Homework Week 2

Making College "Relevant"

In the past decade college has become more focused on what majors produce what careers. With some colleges even going as far as to advertise the fact that they will guarantee jobs, schools are losing perspective on the basic skill sets that students are supposed to obtain through their degrees. Instead of those abilities that most professions actually look for, students have developed a narrow minded focus on majors, putting too much emphasis their majors and not enough emphasis on developing a broad range of experience that can be easily accessed based on career. There are a few exceptions to this, such as engineering, which keeps students on a strict track, not valuing exploratory classes. As long as students are too frightened over not getting a job immediately after their four years, colleges will keep producing the same student.

Tinkering to the Future

Technology has become increasingly dynamic recently and cannot always be approached with a formulaic attitude. It's become more common for people to work from the bottom up rather than to have a specific goal in mind. Sometimes it's more productive to just "see what happens". With technology becoming more ubiquitous in the modern world, it's likely that someone will do something interesting.

Pixel Perfect

We live in an extremely vane society, one that needs a target image to be constantly reminded of. Even in the professional modeling world, blemishes and imperfections need to be perfected, and with the millions of different outlets there are for this kind of thing, it's only logical that people be trained in making things look "normal" to the consumer's eye. People like Dangin have become pixel correctors, making human nature look more... human.


Transform Education

The American education system, and for that matter, the global education systems are not so much as education their students as they are mining their students' minds as if they were an unlimited resource. Schools are all looking for math and science skills instead of letting their students choose their own skills and abilities that they already have a knack for. There are two different types of education in most peoples' perspective: actual and less respectable. No one ever wants to encourage the kid wanting to be an artist, they only want to qualm his fears of becoming an engineer instead. Schools are producing less diverse students that all were trained for the same thing. The only problem is, only a some are going to be good at it.

Digital Detectives

Using photoshop to edit vanity fare magazine covers is one thing, but it's entirely another when images are doctored in illegal ways. Digitally doctoring videos and pictures has gone beyond smearing some of the blemishes of certain celebrities. In courts of law people will now provide doctored evidence that is almost undetectable. Only with the use of highly advanced algorithms can law enforces actual determine if a picture is fake or not. There are other methods, like using metadata, but that opens up an entirely different debate: how much metadata should be allowed to track our private lives?


Building a Culture of Teaching and Learning

People recall high school, think of the crowded classrooms, recall the boring teachers and say, "that sucked". Throw in even more students and it's called higher education. Students, teachers and parents are collectively letting college become more depersonalized, making college a less effective learning environment. Some colleges are arbitrarily named "good schools" but are still demonstrating the same flaws that even the mediocre schools exhibit. College is what you make of it, but it's becoming surprisingly more difficult with contemporary school teaching formulas.

The Next 5000 Days of the web

The web right now, as versatile as useful as it is, is not intelligent. It cannot think for itself and cannot become unified because it is unable to decide what should be put together. Without giving too much credence to Jame's Cameron's admonitions, the internet will become self aware and will be able to think for itself and there will be full transparency, where everyone can learn anything they want, with nothing withheld.