Time Travel discussion
The Future
>
What To Discuss Here
date
newest »
newest »
So, this isn't the right place to whine 'Where's my jet-pack!?'
Mod
I thought you were more interested in successes - have you heard we're finally getting close to either?
Mod
Mod
That's several steps beyond the pill that contains all your nutrients for the day. Of course, if people were used to the pills, it would be hard for them to imagine what food they might want to be created out of thin air.
My brain's churning on the long-term repercussions of being able to create food out of thin air. It would definitely be a plus to the environment. Farmlands could revert back to forest and jungle. Much of our long-distance transportation would cease without need to transport food by plane, train, automobile, and boat. There wouldn't be so many bovines farting up the place. Thus, our climate-changing emissions would go down. However, we'd instantly be beset by economic problems with job losses in the farming, food packing, restauranting, grocering, transportation, petroleum, and vehicle-production sectors. Those economic problems would quickly trickle down to the rest of society who depended on the people in those sectors for business. We'd have our food replicators, but we'd soon all be struggling to keep roofs over our heads.
Oh well.
Job losses always occur when new technology is developed. Think of all the unemployed blacksmiths and carters that were created a century ago!But even if we had more a more efficient to produce basic food, we'd still have the craftsmen, the artisan farmers and chefs.
What are the jobs of the future? More and more is being automated or done in mass scale - so what are humans uniquely suited to do that robots & computers can't?
Mod
Nurses (doctors maybe, but not nurses)
Pastors/Priests/Ministers
Song Writers (musicians perhaps, but not these guys)
Authors/Painters/Sculptors
Lawyers/Attorneys/Politicians
Robot Technicians
John, your list is impressive but not ubiquitois.For all you list, you need teachers.
Computers are a great learning tool, but ture teaching is an art forn that can't be mechanically duplicated.
My opinion, at least.
Mod
Computers are a great learning tool, but ture teaching is an art forn that can't be mechanically duplicated...."
There are so many recorded lectures and tutorials online, that you could replace a great deal of face-to-face classroom work with previously recorded online classes. Hire the teacher once, set up the class online, set up testing online, and then goodbye teacher. You could definitely make teachers more scarce. I'm thinking, though, of the most recent movie version of "The Time Machine" where the hologram librarian functioned as a teacher and seemed to have plenty of personality and knowledge. Someone would initially have to set it up and keep information updated, but it could teach classes for more years than a teacher would teach without retiring even. However, I'd imagine that you couldn't replace pre-school and elementary school teachers considering the need for corralling students and dealing with interpersonal issues.
Amy wrote: "Howard wrote: "For all you list, you need teachers.Computers are a great learning tool, but ture teaching is an art forn that can't be mechanically duplicated...."
I'm thinking, though, of the most recent movie version of "The Time Machine" where the hologram librarian functioned as a teacher and seemed to have plenty of personality ..."
I can envision a big lecture hall with a holographic professor teaching a class full of holographic students... :)
Mod
Ha. Yes ... in a world full of holographs and robots. Hmm ... wonder if that's in a Simak novel I haven't read yet ...
Getting lectured at is not the same as being taught. I agree with Howard 100%. If you never had a professor who stimulated class discussions you've been tragically deprived.We'll always have a need for physical contact. A chat room doesn't have the hot sun streaming in the window, the strawberry scented cheerleader proving she's just as smart as the pre-med student with the smoker's cough....
I must also chime in regarding Amy's online "teaching." There is little evidence that online teaching is effective. I am not saying whether it is or isn't. The fact is, the data are not yet in. This is of course true for most teaching. That is, little assessment has been done to tell whether or not the method being used is effective. However, the vast literature on teaching and learning (which are by no means the same thing) suggests that lecturing is essentially a waste of time, at least for most people. This is a form of passive learning, and is very ineffective, which makes it quite sad that it is still the most common form of teaching. Research suggests that active learning is much better, and that students teaching each other (that is, in group learning formats) is one of the best ways for students to learn (as opposed to listening to someone at the front of the room, or online giving a lecture). So, yes, you can replace the lecturer with a robot or a tape, but that misses the point. The lecturer is outmoded. It would thus be ironic to use new technology to replace an outmoded method and have the new technology be just as useless.
Mod
Yes, and this is exactly why the language program that I work for doesn't have a computer lab and uses a communicative approach to teaching. Of course, society doesn't seem to be gravitating, as a whole, toward what is really better as much as what is trendy, easier, and cheaper. I think the image of holographs teaching holographs is a fitting end result which well-illustrates your point.
I think you are absolutely right, Amy. A current example is seen with what are commonly called "clickers" that are used in the classroom (more formally known as "personal response systems"). These have been the rage for a few years now, but little is known about how well they serve the presumed goal of improving learning. An even more infamous example of technology gone amok is of course the use of PowerPoint for teaching (ask most students and they will tell you how much they hate it). Most people assume that new technologies must be an improvement, but the research shows that the use of technology for its own sake is usually a mistake; technology that serves a defined purpose can be worthwhile, but most people use these technologies for teaching without having a clearly defined purpose, and they certainly do not have a method of assessment in place to determine if the use is meeting the goal. I know we are getting off the track of time travel here, but I did write a very short story that considers how a time traveler would view teaching two hundred years ago compared to today--unfortunately, not much difference, especially in relation to other professions.
John, Amy, Dan, Glynn, Cheryl et al:My point exactly & I believe the problem is in the jargon being used here.
You need to clarify your terminology.
Teaching can often be rote, and connections being made is often the ultimate goal & machines are no doubt great for that, but can a machine inspire, or motivate beyond the point in question?
I think teaching is more than that, it's a direct connection, much like music can be.
No one knows why music affects you, but it can and does. It can make you laugh or cry, feel sadness or joy, envoke pity or love, the list is endless.
Teaching is the same & that's why teachers will always be needed.
A machine's program may be designed well, but innovation is a human action that can only be approached by the best of artifical means.
That was my point.
Teachers should be on John's list.
Mod
John, if you're talking interesting but only plausible, how about a mind-meld, a la Mr. Spock?I don't know about teaching, but if you were suddenly aware of another's mind (and visa versa), then I'd say it would be quite a learning curve for the both of you.
No machines though, I guess.
I wrote a short article about this very topic in The Teaching Professor. Since I suspect few people have access to it, I have pasted it here:A bespectacled history professor sits with a small group of students. He says, “Students, you may not know this, but today marks the 100th anniversary of the brain port. Do you have any idea how students learned in the past, before people had memory chips? People haven’t always had DirectAccess ports in their heads. They used to spend a tremendous amount of time learning small pieces of information.
“As you know from your ancient history chip, we used the mind meld for centuries. You will find this hard to believe, but it was actually a huge improvement over the previous method, called ‘active learning.’With that method, students were responsible for reading their assignments and coming to a classroom where they would work in groups to solve problems. Believe it or not, active learning was considered a tremendous advance over the methods used before it. Next week when you receive your ultra-ancient history chips, you are going to be in for a shock. You see, people used to try to learn by listening to others talk.
“It was the invention of the photocopy machine that made active learning methods possible. Before the photocopier, students had to sit in a class and listen to someone try to transfer knowledge verbally! That person, the teacher, would talk, essentially reading from notes prepared for the class. Students were supposed to learn the information by listening to the teacher talk.
“The teachers who read their notes and talked to students were the knowledge experts of that era—remember, there were no memory chips at that time. In those days, teachers and students did have books with all of the information written in them, but for some reason, students did not use the books, even though the books were relatively cheap and most students had purchased them. They came to class without having read relevant material, even though the teachers told them to read it. Because they were unfamiliar with the material, the students felt that to understand, they needed to copy down every word the teacher said.
“It was a crazy system. Obviously, people trying to learn something can’t write down notes and think about it at the same time. So, students ended up with notes that they didn’t understand. They just memorized those notes and hoped that somehow the understanding would come to them. Anyway, this method of teaching used to be called ‘lecturing,’ and it was used for centuries.
“As you might suspect, students didn’t learn very much when teachers used this method, but what’s really strange is that students knew they weren’t learning. Shortly after a course ended, they couldn’t tell you anything they learned in the course. Even more ironic, many of the teachers realized that teaching by talking was a waste of their time. They called on students to answer questions, and from the answers they could tell that most of the students didn’t understand very well or even at all.
“So, why in the world did students keep trying to learn this way when they could have read their books before they came to class and used the time in class to focus on understanding the material? And why didn’t teachers opt for methods that prevented students from acting like scribes? Sadly, history doesn’t record any really good answers to those great questions.”
Dan, interesting, but what is 'ultra-ancient' history?Prehistory usually means 'before written history' so is ultra-ancient just very old prehistory?
And I think I know the answer to the question asked in your last paragraph, the one about why don't students read their books.
Don't need a time machine to tell me the reasons I had, just a good memory, given it was definitely in another time frame.
Still, I had a good time in college learning things beyond the books.
Talk about ultra-ancient history.
I was just using "ultra-ancient" as a relative term to show how utterly outmoded the lecture/note-taking approach is in comparison to other methods of learning.
Understood Dan & your idea of a port in your brain is also a very interesting concept, yet I don't think I need another hole in my head.Yet we have ear buds & virtuial goggles & a port in your head would cut to the chase, no doubt about that.
Mod
A bespectacled history professor sits with a small gro..."
I do have to agree that I hated the lecture method of teaching in college. My learning style was basically to rewrite, synthesize, and reteach (in small study groups) what I'd written down in college lectures. I have to admit that I never felt "present" in college classes because of taking lecture notes. I only truly learned outside of class. And I probably was the only one who read the book cover to cover since I was getting paid for it (I read books on tape for Disability Services).
Different people do have their own learning styles, though. I would venture to guess that my Saudi students do much better in a lecture-style class than the average American just based on their auditory-based learning style throughout their education that has not traditionally relied on note-taking. I think that the problem isn't so much the lectures as it is that American children generally don't start out with lectures; they start out with a more communicative approach to learning and then are thrown into a lecture-style teaching method later and are told to merely take notes. Being told to take notes assumes that we're not programed to remember. Why? I would guess that it's because that, from an early age, we're not taught to assimilate information lecture-style. Our brains aren't wired early on for auditory-heavy learning. Thus, we have difficulty with this style of learning later on in life.
I've tutored several people with literacy issues that have, as a result of their lack of reading and writing abilities, relied more heavily on their auditory skills. All of the ladies that I tutored had various learning problems. However, if I gave them complex oral directions to get somewhere, they could always remember them. Whereas, if someone gave me oral directions, I would rely on writing down the directions in order to remember them. Out of necessity, they honed a mental skill that I didn't because I could rely on my pen.
I think that if we're going to use lectures at the university level that we should prepare our children for an auditory-based learning style early on. However, if we start our students out with a communicative-based learning style early on, it should extend into college.
As far as one type of learning style being outmoded ... I would posit that the new learning style of the day is very visual-based as a result of YouTube, etc. But I have to say that it's a very passive learning style and not really as effective for actually assimilating information. PowerPoint is nearly as ineffective as straight lecture. There's too much slack-jawness going on with lecture + PowerPoint that it's definitely time for a change in higher education toward a more communicative, hands-on approach ... until we all do get our data ports.
Anyhow, that's my 2-cents-worth.
*Discussions concerning time-travel books set in the future.
*Discussions concerning futuristic predictions (in literature and otherwise) that have come true.
*Discussions concerning speculations about what the future may be like.
*Discussions concerning speculations concerning futuristic inventions or technology.
*Discussions concerning once-futuristic inventions or technology that have actually become a reality or are becoming a reality.
*Wishes for the future.