Alvarado Blog Post #2

Education has changed drastically throughout the centuries whether it’d be for better or worse. No education is perfect, but the education system of today’s society is working pretty well. With our digital technology at its peak, we are able to create many opportunities for students and Professors. Professors now have many options in choosing the way they want to teach to a class. They can choose to incorporate digital technology into their lecture/lesson or do it the old fashion way, but you don’t see much of that anymore. Many professors, if not all, are using devices like projectors, computers, and even tablets to teach a class. Even students are allowed to have their own laptops in class to take notes, which greatly decreases the use of paper. Just imagine how much paper would be saved if every student had a laptop and wouldn’t need to use a notebook anymore. Sure, not every student likes to use a laptop, but the thing is that they are just not used to it yet. As time passes by more and more students will accommodate to the use of a laptop.

There’s always going to be people like Nicholas Carr that think these advancements are destroying our way of thinking, reading, writing, etc., but the truth is that it all depends on the individual and how easily they allow digital technology to overtake him/her. Carr says he gets easily distracted now since using a computer, which is why he thinks that the attention span of people is rapidly decreasing. Digital technology is not the cause of this though; it’s always been in our human nature to get easily distracted, therefore the use of computers is not the cause of our “short attention spans.” Our education has been working the way it is, so it doesn’t really need that many changes.  One problem in our education system, though are the SOL’s. I say that because they are pretty pointless and you can easily pass most of them without having learned anything in the classroom. They should either be removed or revamped to make them more accurate, which are already going on. Also if you’re majoring in something like Computer Science you shouldn’t have to take English at all and vice versa. With minor changes like these our educational system would get much better, but I’m sure as time progresses some of these changes will happen.