Internet and Education

The internet has become a huge part of our culture today. We use the internet for everything from blogging, to status updates, to research. No matter what the situation, the internet is probably the first place we go to. I plan on going into teaching, so I would assume education is what I'm focusing on. The internet has had a huge impact on education because it has made more resources available to us without having to leave our rooms. Instead of actually going out to the library to find information from books, we can just go to Google or another search engine to find the information we're looking for. And in classrooms, some schools use computers instead of paper to do work. And now we have clicker questions in classrooms as well. Education is rapidly changing with the times and the internet definitely has some sort of impact on that.

Archival Research

I've decided to do my second research paper on Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and their rivalry between electricity. I chose this topic mainly because my dad said it would be really interesting. You see, my dad is a huge history buff, unlike myself. So I called upon him for help and guidance on this topic. He gave me a lot of good background information and it was between this and the Space Race. So, I chose this instead because it was either having a topic on science and history or just history. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this yet or what argument I'm going to have or really anything about the paper yet. Once I start the research, hopefully something will just pop up and I'll have a steady argument for my paper.

Artifacts

So, I wasn't in class Monday and didn't know about bringing artifacts to class. So I'm just going to talk about the pictures and documents shown in class from the video. These were shown from the early 1920's (I think. I can't really remember honestly). It was about electricity being brought into a home where electricity wasn't popular and not many people had. This was important because the men in the family were trying to better their lives and make it easier to survive. I'm honestly not really sure what kind of argument can be made about this because I'm not really sure how to do that quite yet. But this was a big step in the 1920's for this particular family, especially since the parts that were needed weren't around and the father had to find other ways of creating these parts. It was somewhat interesting to listen to, but history really isn't my thing so I think I'm really going to have a hard time with this paper. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what I actually do my paper on.

TED

I find the TED website to be very intriguing and really funny and even enlightening in some ways. After reading about the worksheet in class, though, not everyone thinks the same way as I do. Which is completely okay, of course! But I really do not agree with what they are saying about it. They are saying that TED is commercializing products and ideas and making them not as genuine as the speakers claim the ideas are. Yet, how are else are you going to get ideas out there if you don't have a big audience and the internet to help? Honestly, you really can't. And also, ideas are spread everywhere to everyone. For new products to come about, you need to communicate with the people around you and really get ideas out in the open. You know Apple didn't come about from keeping ideas secret. They had to get together and communicate how to effectively market their ideas. I don't see TED as a bad idea. I really like the idea of conventions held to produce ideas and spread wisdom and enlightenment upon others. It's really neat, actually.

Surveys, interviews, and such

For my paper, I plan on taking surveys from college students and maybe even try to contact kids from my high school and see if there's a difference in the way high school and college kids spend their time. By doing that, hopefully I can see if there's an emotional difference between the two types of schools.

Questions I can ask may be:
How often do you do school work? In doing so, how often is that last minute?
How often would you say you're stressed when doing school work? Why?
Do you find yourself more productive after you've spent time with friends and then doing homework? If so, why?
How often do you find yourself laughing or joking around throughout the day? Would you assume that you produce better work when you're happy?

I also hope to maybe talk to a therapist and maybe see if they see a difference in patients' work and lifestyle when they're happier. Also, maybe even a teacher or professor to see if they can tell by school work whether a student was stressed or upset when they finished an assignment and see if they know that that affected their work or not.

Steven Johnson

Johnson talked about using resources we already have to create machines that we use everyday. For instance, he talks about how the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight new incubators after the tsunami to help decline the death rate of new born babies. But, after some odd years, the machines broke and no one knew how to fix them because the manual were in English. So instead of trying to fix them, they all were left there to collect dust. So, instead of creating machines no one knows how to fix and sending them to foreign countries, why don't we use the resources that the country has to create the same machine? That when they decided to use car parts to create incubators. Since they can keep their cars running, they should be able to fix the incubators, too. That's pretty creative in my opinion. So what I was thinking that instead of us buying complicated machines and having to bring them to someone professional to fix it, why don't we also use things that can easily be fixed with some common skills and knowledge. That could also lead to using recycled goods and limiting our waste. But how easy would that be? And, would that even be practical or useful?

Monsters or Heroes?

Philip Zimbardo talks about how people have the ability to become monsters or heroes. The choice is up to each individual. He shows graphic pictures of our own U.S military torturing prisoners and dehumanizing them basically. It's a very touchy subject as we all know because, well, they're our own military. We stand behind them because they fight for our freedom. But that doesn't mean that each one is a hero. He makes that argument by showing those images. They were all each heroes until they went into the basement and humiliated these prisoners and decided to take pictures and record them doing such acts. And the fact that they were all smiling and giving thumbs up next to these prisoners makes it a lot harder to defend them. But when is someone considered a "hero" and what makes someone a "monster"?
That's what Zimbardo explains in his video. Everyone starts off as a normal human until something changes. Either their look, their attitude, or their environment. Same for a hero. A hero, though, has to wait for the perfect opportunity to show themselves to the world and to show everyone that they are a true hero. Anyone can be a hero, one just has to wait for the opportunity to present itself. When it does, though, how will you know what the right choice is?