Are We Learning the Important Stuff

          The article I read, abut future jobs and if students we’re learning the right things in school to be successful was called “Rigor Redefined” written by Tony Wagner.  This article points out many things that schools are, and have been doing wrong.  Students are being taught so much history and from writings and so many things that don’t even sink into our brains.  When questions are asked and no one knows the answer, it is just given to them.  Spoon-feeding answers does nothing to force us to actually focus and learn something.  This problem is not just because of the way we are being taught it’s also what we are being taught.  The study in this article shows that all the most important things looked for in getting a job, are about who you are and how you think.  There are 7 things jobs look for in a person:  Critical thinking abilities, leadership and collaboration, adaptability and flexibility, trying new things and taking risks, effective communication, analyzing critical information, and lastly questioning and imagination skills.  Rarely, any of these are brought up in classes.  School isn’t really enhancing any of these skills to really help us in our future careers.  So many of our classes just give students the answers the minute they don’t know them.  Doing this is not making us focus and work our mind the way we need to know how to in the future.  If schools really want us to be prepared they should be balancing the academic teachings along with the life skills that will bring us true success.  “It’s time to hold ourselves and all of our students to a new and higher standard of rigor, defined to 21^st- century criteria.”  This is a huge issue in the world today, and possibly an issue that can make or break many of our futures.

The MInds The Web

        In the video The Machine is Us/ing Us, Michael Wesch makes the point that we are what makes up the web, the web is using us.  The web uses the ideas of every individual in the world and shares it with everyone else.  The web isn’t anything without us, we made everything on it.  It is constantly changing as we change. The web is there to share personal ideas with the world and make them known.  One personal idea shared can lead to more ideas all over.  Eventually it will lead to something no one would have been able to think of on their own.  In the last line of the video Wesch makes a fantastic statement that really made me think.  He wrote, “We’ll need to rethink a few things…copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric’s, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, and ourselves.” These are all ways we are linked to each other through the web.  The web can truly change who we are.  It gives everyone new ideas, even simple ones.  Ideas like how to dress, what to eat, what movie to see tomorrow, what books to read, anything and everything.  The ideas are endless when it comes to the web… and more ideas are yet to come! Without the web people wouldn’t be gaining any new ideas.  They would just have their own along with everyone else.  Nobody could add to it, or make it better.  The web is using us for each other.  People have ideas right now that are being shared, and added to… Maybe tomorrow because of the one small idea, one of the greatest inventions will be thought of.  We all have ideas that can be linked to other ideas, which can be linked to other people, which is a link to our future.