Monday, May 7, 2012

It' so bad...But oh so good!!!

Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You brings out some good points on the cognitive side of things. He noticed early when he was showing the sims game to his nephew and from there his nephew was able just by being shown the game tell him that he needed to lower taxes in a part of his sim town so that the factories would again be able to work and the crime and povery rate would decrease. Steven made a point that if the child had been sitting in a class room and taught the same information he wouldn't have gotten any of the information needed to know what he was talking about because he would be bored out of his mind. I agree with what point he was making. There are so many things going on today that kids find it even harder to sit still and listen. I think thats why there are so many cases of mis-diagnosed cases of ADD and ADHD. Now not saying that someone's child that has been diagnosed has been diagnosed wrong but what if we gave the kids a different outlet. A different way to learn. We learn even when we aren't trying and that is what happened here.


At the same time I do feel that we don't need to shove Ipads at all our kids and say here learn. While being employed at a restaurant as a hostess I see alot of families come in and wait to be seated and don't talk to each other because they are too busy checking their facebook or on their Ipads. They sit at the table and don't talk to each other because each is lost in their own world of technology. I see that as a problem. How are these kids or even people going to be able to go out and get jobs that require them to be able to sit and speak with someone or if they go in for an interview they aren't going to be speaking to a computer.



Its great that our technology allows us to connect in ways that we have never been able to before. In that respect how is that going to hender and help us in the future. I see great things happening and bad things. When kids started playing games on their game consoles that were violent there were questions and concerns of those kids being violent to others. Now we have the kinect and that allows the users to get up and move without having something strapped to their hands like the wii. We have things to help and hinder. At this point I think it's up to the parents to draw the line.



We can help our culture by keeping some of the non-technological values like having conversations with each other face to face at dinner or if you are a tech savy family how about sitting down with your kids and playing with them. Understanding what they are doing online or on their phones and being able to go forward technologically with them.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!!!

In class we watched different new segments and from what I saw...no news is good news. We saw everything from planes not being able to land properly because of wind. The amount of just filler and fluff we use for news because we don't really want to be bothered with alot of information. The news is now reporting on celebrity information because that is what we want. We want to know what celebrities are doing now and not so much of what the world is doing.



This has become our news. If we want it the news will report it.