Did You Know? 3.0

I was not expecting to see what I saw in this video. But I did learn of some interesting facts. It is amazing to know that China, a country that does not have English as its first language, will be the number one English speaking country in the world. That is mind-blowing. I am still trying to figure out how this could be. Is it because we are over there or they are coming over here and going back? India has more honors kids than America has kids! I can understand how this can be true since India's population is four times that of the United States. Also, as expressed at the end of the video, 395 babies had been born in India, whereas only 67 were born in the United States. However, it does sadden me to know that our kids are so out performed.

The next two facts bothered me as a college student because I wonder if I am wasting my time obtaining a degree (the answer to that, however is no). Jobs that are hot now were not hot 5 years ago. We are preparing our children for a world that does not exist. Sir Ken Robinson also made a similar reference to this in his presentation. The video also stated that we will go through more than a dozen jobs by the time we reach 38! I do not know about you, but if I go to a university and get a degree, I am not intending on changing jobs that often. We find so much wrong with one job instead of thinking about job security. What we need to ponder is how the computer is going to one day replace us all in the workforce.

The Internet boom is ridiculous. We rely on the Internet so much. What did we do before the Internet? I recall grabbing the encyclopedia for all of my information. Books were abundant with research but it is a thing of the past now. Google searches and Jeeves are the new way of researching. Honestly, if we could pull up what people search on these search engines, none of it would be relevant to us as a people nor would it be of any substance (who cares about who wore it the best or who is dating who in the celebrity world)!

As far as communication is concerned, we went from writing letters, to the telephone, now the cell phone (text messaging) and PDA/email. True enough, text messaging requires you to know how to spell but these days we have abbreviated phrases with OMG, TTYL, WTF, LMAO, etc. Spelling has gone out of the window because we are too lazy to say what we mean. How difficult is it to just say, "Talk to you later," or "Keep in touch?" We have relied on these new technological advances so heavily and done away with the old-fashioned way of doing things. This is making us one lazy world in my opinion.

Technology has progressed so much in such a small time frame. I took a class similar to this at Auburn only 3 years ago and we did not cover half of this. We made web pages but through Microsoft Access. It was not so technical as it is now.