Monthly Archives: March 2008

Teach Our Children Well

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Remember the good old days when your mother wanted to get you home for dinner so she stuck her head out the screen door and screamed your name at the top of her lungs? Yesterday, I was too lazy to get up from my sofa, walk up the stairs and rouse my husband from a nap, so I pulled out my cell phone and called our home number knowing that the ringing would wake him up.

Oh, my! Who could ever have envisioned how much technology would change our lives?

Our children are from another world. When my son was whining last week over how long it took to download an episode of his favorite TV program, Lost, that he had missed the night before, I waxed nostalgic about how we watched television as children, if we missed a program, we had to wait until the summer to see it as a rerun.

When I was delivering a lecture to my older son about the genesis of music videos in the 1960s, I cited the Monkees television show and the Beatles’ clip to promote Strawberry Fields Forever. Dan nonchalantly reported that he has been watching those old clips all the time on YouTube. Who knew? Sure enough, anyone interested in walking down Memory Lane (or Penny Lane, for that matter) can relive the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Monkees cavorting in full costume or the 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every single recorded moment that I could think of, I found on YouTube.

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YouTube, which facilitates the world-wide sharing of homemade and professional video clips, brings in literally billions of viewers. If it’s been taped, you can probably find it on YouTube.

If you can’t find it on YouTube, you can probably read about it on Wikipedia, the free online, reader-written encyclopedia. If you are not aware of Wikipedia, which has 9.25 million articles, you should be. Your children are using it every day to research subjects from Shakespeare to baseball statistics. It is the bane of faculty, who rail that Wikipedia articles are unreliable and lack academic credentials, but they seem to be fighting a losing battle. Wikipedia is indeed helpful in solving difficult crossword clues and putting a finger on an elusive fact, but we’re trying to teach our students more sophisticated and reliable advanced searching techniques!

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