When you watch “A vision of students today”, what comes to mind? A tangled web of human interaction interspersed and affected by technology, to put it lightly.
The statistics don’t lie. Despite questionable sources of the statistics in the video, the fact of the matter is that the focus has been taken off of education with the advent of technology just as much (if not more than) as it has helped to serve the educational process.
Some think technology has not helped students at all. Maybe computers are not the answer to all life’s problems, they think. This view reminds me of an Amish standpoint. I, unlike these detractors, believe technology is the answer and the inevitable investment that humanity will end up making at some point anyways.
These pessimists view technology as an enemy, as something evil. Is it really that hard to understand that with new technologies, will come new distractions?
Take the novelty Facebook.com for example. The latest, greatest and most valuable social networking site in the world, Facebook is designed to be a connecting tool for friends, but soon it will connect us to an almost demonic level of publicity. Facebook today will be the Human Resources Department hiring tool of tomorrow. In some cases, this is already a reality. I think we adapt over time to these novelties, and then to use them to our advantage. In some ways, Facebook lives up to its name… an online book for every single face. Privacy has never suffered a bigger blow.
And by the same token, Wikipedia.com is another by-product of human innovation. Ever evolving, Wikipedia is created by the people, for the people, with all the biases and human tendencies woven into its intricate fabric of “knowledge”. Facebook and Wikipedia, to name a few, continue to drive what I like to call webolution.
When I think of the words web and evolution, it’s easy to figure out what webolution is, and when you look at facebook and Wikipedia it’s not hard to see how
Advances in computing will bring the human race to new levels and for every increase in processing power of the newest computers, human intellect will rise as well to match and exceed that power. We develop the technology, and therefore we are infinitely more powerful than it is.
It takes a computer to learn to mimic and imitate. It takes a human to innovate. Computers will never innovate… but they will take the innovation of today and mimic it tomorrow.
What remains to be seen is how much (or even whether) infinite human innovation can be matched by machine imitation.
