Helping Sustained Learning

Right since our childhood, we have been force fed by our education system to mug up all that we can. No one knows why. The teacher's don't. The parents don't. The children for sure don't.

Given the fact that most of the human knowledge is already on the internet (read Wikipedia), don't you think we need to break the rules now? Do any of us grown up adults remember anything more than how to find stuff from the Net and use it logically? I, for one, sure do. So, do we really need our children to go through the excruciatingly painful education system?

Aside: Wow!! I really like to ask questions.

Aside II: Can I provide answers? Sure why not!! What I propose is something like a secondary brain. Our vault of memory on the cloud.

Like it or not Sherlock Holmes was right. We do have a limit to the Petabyte HDD we carry in out heads. We can only store so much information in our head. Why bug it up with all the unnecessary information children get from the subjects they are not interested in?

Why not give them a Single-point-of-access-device for all their information needs? Whatever they read or see can be stored on the cloud so they don't need to remember anything (if they wish to). All that is required of them is that they process that information quickly and logically.

We already have systems in place for all that I propose. All we need is convergence and social acceptability.

Spare a thought for it!!

The Social Agenda

Do Social networks really work?

Yesterday while talking to my boss (BTW he is the only one I still consider to be my boss, apart from my wife, as he is the only one I listened to at work ;)), he came up with an interesting idea. People have not changed since centuries. They have always been drifting apart. From whole villages living in one cave to rising divorce rates, we have come a long way from social living. People are becoming more and more individualistic.

Now, back to the main topic. Do social networks work? For the past decade, we have seen numerous social networks coming and then fizzling out. MySpace, Friendster, Orkut and now Facebook. All have seen the same story. People get excited when they are launched. Call all their friends to join them. They form groups and communities. They chat all night long. But then after that what? They move on to the next big thing... Twitter.

For the fear of being called a hypocrite, I would like to admit that I have also been a part of all the bandwagons. Be it Orkut, MySpace, Blogs, Facebook or Twitter. You can find my profiles on all of them. But then I become bored like the rest of you and move on.

Now that Google is coming onto the scene with a stronger product (than Orkut) in Google +, I am not sure whether it is too late to make any dent in the SNSs' fortunes.

There are three things and only three things that really sell in this world. Sex, knowledge and food. That is why you see all the Porn sites being so popular and Google making tonnes of money. Online economies around these three will always remain popular and viable. The rest as they say will become history.

BTW with the much hyped IPOs of all the SNSes, I seriously feel there is another dot com burst brewing. So cash in your stocks and come back to the real world!!