anyway i think it will be fixed simply because eventually knowledge is an advbantage and people will see you need it. but it will require more bumbling about than necessary. in my limited experience, i found my students appreciated the part of myonline journalism course where i sat down with them and walked them through how i do research online, the most. in turn i was flabbergasted because i don’t think i’m particularly efficient but there you have it. they were simply unaware of many obvious goodies on the internet which can compensate for our often moribund libraries.

we need more of that kind of stuff, imho: in every school, no matter the age.

djb, benign0

There does not seem to be a deficit of imagination here. The world is experiencing an explosion in mental and intellectual activity, communication and sharing such as never before since Gutenberg, maybe.

this part i think relates not just in the philippines but all over the world. you’ll see a LOT of crap on youtube. but there are also gems there.

this month is national novel writing month. we’ll see a lot of crap in that but there will be one or two that’ll be good. that i think is natural as we see the easy by which we create becomes part of normal people’s lives.

the internet as djb points out has made us all Gutenbergs.

Not just DJB but so many others like Bill Clinton, Ken Robinson have observed that there is an explosion of possibilities because of the internet. It is this power that Filipinos need to harness. to go beyond the simplicity of Friendster— which is often their first glimpse of the Internet and take advantage of the possibilities.

a few months back CVJ and i had a similar discussion (sorry no link) re the gift economy nature of open source software. and i disagreed that it was a gift because open source is like a recipe. sure you got it but to build a product out of it requires you to cook it yourself. but the idea that this piece of information is out there, just waiting, sitting there.

Filipinos got to take advantage of that. a lot are already— but there is SO much more we can do.

we are becoming:”a society, generally, of recipients more than givers, users more than producers, troublemakers more than troubleshooters”

But Benign0, go to the Blogger home page and watch a new blogger being born every second. Not all end up being writers of course, but many do. Isn’t this a valid counter-example to your claim. (Well okay, there are more troublemakers).

There does not seem to be a deficit of imagination here. The world is experiencing an explosion in mental and intellectual activity, communication and sharing such as never before since Gutenberg, maybe.

which brings up the problem of what will happen when the 50 and 60somethings start retiring, and a big generation gap exists between themselves and their successors.

not just in politics but in business and in education, the transmittal of culture and a historical, and institutional, memory, from one generation to the next is important. this is not taking place, and could it be because ther generation gap is simply too big between those in positions of maximum responsibiluty and their succesors? the ones to mediate are absent.

which doesn’t mean it will be a permanent problem. it simply means the old mores and norms will die sooner than they otherwise should, good riddance in some respects, much to mourn in others. but a problem nonetheless, specially from an institutional point of view. this happened before, when the generation of educators who reached maturity during the colonial era and their successors began seeking opportunities abroad in the 70s, because the situation at home was too authoritarian and bureaucratic under marcos.

anyway i think it will be fixed simply because eventually knowledge is an advbantage and people will see you need it. but it will require more bumbling about than necessary. in my limited experience, i found my students appreciated the part of myonline journalism course where i sat down with them and walked them through how i do research online, the most. in turn i was flabbergasted because i don’t think i’m particularly efficient but there you have it. they were simply unaware of many obvious goodies on the internet which can compensate for our often moribund libraries.

In the past, reading pure text has forced us to use our imagination to fill in any visual gaps.

Today, rich audio-visual media has reversed the way our brains work, directly feeding it audio/visual data and not leaving much to the imagination. I doubt if text-based literature can be backward-imagined from rich AV data (kung baga, movies have been made from great literature, but very rarely, if ever, do we see great literature made from movies).

Result: imagination-deficited minds.

In the case of the Philippines though, it seems that our society has been imagination-deficited long before rich media technologies became widely available. Lack of imagination apparently is hard-coded into our society’s DNA. :D

But I have to beg that a slight clarification be added to what he says here:

there are some in this blog who have nothing but contempt for the old and hold the latter responsible for the “mess” they are now experiencing. they have obviously forgotten that it was this older generation which paved the way for the technological advances whose fruits this youth are now enjoying, from automobiles to the internet, and who worked as hard as they could to try to make this young generation’s life easier.

… specifically the passage “it was this older generation which paved the way for the technological advances whose fruits this youth are now enjoying“.

This may be true for the older generation of the advanced world. But in the Philippines, I’d struggle to think of any way-paving done by our local Old Farts which contributed to producing those “fruits [the] youth are now enjoying”.

And even then, let’s not forget that the recent advancements in info technology (particularly those that keep the youth distracted today — YouTube, Facebook and the like) were developed by the youth of the mid 90′s to mid 2000′s in the advanced world — a period that saw us, for our part, blissfully but unproductively pre-occupied with our quaint ocho-ocho politics.