Monday, August 22, 2011

Multimedia and how it benefits... things

The oblong wheels inside my little head started to turn when I asked myself the question..."What exactly does education and it's reform have to do with our crazy multimedia culture of today?".

This question started to occur to me when watching that spiffy animation with Sir Ken Robinson (a hero of mine in one way or another) giving his lecture on "How we need to radically rethink our educational system". We need to graduate from our over-simplistic, over-authoritative and pre/post-industrial notion of teaching everyone to think in one way.

Instead we need to embrace and nurture the talents of each individual. We need to cater to the individual — this is something we can do now with the aid of technology. A flexible educational system (whereby any learner may explore with ease any one thing they happen to be curious about at the moment when they are interested (not when they have to...)) would be super nice. Hence the call for a radical change from an assembly line mentality in our education to a more organic way of letting an individual flourish by naturally binding themselves to something they love. There are unique programs that do just that. Like this one: (http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hardy_my_green_school_dream.html).

Never before now have we had such an opportunity to harness the technology and understanding of human development and make a sustainable and effective learning system.

I found it interesting that many people are taking advantage of online networking and resources to teach themselves. It turns out that virtual school may not turn out to be so...disconnected? after all. I saw a TED talk lecture (ill try to find it) on how younger kids (a few years ago) taught themselves how to dance by watching youtube videos. There was a committee that got together and selected the best group of self-taught youtube dancers, and now they have a professional dance group — and those self taught kids are doing what they love the most. And consequently they are happy people and the world is that much more of a better place.

Collective intelligence is a relatively new thing with the internet. With online networking, people can work collaboratively to improve a site like ebay, or Facebook. There is power in numbers, and that power is enhanced by the easy communication of lots of people. This networking and constant improvement of sights that were well used today started with clunky computers that are now an eyesore. This is beneficial in so many ways (not the clunky old computer but the updateableness of the web..). not only for web development and programming, but for art, learning, and much more. Here is TED talk about the first and only virtual choir of 2,000 consisting of youtube participants from around the world. (very neat and inspiring) — http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong.html

This shows the connection points of Facebook users.










Now everything is even more accessible and up dateable with faster (and sexier looking) computers AND smartphones. It's nice that new sensory inputs (i.e. cameras, tracking devices, etc.) in our devices can do a lot of work for us — as appose to manually plugging in data in order to develop something. I imagine that algorithms is a big, meaningful, and downright loveable word for a lot of web and program developers.

You R Here sounds like a neat app! You can teach it to see a map by inputing your location. And I imagine that info can easily be shared among the users of the app. That is I think a good example of how new technology is a good aid in the development of a program.

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