Did you know?
Educationally Speaking
After struggling with a computer problem for an hour, I called my daughter who suggested I “Google” it. Since when did google become a verb? We found the answer online in just minutes. Many parents request assistance from children on how to program a remote, download a song, upload a video and operate a smartphone.
“Did You Know?” is a popular video available on YouTube that shows the rapid progression of technological advancements that are likely to impact education. Dr. Snavely showed a version of it to all the teachers last year at our back-to-school gathering in the Buck Shaffer Auditorium.
“Did You Know?” originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Shift Happens” produced by Karl Fisch for a faculty meeting in Colorado. It “went viral” a few months later and today the online presentation and various updated versions have been viewed by over 20 million people.
View this video at http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ and see how this simple little presentation spread worldwide. Scott McLeod, another key contributor, warned that we’ll become dangerously irrelevant when educating our children unless we take into account the exponential times in which we’re living.
After watching the video he advised people to discuss what actions need to be taken in order to remain relevant. What are our students going to need to be successful in the 21st century? How does living in such exponential times impact what teachers need to do in classrooms?
Facts from various versions of the video give will give you reason to pause and contemplate our technological age.
The population is exploding. In 1 minute the US has about 10 babies, China has 40 babies and India has 60. China will soon be the number one English speaking country in the world. India has more honor students than America has kids.
Information is exploding. A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person came across in a lifetime in the 18th century. Newspaper circulation is down 7 million in the last 25 years, while online readers are up 30 million in the last five years.
We’ll generate more information this year than in the past 5000 years. The encyclopedia have been replaced by its online counterpart, Wikipedia, which launched over 10 years ago and now features over 13 million articles in more than 200 languages.
Devices that connected to the Internet in 1982 numbered 1000, in 1992 — a million, and in 2008 — a trillion. Mobile phones are predicted to be the primary source of connecting to the internet in 2020. Of the 200 billion emails sent each day, 90% are spam.
The first text message was sent 20 years ago. Average teen sends over 2000 texts a month. The number of text messages sent and received daily exceeds the population of the planet.
The amount of technical information is doubling every year. If students are starting a four-year technical degree, this means half of what they learn the first year of study will be outdated by their third year.
The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
The US Department of Labor estimates that students today will have approximately a dozen jobs before they’re 40. A fourth of employees have been with their current employer for less than a year and half have been with them less than five years.
By next year, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain. What does all this exponential growth mean for educating our students?
We’d better teach them how to think and locate information rather than teaching them facts which will be obsolete before they graduate.
 Kristi McCracken, author of two children’s books and a long time teacher in the South Valley, can be reached at educationallyspeaking@gmail.com.
