Forgetting the Present (A Think)

As you probably know, I'm hosting the Carnival of Education today. I wonder if there's any point to a Carnival of Education beyond curiousity. The Education Wonk has set up an archive. Is this archive legitimate? Before you think this is a crazy question, consider the following article from The L.A. Times. The Article is entitled Unable to Repeat the Past. The article states:

Digital storage methods, although vastly more capacious than the paper they are rapidly replacing, have proved the softest wax. Heat and humidity can destroy computer disks and tapes in as little as a year. Computers can break down and software often becomes unusable in a few years. A storage format can quickly become obsolete, making the information it holds effectively inaccessible.

Consider this, everything we store on computer files...forgotten!!

Lesson Ideas:
1. Pose the following scenario to students: "You go home from school today and find out that comptuers no longer work. You come back to school the next day and find that computers still don't work and will never work again." Ask students to consider what they've lost? Ask what might be lost throughout the world.
2. Tell students that they should think about what things will be like 1000 years into the future. Ask if they think that people in 1000 years will understand the computer technology that we use today? (In order to help them think about this, ask them if they know how to tell time precisely using the sun. This is something that more people could do 1000 years ago than today.)
3. Ask students to define the term "memory." Ask them if there is such thing as a "national memory." What about a "global memory?" Ask them if they think that memory is important. Why?
4. According to the article, Jason Lanier, the computer scientist who made up the term "virtual reality," describes the potential for forgetting everything stored electronically this way, "If you let forgetting and remembering happen arbitrarily, you're losing part of yourself." Write this quotation on the board and ask students to do a quick write explaining what the sentence means. Then discuss it as a class. You migth choose to write this quotation on a class website and have students blog their understandings of it.
5. Ask your students to think about how to solve the problem. Tell them that they are on an advisory group to the National Archives and have been asked what to do to make sure that information of today is never lost. What can we do. (Tell them that one option is not putting everything that we have onto paper, because the government will refuse to allocate the space for holding this paper.) In groups have them develop proposals.

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