Shift Happens

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a billion…

Here’s a video that every student, teacher or education-in-training should watch.

The video makes a compelling argument as to how the world is changing by pointing out some startling facts about children, education by making comparisons with countries like India and China. The video is visually delightful way and while it is rather long (for a YouTube video!) it DOES hold your attention.

I showed this recently to a class of undergraduates – freshmen who have grown up with technology but also some older adult students who are looking for a change in vocation. I think the few minutes it took to show the video made more of an impact than the whole hour I took explaining why educational technology is going to be an integral part of educating digital natives.

I just found a comment from a student to a similar video (there are actually tons of derivative works from the original Shift Happens video) that said something to the effect that “my teacher showed this in history class about the only thing worth while that i learned in hs”

I often like to read about the inspiration for things so for those of you who are interested here is a post to Karl Fisch’s blog - the fischbowl (the original creator of the powerpoint called Shift Happens

So as we witnessed last week, Shift IS happening – the question is how are we getting ready for it?