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IN THIS (ISSUE) News from your class agent From Your Class Agent What’s New With You? Alumni Spotlight: Chris Goebel Keeping Time Homecoming 2011 Family of the Year Run With Friends Football Game Coupon Fall Alumni Events From the Desk of Lisa Tilma
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Laura McLemore, G’83/M’89 MAT Class Agent drhalfpint@yahoo.com
Read about Homecoming 2011 inside!
Greetings, friends! Recently, I bought a new laptop. It has a 15-inch screen with 4GHz memory and a 500GB hard drive. I have a 3G iPhone as well as a netbook with 1GHz of memory (which runs way too slow). All of these technological gadgets have more memory than the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
The first computer I used was in 1978 in high school and was really just a terminal for the mainframe that sat in the basement of the Board of Education building. We typed in pages of commands that usually began with “if” or “then” and was proceeded by a line number. All this to ask the computer to tell us the time or the day of the week, that is, if the mainframe didn’t overheat and lose our work. Now I am sitting with a computer on my lap that does much more than we could even imagine 33 years ago. The computer and the Internet necessitate a change in the way we educate young people today. According to a July 15, 2011 article in “The Wall Street Journal,” the use of computers has altered the way we think and the way our brain works. Instead of remembering a plethora of Jeopardy-type facts, our brains have become programmed to remember the big concept or where the information we need can be found. We can
simply Google “Civil War,” for example, and find any fact we need to know rather than having to memorize names, dates and places. We have become consumers of information rather than storehouses of facts. As educators, parents and grandparents, we need to keep in mind the following as we teach young people: “Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used” (Dr. Carl Sagan). So, as consumers of information, and due to my verbosity and lack of space, I encourage you to check out what’s going on at Friends University by visiting their website at www.friends.edu. Don’t forget to send me an email and let me know what’s new with you. Professional accomplishments, personal achievements - anything you want me to share with our fellow MAT alumni. Have a great fall and a fantastic beginning to another school year!