Blog Post #10

An Open Letter to Educators

I felt that both the Morgan Bayda and Dan Brown made really good points in their posts. Dan's video was about the way that technology is making education as it was once known change, because where it was once something that had to be studied and memorized, it is now something that someone could easily get from Google, Bing, Yahoo! or whatever one's favorite search engine is. He feels that schooling gets in the way of education, and in many ways I agree with him. In most of my college courses up to now I have been lectured to by professors, taking notes on what they said, and spitting that information back to them as best I could on the tests, but not ever really learning a whole lot that I could use, and certainly nothing I couldn't Google. His point is that education needs to change, to evolve and become something that is actually useful in this age of information at the fingertips. We need more classes like Dr. Strange's, where we actually have to do something, not just get talked at while we take notes. Through this class, we learn to do things that we didn't know how to do before and things that can actually be useful to us, like networking and blogging. This is the point that Bayda makes as well, in her example about how her Twitter post helped her to find volunteer work in another country where she could be of use but still not spend a ton of money. Without Twitter, that may not have been possible, because she may never have known it existed.