to be! Aristotle, Jesus, and Edison are probably laughing (or crying) in heaven right now about this. We have lost our quest for knowledge because its just to easy to Google it!

What I'm saying is I look at technology the way I look at smoking weed or drinking (follow me on this). Do the drug, don't let it do you. Technology is doing us now. Rather than using this tool for helping us do our work and make our lives easier and more efficient, we let this lighted box dictate what is important to us. When television was invented a smart man said it would turn people into mindless drones (I'm paraphrasing)and I would say to some extent he was right. Now that the computer has taken the place of the TV, I would have to say it has taken the torch of life sucking and ran with it quite nicely. However, it isn't technology's fault.

We allow the world to dictate what is right or wrong, good or bad, new or outdated. We love to assume that if its new and a lot of people are doing it then it must be better. Remember the old "if your friends jump off a bridge" analogy ? I think we have all been guilty of jumping off the proverbial cliff of technology rather than scaled our way down at our own discretion. Lets teach our students how to navigate the sea of information at their own discretion, and lets form that discretion on whether or not the "new and improved" version is really that improved. In other words, teach the students how to teach themselves. Lets teach students how to THINK for themselves. That is the main problem behind it all, people don't think. The mind is a terrible thing, at times, and its also a terrible thing to waste.