Election time

I have been teaching my students about elections and we are starting to follow the federal election. The lack of comprehension about how the Canadian electoral system works means I have a lot of instruction to do!  The conversations we have had around it is amazing and interesting. I am thankful for the organization that has put together an excellent package for the student election process: studentvote.ca

Having held a student election campaign prior to this was a really good idea because it helped them develop a concrete understanding of important terms such as ballot, candidate, nominate, campaign, and vote. 

Now they are discovering ridings exist!  And the questions are flying!  

Time to Blog

What if the industrial revolution is about to trickle away to an end when the boomer generation dies off?  What if the last few generations of human were special because they had just the perfect combination of boredom, needs, and ingenuity to stimulate intense creativity?  What if that mix of genetics and environment is going extinct due to the very changes it brought?  What if it was no longer the lone designer or small team working in relative isolation, studying everything and working furiously towards a goal, a veritable vision that would bring further progress?  What if the only way to work out improvements to society and our lives will be through communicating our individual ideas to the world in bursts and the responses?  

If this is the case, then all the children must learn to blog and respond to blogs thoughtfully. This form of communication will help them to learn from each other and together. To have online conversations via blog and comment is the way we will bring empathy and understanding to our world of machines and industry. This will produce a new generation of global citizens who are not merely users of technology and consumers of information, rather the progenitors of a super human neural net  or Collective Consciousness. Each of our brains connecting with each other multiplies the power of our ability to think making the resulting process million fold more powerful than a single thinker could ever be.

This is the true power of 'social' media if we use it with care. This is why I have decided to blog and tweet and why I am teaching my students to blog.