When EarthSky’s Deborah Byrd told me recently that college kids today are being prepared for jobs that haven’t even been invented when they started college, and how many college graduates there are each year (as represented in the image), we both stared auspiciously into our respective bowls of posole at a local Mexican restaurant and shook our heads. A little later, she sent me an amazing presentation of facts from THE FISCHBOWL, a “staff development blog for Littleton, Colorado’s Arapahoe High School teachers exploring constructivism and 21st century learning skills.”
For those young souls among us who are under 25, maybe all this change and “cool stuff” that is happening in the world is commonplace, because they were born in times of profound change. However, for those of us over 30 (the age over which one was not to be trusted in the 1960’s) our heads are aswirl on a minute-to-minute basis, and it is impossible to know very much at all about even the tiniest bit of the slightest fraction of a slice of what all is going on in the world. Try as we might, we just have to surrender, if we will, to thrilling and exotic rides in our cybertravels and send dispatches from distant stops worth noting. DID YOU KNOW?/SHIFT HAPPENS is one of them that offers a compressed view of the present and future.
For instance, did you know that in 10 years China is predicted to be the number one English speaking country? Or, that it took 38 years for the radio to reach a market audience of 50 million, only 10 years for TV to reach that many, and a mere 4 for the computer to do so? And that third generation fiber optics has recently been tested that pushes 10 billion bits per second down a fiber, which is equivalent to 1,900 CD’s or 150 million simultaneous phone calls per second?!
You can see the brief presentation as a mind-boggling video packed with information with visual and audio embellishment on YouTube, or as a slide show that you can navigate yourself through this ocean of information.
Did someone recently say to me, “Who can keep up?” Well, The Fischbowl says, SHIFT HAPPENS!
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