Motivation of the Ages

The article "Rigor Redefined" by Tony Wagner is basically about the "seven survival skills' for academic learning, it shows what is really happening in the classroom. School is not just a place where you go to five days a week, seven hours a day, to be given information so you can forget it in just a short time span. One of the problems is not only the students, but the teacher or instructor also. I know from my own personal experiences of teachers that not all of them are challenging enough. One of the most important aspects of a teacher is to have your students question themselves to a further extent. And have the ability to not only interact with piers, but be able to have the ability to ask the right questions. I mean without asking questions and engaging yourself how are you ever supposed to learn? Another great skill that Wagner pointed out was the lack of general leadership. Although, how do you teach leadership? How do you teach students to collaborate with one another, constructively and effectively? Teachers are finding more and more students are lacking the requirements of basic spelling and punctuation. Are we just simply passing by without the basic skills needed for the future job field?  Not only that, but actually remembering the information learned in schools. "Of the hundreds of classes that I've observed in recent years, fewer than 1 in 20 were engaged in instruction designed to teach students to think instead of merely drilling for the test." As Wagner stated, we need to find better and more intuitive ways to teach students without boring themselves to death. Could people solve that with more of the use of technology? Or is that maybe the cause of the disengaging of students? With all the distractions such as the use of cell phones, Facebook, or Myspace it can be easy to stray away from what is truly important.

The Mind of the World Wide Web

Web 2.0 the machine is Us/ing changed my perspective for the way the computer actually works. What caught my eye I think was how they mentioned that each time we use the computer for a task, we are teaching it a new idea each time. So what does that exactly mean? Always, from my perspective, the computer has had a "mind of its own." But now I realized its really the other way around. WE are the ones who make up the machine. Each day we add more and more information to the web. Increasing its knowledge through a database. What they were trying to explain was that digital text used today, used to be a simple part of our world. I not only think that it has become a part of us, it has defined our generation to do bigger, and better things for the future. It's not just part of the digital world, It's part of who we are.