Are We Good Enough?

            For this week’s PLN I read an article called “Rigor Redefined” by Tony Wagner. This was about relooking at how hard we as Americans work. Tony Wagner went to tons of excellent school across America and had interviews with several hundred businesses. Using his research Tony Wagner came up with three points that the kids of America need to master in order to succeed in the future: critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration and leadership, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective oral and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, and curiosity and imagination. Tony Wagner is trying to tell the kids that if we master these skills we will succeed in the future and get good jobs.

            This article makes a great point. If America keeps up what it is doing in its education system there will be no jobs left in the United States. All of the jab will be “off-shored”. If the kids in America master these skills that Mr. Wagner talked about, we can keep the jobs in America. But we have to ask ourselves, are we good enough? A lot of countries are passing us up in education. Schools need to stop preparing us for the present; we need to be ready for the future. Schools aren’t teaching us anything new. We need to learn for the future. As JFK said, “Change is the law of life; and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”. We need to get ready for the future. We are learning in the past and we need to change that. We need to get ready for the future.   

The Machine

            This week we were assigned to watch “Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us” by Michael Wesch. This was mostly about how the web is evolving. It talks about how we are the machine, and we need to rethink a lot of things for Web 2.0. A couple years ago we needed to go through a huge process to make a website. Now we can just create a blog and it’s done. It said in the video that a blog is created every half second. The web is evolving and it is us that are helping it evolve.

            This video amazed me in several ways. Its amazing how regular pencil and paper text has changed, and how the old way of making a website has changed. As we evolve the machine evolves. What does Michael Wesch mean when he says we need to rethink several things? Does he mean that the web is so accessible and easy to get on that we can’t be putting everything out there? He does make a lot of valid points. When he is hyper linking everywhere on the page and talking about that the web can be connected anywhere and everywhere is a really good point, because you can access a lot of different things from one webpage. The fact that a blog is created every half second blows my mind. This is a hard fact to rap my mind around. If that is true then there is 63,072,000 blogs made in one year from people around the world. It is amazing how as we change the machine changes. We teach the machine and give it new ideas.