New Technology With an Old Twist
Today is the first day of 2010. I keep wondering what new technological twists and applications to math and science teaching will it bring us?
As I woke up today and realized that it is raining once again here (in Vancouver), so I decided to indulge myself in reading… Luckily I have my Sony reader with me with lots and lots of books uploaded into it (included the papers I have to read…). The latest one is “War with the Newts” (or “War with the Salamanders”) by a Czech writer Karel Čapek . So this tiny electronic book I was holding in my hands contained shelves and shelves of books in many languages and in multiple formats… (ok, even the word “format” is a tech-based…) Yet, when I opened the book, I noticed a beautiful bookmark in it (see the photos of it I posted on Facebook below. (Actually, the Facebook will be a topic of another post. In my view, it is an invention of the last decade that changed how we live and how we reach to people.)
At first it felt absolutely normal – a bookmark inside the book- that is what I do to remember where I stopped, yet in a few moments I realized how funny it was… My electronic book has an electronic bookmarking option, so a traditional paper bookmark became obsolete, yet I wanted it to stay there… I like bookmarks… This was my husband’s New Year’s joke…
So will 2010 show us how new technologies change what we teach and how we teach yet hopefully we will be able not to lose contact with the past. May be even having a paper bookmark inside an electronic Sony Reader.
