The first lesson of technology and world change gave me an introduction of what to expect in the upcoming months of this module. Including the compulsory weekly writing of this blog which I believe is very good and effective in the sense that it sort of force us to concentrate and take in as much knowledge as we can in lesson if not we would not know what to write here. This module does not have a very rigid syllabus and definitely allows much greater room for creativity as mentioned by Prof Shahi where we are given freedom to choose our favourite topic of interest to focus on and do intensive research on. I believe this is excellent in the sense that we can score better and do well if we are doing something that interest us rather than a boring topic which we dread. This being said, I'll need to go look up on interesting topics right now to work on for my oral presentation, topical review paper and group project.
After going through the introduction phase, prof Shahi went on to show us a video of Shift happens where we are shown a video showing very interesting facts and statistics. A few interesting facts I picked up are "We are living in exponential times" and "Whatever we are learning now, half will be outdated in 2 years time" This means that technology is ever changing and it is changing at an amazing rate. We need to keep updating ourselves and keep up to it in order to gain full use of technology. We cannot let technology outpace us and make us redundant. There is another quote I would like to mention, "By 2049, a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race." This is extremely scary going by the rate how technology is progressing. Why would the world still need human talent and manpower when technology can easily replace humankind. This is a thought provoking idea that I thought of.
The second part of the lesson, Prof Shahi showed us another interesting video called "guns germs and steel". It posed us a question regarding the inequality of wealth and technology between different continents of people. Why do the white men have so much cargo than the New Guineans? The class contributed various interesting ideas. There can be many many reasons as to why is this the case, it could be due to the geographical nature of the countries. Some are better positioned with natural resources that gave them the headstart. However, I believe that what is more important is to find out what can we do to close up that gap of inequality. How can we help the New Guineans progress in wealth and technology? The problem of widening technology gap between countries is getting worse. This should not be happening although it is a blunt and obvious fact. What we can do is probably to find out what are the reasons behind this technology gap and tackle the root of the problem.
Next, Prof Shahi also showed us one more video on social media. This is extremely interesting as it is more relevant and up to date to what is happening to the world right now. If facebook were a country, it would be 3rd biggest! Right now the current trend is about social media. Facebook is worth billions of dollars and social media definitely change how businesses are operating. For eg. businesses are using such social media to reach out to their consumers and target audiences. You see so many advertisements on facebook where you are asked to 'like' it. Everyone in the class has a facebook account and uses it frequently (especially now when we have to use it to contribute to our class fb page). Few days back I came across something interesting: theres a hacker collective called Anonymous plan to take down and destroy Facebook and even stated a deadline of 5 Nov 2011. I do not know how true is this news and whether will it really happen. I really hope to see what happens on 5 Nov 2011. The question posed is how will we react if Facebook is gone forever? Things will definitely change but is it for the better or for the worst...
Personal Rating:
7/10 ( overall quite a good introduction of TWC however not much time for discussion)
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