Professor Sedgewick is one of my favorite professors because of his book Algorithms and the popular MOOC courses he taught on Coursera, therefore in addition to my admiration of his inspiration to my way of study, I think, he is super canonical in this topic – the future dissemination of knowledge.
The lecture developed from history to future.
He first gave us a flash back of the methods he got knowledge decades ago and how his students learn through new methods with the blossom of new technologies.
This lecturer give me a nutshell view of how science and technologies changed studying and teaching.
We could only learn from book, get education certifications mainly in school in person and get material in bookstore or libraries. But now we can learning from multiple medias and libraries is only a place for study with laptops and tablets, no longer the base of the knowledge which is replaced by databases in servers.
The development of the Internet break the space and time limitation. With online courses, everyone on this planet can get high quality education as long as he has a computer and internet. This is a big step of our civilization as it provides equal opportunities of education for everyone no matter how old he is or what class he belongs to in this society.
In the future, it is assured that new learning methods will appear thanks to the informatics revolution. For example, to make the user interfaces as real as the reality, the VR technique will definitely be used, with equipment such as VR classes or helmets what online study will make students fill as if they are in real classrooms. And school may become the places only for courses cannot be taught through internet or a place for group discussion and career consultancy.
This has obvious advantages. For example, since students don’t need to go to school, not only them but also their parents can save a lot of time on the road. Hence it will reduce the pressure of traffic during rush hours, which makes the society much for efficient from this perspective.
However all of these forward imaginations belong to the goodness of humanity and not everyone is suitable in this kind of education.
First of all, young children lack self-control of learning at home. Without guidance and tutelage, they may learn nothing and even play computer games rather than studying. As it is quite clear that even in real schools, a lot of students can not control themselves under the instruction by their teachers. In addition, some students were born with the preference of learning in real school, they merely understand anything through the Internet. That’s another problem. It’s same for the situation that digital materials are replacing paper books, some readers have very low efficiency when they read on screen.
Therefore the evolution of the disseminating knowledge does not only depend on how developed the science and technology is ,it also relies on the evolution of human beings. When our mind and policy cannot catch up with the rate of the new technique. It’s not a good idea to sharply develop it.
But we will achieve all the dreams we have in the future when all the conditions are ready.
When we focus on the structure of the lecture, the materials are well prepared, we were very interested in what he was talking from the beginning. I also learnt some speaking skills from him.
