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The term innovative education has been presented to scientific community by American pedagogue James Botkin about twenty years ago and received numerous and rather controversial response, for it suggested complete and irreversible revision of the principles traditional educational theories consider to be axiomatic. To begin with, while traditional education considers the main value of educational process to be the knowledge transferred to the student, Botkins innovative education presents the knowledge as a means rather than an end, at the same time orienting at the development of the students personality through knowledge. It is less concerned with controlling the educational process, trying to create circumstances in which the student would establish his or her own goals and achieve them, while transforming his or her own self and self-regulating the studying process. Traditional education represents in itself more or less stable structure, without undergoing dramatic differences in the course of years. The accumulation of knowledge goes on, of course, but only in the subjects where it is impossible to avoid, for example, history and literature, which are being expanded all the time. Curriculum for exact sciences, like physics or mathematics may not change for decades. Botkin offers another decision, which presupposes that educational system is dynamic, ever-changing structure that is being regrouped and renewed constantly, with new programs and educational disciplines appearing all the time. As opposed to reproductive nature of traditional education (the student perceives information and reproduces it), innovative education is supposed to be only and specifically creative process. It should teach students to create text irrespectively of its subject, understand information even if it has never been perceived by the student yet, solve any problems by means of independent thinking rather than applying pre-existing, memorized solutions. It also cancels the long-lasting tradition of relationship teacher-student as superior-inferior, making both the teacher and the student equal participants of educational process, who work on one and the same task in cooperation, rather than submission. Any kind of outside control is supposed to be harmful for the process and, therefore, abolished, with its place taken by self-control, mutual control and coordination. Of course, the self-sufficient system of education based on equality of teacher and student may look really alluring, but all the same, it is more of a utopia than reality. Botkin idealizes children and thinks that it is possible to create such system; reality would most likely say no.
1. Introduction 2. Technology as a new religion. a.Is technology a shrine? b. Responsibility for people 3. Technologies cause frustration. a.Causes of social isolation b. Technology and alienation c. Influence of Internet 4. Conclusion
1. Introduction The term technology is used in so many contexts nowadays that it is very hard to give one complex definition of this phenomenon. Ordinarily, this term implies the collection of all the contemporary discoveries, inventions and innovations that get a physical entailment. It is common knowledge that the major priority of any terrestrial technology is to facilitate the process of working and living of every human being. In other words any technology is always a tool, a facility used to save time and perfect the life. Originally, technology was used in order to survive, as it was the primary goal of the mankind since their first day of existance. Technology was born thousands of years ago when a man started inventing new primitive instruments to improve the effectiveness of hunting and fishing.
The industrial revolution of the 19th century changed the course of human development as it introduced industrial technologies to the world and gave birth to unattended operation.
The quality of machinery grew and this fact opened the possibility of mass production and therefore was an enormous step into life-level improvement. The second step was the invention of the telegraph as it started the contemporary period of information technologies. The possibility of sharing the know-how and other vital information influenced the economy of the countries and therefore significantly changed the standard of life. The benefits of the technological progress were obvious but nobody ever thought that this benefits would also have a flip side the side of isolation.
2. Technology as a new religion Contemporary people cannot imagine their lives without the participation of modern technologies. Technological progress has become an indicator of the cultural development of every given country and person because it resembles the ability to control. Controlthis is the point technology is all about. Since the ancient times men needed a tool to control each process in their lives and different technologies became the fist aid kit for this problem. Technology nowadays has become a new religion. It really has much in common with any religion in the world. If to exaggerate, the concept of religion implies that a person has faith in the fact that his God will lead him to a better future and prayers can help the man to control God giving him exactly what the man needs. God protects his men . The same thing is about technology. The technological development provides a good future for a person, too. Technology improves the life of each person; it does protect for it surrounds a man with a comforting atmosphere of tranquility for his health, security and in addition to that it keeps the person on top of the latest events happening on the planet. Altogether it gives a perfect illusion of control over life and is even stronger than the religious faith.
2.a. Is technology a shrine? It is hard to get around the fact that many contemporary people worship technology. This is primarily due to the fact that people simply cannot imagine their lives without its numerous embodiments: cell-phones, Blackberry communicators, iPod players, laptops, speedautomobiles, airplanes, automatic kitchen equipment, many others but especially computers. Computers nowadays have become almost family members and troubles with a computer are perceived with great emotional involvement. Not many people remember that the majority of technologies were created in order to accelerate the process of connection between people. The problem is that the progress of information technologies outstripped the human ability to communicate. The market is a flood of unbelievable amounts of information technologies that wipe the personal touch from every single message transmitted from them. People worship the technologies that save their time and give them more opportunities to work and earn money. Isnt it wonderful that now a man does not have to actually meet a person to say, I love you? All he has to do is send an sms, an internet-card or in the best case send a hand-written post-card or make a call. In Malaysia it is even allowed to divorce by a text message. Seeing technology as a shrine prevents people from understanding that all these technological embodiments exist, in the first place, to complement the real person-to-person communication but not completely substitute it. Too much of anything is destructive. No difference with the modern technologies. They entered the life of people replacing men with machines, replacing real speech with communicators and real love with cyber-relationships. So, the reality is that the inability of people to control the process of technological influence resulted in various negative effects such as: social isolation and alienation of people from each other.
2.b. Responsibility for people Technology has influenced so many spheres of life that it can be even said that it actually takes responsibility and therefore controls at least four major blocks: culture, intelligence, personal identity and economy. Culture is affected through the ethics that accompanies technology in such manifestations as quality of life owing the modern house static and portable equipment and in the process of socialization, which implies the increase (or decrease) of the cultural level. Intelligence is influenced by technology in a way that a lot of decisions are made by machines: up-to-date programs allow people to rely major tasks to computers to count everything themselves and simply give the result: a prognosis, an economic calculation etc. Personal identity is definitely influenced too, as technology provides the opportunity to chose the way of living, which corresponds to the inner condition of a person, but equalizes everybody at the same time, for each person is no more that just another user. Economy is not an exception as it helps to build corporation all over the globe crating strong economic alliances. Technology gradually leaves no limits for the possibilities of humanity and humanity gradually become desperately dependent on it. The major issue is that though technology is responsible for the changes in the society it cannot take this responsibility. It is the humanity that is to be responsible for what it invents and contributes into the world. And even more than that each person has to take responsibility for the technological goods his children use.
3. Technologies cause frustration. In spite of the comfort modern technologies bring they cannot eliminate such powerful side effect as frustration. This frustration primarily deals with the domination of the technology over human values. The social side of the technological progress resulted in antisocial consequences. A man does not need a friend to come over to help him, or just to talk because everything that is to be done is done my machines and one can talk with a friend over the phone, or communicate through sms or Internet. Such social changes with an antisocial character grow with the growth of number of advanced technologies. Frustration remains invisible until people actually see that their children do not go out but spend hours playing computer games, talking on the ICQ or choosing avatars for their chat nicknames. The lifestyle of the contemporary generation become more isolated and therefore result many frustrations. One of such frustrations is the inability to demonstrated advance social communicational skills. Two people feel more comfortable sharing personal information by means of the computer that in a face-to-face conversation. Technology is a frustration also because it pollutes the atmosphere, uses too much natural resources, leaving lifeless earth and makes people useless, as the machines do everything instead of them. Psychologists are tired of repeating how important is the tactile contact for each person and that the weakest consequence of such deficit is aggression. Internet-communication, a computer deciding what is the best color gamut for the bedroom, virtual-traveling, remote education, computers telling fairy-tales to little children - this is just a small part of what is going on around us. Depression, isolation, alienation are looking for new victims that lose their contact with the outside world.
3.a. Causes of social isolation Technological progress expands our contacts we can have hundreds of people in our contact-lists, but still we get the same result social isolation. We do not meet these people; we do not take them by their hands or give a hug when they need it. Technology brings up a generation of people without proper social skills and therefore immature people. New
technologies have forgotten the values and human goals. Technology is above a man now, because it is in great demand, brings profit and dominates. Technologies promote human interactions through technical devices but many people understand this calling too literally. The term society means that a person belongs to a bigger formation, a conglomeration of many people with definite peculiarities . This group of people has common goals and therefore is a unity. When a person loses this sensation of unity he becomes socially isolated of his own accord. When a person understands that he does not need to meet anybody in person in order to talk and finds it comfortable than he is trying to escape the reality. Why do so many people try to escape reality? The contemporary life has proved that people have so little time to talk to each other because of their jobs, not even mentioning the tactile contact that their social frustration leads them to search for a solution. The solution is often found in Internet and after some time the person becomes absolutely isolated he buys everything he needs in the internet-shops, communicates with people via Internet and falls in love in the same manner. 3.b. Technology and alienation In order to understand alienation through technology better it is important to know the existing types of alienation which include alienation between the rich and the poor, between genders, races, interests and so on. Technological alienation implies that a person does not need to establish social contacts to achieve his goals, because everything can be done with the help of technological devices. Technology, as it has been mentioned before, does save time, but this time is nowadays is spend on more technologies like Internet and therefore causes alienation for many people . People become the slaves of modern technologies and do a good job in not letting anything else in their life they even prefer to work over the Internet not to be torn away form their deity. Alienation means forgetting something that once used to be considered a good manner the ability of a man to reflect and feel the world and other people in it.
customer used by the digital cameras manufacturers is especially reflected in the wide choice of cameras that offer the best quality standards for the price-range they belong to. 3. How to choose a digital camera? The transition of digital photography from the privilege of rich people to an ordinary home appliance has caused some problems. That is the reason a modern man has a set of questions concerning digital cameras, especially the whats, whys and wheres of digital cameras. Nobody wants to make a miscalculation! The basic problem in choosing a digital camera is a guarantee that the device you are purchasing will grow old in couple of month due to a constant improvement and development of the sphere. The only factor that may delay this process of growing old is purchasing a device with the price twice or three times higher of the average market price for a digital camera at the moment. If a person chooses a digital camera there are several criterions of a great priority he needs to keep in mind: price of the device, the image resolution of the camera, the capacity of the memory card, presence of a LCD-display, the interface of the camera, its weight and size. The price of a digital camera depends on its quality factors. The resolution of a digital camera, or in other words the size of a digital image is measured in pixels. Pixels in their turn are photosensitive elements. It is common knowledge, that the bigger is the amount of pixels indicated in the camera properties the better it is. Therefore, if a high-detailed photo is required, the usage of zoom on a digital camera with small resolution will not give the desired result. In this case a person choosing a digital camera needs to exactly know what it will be used for and to choose it according to its future destination. It is necessary to mention that the resolution of 640"x"480 is the lowest resolution any customer should be orientated to. It is the minimal resolution with witch the purchase of a digital camera still remains reasonable. The lens of the camera or the zoom properties mentioned above allows saving a lot on the price of the device but hits the quality of the pictures obtained. The memory card is a very important issue, too. It is much better to choose a better camera with a lesser memory capacity than an overage digital camera with a larger memory capacity. The presence of the LCD-display is no longer a wish it is a requirement for any digital camera. It allows to choose the future image, to anticipate it and to delete bad images and therefore to save space. 4. The advantages of digital cameras Along with some advantages mentioned above there are more to digital cameras than that. It goes without saying that it is possible to examine and sort out the images, create a slide show, a digital photo album, create a presentation on your computer, a ordinary TV or a multimedia projector. A digital camera offers the ability of sending images for printing directly to the printer with a DPOF standard or throughout the USB without using the computer. The images from the digital cameras may be sent throughout the Internet. For instance, it is possible to send images to colleagues, friends or relatives using e-mail. In the era of the constant lack of time this advantages become issues of the highest priority. 5. Affordability and manufacturers There is a plenty of digital cameras for sale in the price-range from $300 to $9000 and more. What camera would become the best choice? An ordinary digital camera with the price around $300 is suitable for everyday usage. So do not expect any super possibilities from a camera like that. The variety of manufacturers is very wide. Nevertheless it is necessary to mention the most popular brands among the customers. They are: Sony, Canon and Nikon. And some others: Casio, Fuji, HP, Kodak, Konica, Olympus and Pentax. The most popular digital camera nowadays is Sony Cyber Shot DSC-P150.
6. Conclusion Digital cameras find more and more place in the lives of contemporary people. Due to the comfort and quality of making images they are rightfully displacing ordinary old cameras from the market. After all, this is very simple: take the picture you want, connect the digital camera to your computer and open the boundless elbowroom of its opportunities. You may immediately print the images or by means of special programs make the images brighter, add shrill and so on. The quality of the images is much better than on the film cameras. Smart Media Card or ompact Flash memory cards store the images and do not let them to get old. Digital cameras are the right choice of the new millennium