Monday, 21 April 2014

Power outages, broken modems and lousy wifi..

So what do you do when there is an assignment due in the morning and the internet is down?  How about a freak ice storm that causes a power outage that last for days?  It’s great to be connected, but what happens when we are suddenly disconnected against our will? 

For some of us ‘old school’ types, it is the perfect excuse to curl up with a book and forget about the rest of the world for a while.  For my 16 and 20 year old sons it is complete torture as the last bits of power drain from their cell phones and they are force to engage in a face to face conversation.

A large part of 21 Century fluency is definitely the art of discovering and making use of the abundance of technology and services available, but there is also the education of problem solving and being able to use whatever resources are available, technology related or not.  It is also imperative that we learn how to prioritize, rationalize and criticize.

Prioritize:  with so much to do and so many resources available we need to learn how to choose what is most important and most relevant to us and our needs

Rationalize:  does this make sense and does it make sense to me to do it this way

Criticize:  just because it’s on the web doesn’t make it right and just because a new piece of technology is available doesn’t mean it’s necessary

Thoughts from other sources:

Personal Anecdote…..My husband got his first computer during his final year of University. He was in an engineering program.  My son got his first laptop in Grade Seven to assist him with writing because he is identified as LD / expressive communication.

No comments:

Post a Comment