TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING EVERYTHING... PASS IT ON!

We have come a very long way since I started out in this wonderful profession and together we have achieved so much with technology changing the learning landscape beyond anything I could have imagined. And by the way don't believe those miserable individuals who constantly run down what our schools and our young people are achieving… all the evidence suggests that our young people are smarter and cleverer than ever and so are our teachers!

Technology has changed everything to do with learning and research suggests that it is possible that all of this incredible change has affected our intelligence. Individuals in isolation may not be able to accomplish as much as someone who fifty years ago had no such aids in their everyday life. But this doesn't mean that we are less intelligent!

We have mobile phones, computers, tablets. We are always connected to the Internet. Our brains have adapted accordingly to this new world.  I used to be able to remember huge amounts of data; names, dates, music and telephone numbers and today I'm lucky if I can remember anything, but I simply don't need to anymore. OK, I am getting older but my brain has adapted and learned what it is important for me to know and to remember.

As a scientist alone and unaided I can accomplish certain things; as a scientist with pen and paper I can do more; as a scientist with a computer I can change the world. Nowadays, with our intelligence outsourced, I can find the meaning of anything in a matter of seconds. I can become informed about pretty much anything without moving from where I am. If you define intelligence to be the performance of the human and computer together, I am now smarter than I have ever been. We are all cyborgs, whether we want it or not, and we have already absorbed technology and made it part of our minds, the way we work and the way we are.

And, if my intelligence as one individual has increased, the intelligence of the collective has increased exponentially. Instant communication between any two people, free access to a great fraction of the planet’s research and information, huge repositories of knowledge available to anyone: all this has the potential to take human creativity to achieve almost anything. And it is changing our society so fast that we simply don't know what the world of tomorrow and the jobs of tomorrow will look like and what the future will bring.  That makes the work of teachers and educators even more critical as we move into this brave new world.

So as I said, don't believe those miserable individuals who constantly run down what our schools and our young people are achieving… all the evidence suggests that our young people are smarter and cleverer than ever and so are our teachers!