Reply #121: Thanks, You get the Gist of it! [View All]

I'm not about to start telling parents how to raise their kids but part of my job is looking around at what works out there in the world and figuring out how to bring it to a meeting or brain-strom session on how it can be applied to adult education. People are always so busy looking for the negatives (or worse, applying human traits to a tool, like saying an X-Box 360 is "evil") that they don't look at the advantages such things can provide. The big reason we've spent a lot of time talking about how to facilitate training over MP-3 devices is because so many people have them with them all the time now. Same with cell phones, especially as their memory capacity evolves.

More and more, things are becoming digital. I've had people say "well, we don't allow our child to use the computer to help with his/her homework" and my response is "why the heck not?!?" I'm not saying that going to check out some books from the library to do a book report is an antiquated idea, but why not use every tool at your disposal? There's more to education than learning a fact...it's HOW you learn a fact!! If I use google to look up Universal String Theory I'm not just learning something about Universal String Theory, I might also learn how to do a Boolean search with a web browser.

These generations are the ones proving the old axiom: Work smarter, not harder.

Your examply of typing is one I use all the time when "selling" ideas like this. I learned to type using computer software on an Apple IIc in the mid-80s AND reinforced it with a class I took in high school. By the time I was in college, I was typing 100+ WPM and on an hourly basis probably made more money typing other people's papers for them back then as I do as IT professional at age 33. Man, you said it. Spending two hours a day typing up papers beat the shit out of waiting tables or flipping burgers! I think at one time I was banging out two 10-page double spaced papers an hour, checking my work and making two bucks a page. Most of my friends were making minimum wage. I was making 40 bucks an hour.

Even to boob-tube can be informative and educational assuming a parent will monitor what a child is watching and personally I don't think an episode of Sponge Bob is going to cause them to perform a full data-dump, but whatever.

Here's an idea for those who ban TVs in children's rooms. Give them a TV, a DVD player and some interactive software, but DON'T hook that TV up to your cable. You avoid having to worry about the TV content and provide a unique and modern learning experience.