I started off my classes today with the Shift Happens video and it instigated some lively discussions.
There were interesting reactions to some of the slides in the video and a lot students were eager to comment. One student questioned why we were in a classroom if what we were learning was going to become obsolete in four years. Other students began to recognize that it is no longer as important to memorize names and dates as it is to understand concepts and processes. The pace of change that the video is predicting is startling and to prepare the students to stay informed during my class and beyond, I will be introducing them to iGoogle. iGoogle is a personalized webpage that allows a user to customize the information that is displayed when you visit the iGoogle page. Many sites with Web 2.0 characteristics offer similar options to customize such as with My Yahoo or My MSN for example. I have chosen to use iGoogle with the students for several reasons:
- Students can sign up with their school accounts, you do not need to have Gmail to use this service.
- Google Bookmarks and Google Reader – these two widgets are very helpful for students. The Bookmarks can be accessed from any computer and the Reader is an RSS aggregator that organizes your RSS feeds.
- Google Docs, Spreadsheets & Presentations – Once registered with Google, a student can use these applications online. The best part is that multiple students can collaborate on the same document simultaneously. This is great for group work.
- Customized Google Search – This is a great feature to help students with their research skills. You can create a search toolbar that will only search websites that you specify.
DILigence 
“Other students began to recognize that it is no longer as important to memorize names and dates as it is to understand concepts and processes.”
Contrast this realization with the popular US game show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader”, which seems to focus almost entirely on recall of facts. What has this got to do with smarts?
Great to see the kids cluing into the fact that process skills are becoming more important than retention of transient ‘facts’.
i think the video was very influencial because they talked about how the computers and technology is improving so quickly. Most people who go through collage spend 3-5 years wouldent be using what they ahd learned in collage because there are going to be new technology that would make life easier but they would need to know how to use it.
I thought that the video was very interesting and it told me a lot of things that i didn’t know. I tthink that we should do a project just like that because it’s a cool subject to talk about in a video and I would like to lern more about a lot of interesting facts.
I thought the video was really nice. The transformations in the visuals were very effective. It was really interesting and enlightening. It makes you really think about the future. I never knew how much things have advanced and how fast they continue to expand.
I think that it is quite interesting that information and technology keeps on growing; uses of community webpages like youtube, or myspace for example, continue to grow more users, or even how quickly the television and computer were adapted in less than 10 years. Its quite amazing to see that new information will be processed every three days in the upcoming years. Also, the data charts can relate to charts of those relating to global warming. Perhaps these two things might be related to one another?
I thought that the video nice. It healped me learn that when we go to collage we will not use the information that we learned in the 1st year becuase information is becong more complex throughout the years I think we should learn more about technology also.
I really was amazed by some of the facts mentioned in the presentation. It is extremely interesting how our world is contantly changing and how little we are aware of it. Within a life time, most of the knowledge we have learned can or will become obsolete. Being a student myself, I feel this will affect me greatly when I get to collage or university. We live in the age where we are heavily reliant on computers and technology. The computer age.
I thought the video was interesting because it had facts that i didn’t know.The changes that happened over the years with technology ha been more popular. Especially computers and television. I didn’t know that the popularity grew so fast over the years and that so many technologies are changing very quickly.
I posted an earlier commetn but it got erased.
Anyway, I think that the video was very educational and interesting. The information I learned was helpful, but it is hard to imagine a world like the one they predicted.
And I agree with Stale. By the way, WE SHOULD PLAY THAT GAME! IT LOOKS FUN!
The video was cool. The pictures were helpfull and I learned alot of new things from the contents of the video. Most of the information were both surprising and educational. We need to be aware of whats happening as the world changes in SECONDS!!!:D
I was surprised about the facts shown in the video: I never knew that the information will be doubled every three days in next few years, that the people who haven’t even hold the textbooks will handle the world, and I never even thought that too much infomation and technology will cause more problems. The video showed infomation in a simple way, which I liked pretty much.
I thougth the video was great talking about facts in our moderate life.
I think we should make a video like this but use different topics like ipod, cars, and etc.
i really learned a lot from this video. i liked the contents and the presentation. i thought that this video was very interesting and educational. i learned a lot of useful facts.
I realized that the world is changing really fast.
It is quite scarey that everything I learned until today will be considered “antique” next week.
What if what I have learned as up-to-date studies turn out to be nonsense/fake when I get older, just like the people who learned as the sun rotating around the earth?
I wonder why I am studying so hard in the classrooms now.
This video was very scarey, perhaps because it is unveiling the truth, a bit frightening truth.
I really liked the way video started. Starting it by “Did you know” and keep on repeating made me more focus in the video. By this video, I started to know how things changed from the time I was born. Although i haven’t known that much about the past especially on technology, I got to know a little better about it. As i was watching, I started thinking how the world would change and develop when I reach age of 70. This video made me think a lot about the past but i don’t think it only made me but other audiences that were watching the video. I would like to suggest this video to the people that doesn’t know a lot about the technology that happened in the past like what I did before I watched this video.
I think this video was not just educational and informative, but it was also very interesting to watch. I learned a lot of things I wasn’t aware of before, such as the number of years it takes to sell 50 million units of different inventions (radio, TV, laptop/computers).
The movie was really good and very informative. I liked it. It was very interesting to watch
i thought it was very interesting. i dont think that we should stil be going to colig but maybe not teaching things that will posibaly not be real in som years. ths staitments were very interesting.
I think the movie is nice also I learned that going to collage is not that helpful because they repeat the subject again. The intelligent people in China population is greater than the population of North America
That Video was simply amazing. It told facts that i didn’t know about the modern world and also what could happen in the future. The most thing i was amazed was that in the future, computers can overcome the knowledge of the human brain! Also Learning the population statistics of the world was very interesting.
This video was very informative and entertaining. I always thought that it would be important to go to a university or college, but after this video, I thought twice about it. I had second thoughts because in one part it said that the things in your first year will be outdated when you are in your third year of college. This Video had nice music to listen to. Overall,I thought this video was very well made.
I believe that the movie was very successful in changing people’s view on daily life. It was very informative and showed many examples.
I Didn’t know that if you go to university with a major in computor Engineering would be a waist of time.
This movie really put stuff into perspective. I really liked it because I really like the facts, they were very interesting. When I read the part about college, I thought that I would have never thought about that. I also realized that the world is changing very fast.
I think we should be more focused on our educational fund rather than spending millions on creating and developing video games.
I was suprised because, for one, I thought that China would have more babies born right now because it has a greater population, and some of the facts shocked me because one or two of the concepts I had never heard before.
i think that this video was a very interesting because of the population ande also about the university and also bec
I thought this video helped me realize how technology is taking over the way we find information, and how we would need it alot in the near future. 🙂
This video made me think really hard of what life for me is going to be in the near future. Will things be harder or easier? How will we cope with all these new things?
i was impressed with that video. It’s strange to think about how much the world is changing, and how fast. I was surprised with the “number of college graduates” statistics. I didn’t think India would have more qualified people than in the USA.
It made me think about how i would get a job in the future when it said that most people apply for jobs that dont even egzist
its interesting that there is new info every three days, but i think that robots might have the power to take over this world. The thought of that scares me and i kinda wish that discovery would stall until SATs are done.
I really like this video because there were fact that as the human get more skiiled the technology is devleoped. It said that that when builded the radio it took them so long but when they were making TV it took them lesstime. I really enojoyed this video.
I found the show interesting because the fact that we are being prepared for jobs that don’t even exist yet makes me wonder what jobs there will be in the future. I hope there’s a job where you get to fix robot servants. That is a job I would definantly pick because it might get me a decent salary.
I thought that this video was very informative and that it makes the viewer begin to think about things, mainly the future and how we are to keep up with the pace of change. Since the world is progressing so quickly, how are we to know what is to happen in the future? It made me think about how fast our world is changing and the advances we are making every day. It was an interesting video and the graphics added a nice touch to it.
The information in the video is both shocking and worrying. To know that the world is changing so fast is especially alarming to me for my generation is the one that is susceptable to its effects. SATs will become harder, getting in to college will be harder, jobs will be harder to get as well. Too bad for us.
I think we have to study more than play games.And I like the film is interesting
I thought the movie is interested. Any question I didn’t understood.
This video was very fascinating, and inspired many new ideas about our future. With the way technology is advancing so quickly, and the huge amounts of information being brought in, our jobs could be radically different from the average job of today. We could end up making a living on an occupation that nobody has even heard of yet. That would be fun.
it made me worry on how we are supposed to prepare for a future that we don’t even know. it made me realize how much the world is changing and how much we are not aware of about the changes that take place in a matter of minutes or even seconds.