Imagine!!

I wrote an article today about the importance of teachers teaching students how to use technology for disciplinary purposes. I want to share several paragraphs from this article here:

Imagine a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1990 and woke up today. Consider the new vocabulary terms that have entered our parlance in the last seventeen years: Internet, Web, Virus, Google, etc. Certainly Rip would understand web, a spider web. He’d understand virus, an illness that affects an individual. Assuming that Rip was not an advanced technologist when he went to sleep, he would have no idea what the word Internet meant. Even if he was the most advanced technologist in history, he’d be clueless about Google. Mr. Van Winkle would have to figure out a way to acculturate himself into the present day, a day very different than the one in which he went to sleep. Incredibly, Van Winkle only went to sleep seventeen years ago. So much has changed.

In seventeen years, it will be 2024. The child who begins kindergarten in September will just be graduating from college. If technologists and futurists are correct, change will happen much faster in the next seventeen years than it has happened in the last seventeen. Imagine a world in which people no longer have to use keyboards, mice, and stylists to manipulate their computer. Imagine a world in which children can play with different species of fish, actually feeling the textures of the fish, without getting wet. Imagine a world in which students can scale the top of Mount Everest without ever leaving their classroom. Of course, only the most fit students will make it to the top. Imagine!!

That’s just the point, we have to imagine. We don’t know what the future will look like. We can’t know what knowledge four year old Jessica will need when she graduates from college to succeed in the workforce. Even when Jessica graduates from college she won’t know what she’ll need to succeed in her third and fourth job. Karl Fisch's Did You Know was very influential in this writing.