One of the reasons that our society is so averse to new ideas and knowledge is that we have failed to understand the power that knowledge confers on us. I did not realize what computers can do until the day I worked on one and I did not relies the power of the internet until the day I used it and really used it. The internet where you can stream audio video content online and the internet where downloading a document is just click away is the real internet that gives us power. I have used a dial up connection and that is so slow that it bleeds us to death. Over a dial up connection one can not imagine watching a political debate between one's favorite political idealists. Without a fast connection one can not download documentaries and without a fast connection the essence of connectivity and global world re two alien ideas.
My hard drive can hardly hold 40 gigabytes of memory. Whereas I was talking to an IT professional the other day that they are in the process of making hard drives half the size of what I have now and 100 times more storage capacity.
My processor is a single core obsolete model and 2 core processors are the in thing these days. But what if I tell you to wit a little because AMD will launch a tetra core in the April of 2007. Work has already begun to develop a octacore model.
I remember buying a 128 MB Flash drive for a friend about three years back. It cost a big fortune then. Now I see Flash drives smaller than the one and with storage capacity of around 4 Gigs.
But let me come back to knowledge aversion in our society. Let us compare a high school kid living in US to a high school kid living in Jhang. There are obvious differences in the way the two go about the business of equipping themselves with knowledge and their environment. The US kid has a laptop and a high speed internet connection and relies heavily on internet and its resources for doing his/her homework. He/she spends considerable amount of time playing online informational games and he knows how to print store and retrieve data that is most relevant.
Now move back to a Paki kid. He has his notebook and his textbook. His worth of knowledge is limited to all the textbooks that he has been given to read and cram. He can not and should not ask questions outside the set of questions given to him. And there is no use him asking questions anyway since there is no where to look for answers. No kid knows how to use a library let lone internet for researching some material for the homework. If by some luck he has a computer it is a desktop the make and model of which is obsolete in international market. The connection does not allow sane internet surfing let alone stream media.
I would imagine how such a kid would think about the importance of online encyclopedia as a rich source of information. I can imagine myself since I have lived in similar circumstances. Until the day I actually got access to wikipedia I used to think that encyclopedias were these big volumes of books that were so huge that searching them for help in itself would entail a humongous task. And this to my mind was enough of a reason to defer any such search for information in encyclopedias.
Under such circumstances it is necessary that we should work towards promoting easy access to knowledge to our young generations. This will help bring the revolution in our attitudes from below up and will serve us well. How this will happen? Let us discuss it tomorrow.
My hard drive can hardly hold 40 gigabytes of memory. Whereas I was talking to an IT professional the other day that they are in the process of making hard drives half the size of what I have now and 100 times more storage capacity.
My processor is a single core obsolete model and 2 core processors are the in thing these days. But what if I tell you to wit a little because AMD will launch a tetra core in the April of 2007. Work has already begun to develop a octacore model.
I remember buying a 128 MB Flash drive for a friend about three years back. It cost a big fortune then. Now I see Flash drives smaller than the one and with storage capacity of around 4 Gigs.
But let me come back to knowledge aversion in our society. Let us compare a high school kid living in US to a high school kid living in Jhang. There are obvious differences in the way the two go about the business of equipping themselves with knowledge and their environment. The US kid has a laptop and a high speed internet connection and relies heavily on internet and its resources for doing his/her homework. He/she spends considerable amount of time playing online informational games and he knows how to print store and retrieve data that is most relevant.
Now move back to a Paki kid. He has his notebook and his textbook. His worth of knowledge is limited to all the textbooks that he has been given to read and cram. He can not and should not ask questions outside the set of questions given to him. And there is no use him asking questions anyway since there is no where to look for answers. No kid knows how to use a library let lone internet for researching some material for the homework. If by some luck he has a computer it is a desktop the make and model of which is obsolete in international market. The connection does not allow sane internet surfing let alone stream media.
I would imagine how such a kid would think about the importance of online encyclopedia as a rich source of information. I can imagine myself since I have lived in similar circumstances. Until the day I actually got access to wikipedia I used to think that encyclopedias were these big volumes of books that were so huge that searching them for help in itself would entail a humongous task. And this to my mind was enough of a reason to defer any such search for information in encyclopedias.
Under such circumstances it is necessary that we should work towards promoting easy access to knowledge to our young generations. This will help bring the revolution in our attitudes from below up and will serve us well. How this will happen? Let us discuss it tomorrow.
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