Technological Advances in Recent Years Term Paper

It has transformed work and has pervaded our leisure lives as well. And it has changed the way we educate. Not since the Industrial Revolution has society seen such an omnipresent technological advancement. We are teaching amidst a technological renaissance, with ideas flowing digitally at rapid speeds, traversing the globe, and changing our lives in the process. (Ross & Schulz, 1999, p. 123)

The value of communicating with stored information as well as individuals on the other side of the planet has become a pervasive aspect of the social fiber of the world, though their s still a divide that separates some from the system, it is safe to say that without the WWW.noone would even know the who, what and where needs of individuals missing this common link. (Aberg & Shahmehri, 2003, p. 287) the change has been so extreme that the WWW.nowspawns countless new ideas a day, as a result of information exchange and has even changed the fabric of our vocabularies, allowing concepts, words and phrases to become universally accepted aspects of language. (Forsythe, Grose, & Ratner, 1998, p. 12) in one expansive text on the manner in which the WWW.haschanged the pattern of individual literacy from local to global the authors describe their work, and in so doing explain the connectivity and extreme nature of change.

The chapters that comprise this volume describe literacies born of, and marked by, their particular cultural, linguistic, historical, and geographic roots in Hungary, Greece, Australia, Palau, Norway, Japan, Scotland, Mexico, Cuba, South Africa, and the United States, but the chapters also describe literacies that clearly transcend, deny, or resist these specific geopolitical locations by, and through, their presence on the Web. This dynamic tension between localness and globalness, takes us beyond the simple-if appealingly coherent and modernist-narrative of the global-village as described in the Introduction to this volume. The messy complexity -- and the oftentimes contradictory nature-of these new literacies suggests, instead, a more complicated postmodern vision.This new vision recognizes online literacy practices not only as responses to the disintegration of conventional world-views, world orders, and social formations based on a modernist framework, but also as an important primary means of creating and expressing identities in changing postmodern landscapes. (Hawisher & Selfe, 2000, pp. 277-278)

Through the global mind change associated with the internet and the opportunity for information sharing and connectivity, individuals are changed. Each individual, depending on his or her desire to do so can research and develop ideas about self and other as quickly as their system will allow. Work has changed, education has changed, research opportunities and availabilities have changed, the social fiber of the world has changed and above all the individual has changed. The individual can seek information and understanding through the WWW.aseasily as they can start their car in the morning or even more basically, as they can tire their shoe or put their pants on one leg at a time. Though this may be an oversimplification, and the internet does require at least limited technological understanding to use it really is everyone's game, as long as they have the hardware available to them they can get information they seek or even more information than they need.

References

Aberg, J., & Shahmehri, N. (2003). 15 Live Help Systems. In Human Factors and Web Development, Ratner, J. (Ed.) (pp. 287-329). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Computer History Museum. (2006) Exhibits Internet History, Retrieved January 20, 2008 from: http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/index.shtml

Forsythe, C., Grose, E., & Ratner, J. (Eds.). (1998). Human Factors and Web Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hawisher, G.E. & Selfe, C.L. (Eds.). (2000). Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web. London: Routledge.

Pelton, J.N. (2000). E-Sphere: The Rise of the World-Wide Mind. Westport, CT: Quorum Books.

Ross, J.L., & Schulz, R.A. (1999). Using the World….....