ONE FILE FOR LIFE aka C.O.O.L. - COMPUTER ORIENTATED ONLINE LEARNING
ONE FILE FOR LIFE
It has been described by Forbes – the billionaires magazine as being faster than Google and bigger than Wikipedia. What am I talking about? When I was Deputy President of La Salle & Sacred Heart Alumni I worked on a project that I had initiated called the “ONE FILE FOR LIFE”. Now back in the bad old days (which are still with us) a student in school would have to tackle countless textbooks, notebooks (of the paper and not digital kind), various bits of papers and bookmarks and tags. This was a cumbersome way to do things but then there was no choice for want of anything better. Things would have changed with the invention of the laptop or so it seems. The laptop however did not change matters but made it more worse by spawning even more gadgets with storage capacity but not necessarily with more organisation. Now you have your hard disks, sd cards, pen drives, cds and even mobile phones with storage capacities. When I saw those students an idea leapt into my mind which I called the “COOL Project”. COOL stands for Computer Orientated Online Learning. What if a student entering Primary One or Form One had all his information and subjects and notes all in one digital file. What if that digital file would hold not only one subject of the student in that file but all his subjects, whether it was Maths or Science or History or whatever. The student could and would be encouraged to study at will any subject that he took fancy at any one time. To arrive at this point I did an observation study of gamers and new millennium learners or NMLs.
The NMLs Who exactly are the New Millennium Learners (NML)? Millennials is a term widely used to designate those generations born from the 1980s on and grown in a context where digital technologies form inextricably part of their daily lives, the so-called Generation X. In short, Millennials are the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital media, and are influenced by these technologies.
Accordingly, Millennials are thought to be adept with computers, creative with technology and, above all, highly skilled at multitasking and this is why they are also often referred to as the Net Generation, the IM Generation ( Instant-Message Generation), the Gamer Generation or even the Homo Zappiens for their ability to control simultaneously different sources of digital information.
Typically their everyday lives are characterized by immediate communication, via instant messenger, cellular conversations or text messaging. And today’s teenagers are increasingly spending more time using home digital media (computer, games, the Internet) than watching TV. Millenials usually take for granted that multitasking is the normal approach to using digital media: being online while at the same time watching TV, talking on the phone, and doing homework. While earlier generations were introduced to information through print, Generation X takes a digital path. They have short attention spans or “grasshopper minds”, for the inclination to leap quickly from one topic to another, sometimes back and forth, instead of lingering over a subject. Such a repeated behaviour will result in NML being impatient if sources of information are not instantly at their fingertips, and rarely spend long hours thinking about the same thing. NML have grown up used to: 1. accessing information mainly on non-printed, digital sources, 2. giving priority to images, movement, and music over text, 3. feeling at ease with multi-tasking processes, and 4. gaining knowledge by processing discontinued, non-linear information.
The resulting changes seriously defy traditionally expected behaviours and supported practices by formal education institutions – longer attention spans, reflective activities, and focusing intensely only on one activity typically involving some form of properly written text. NML can be said to be “digital natives,” native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet, as opposed to their teachers who are mostly “digital immigrants” and have had to adapt to the new environment created by ICT.
The One File for Life
But lets push the proposition or envelope on the topic I mentioned even further. If a student could learn all his subjects from one file what if he could do that also from year to year. That means when entering primary one his digital file would hold all study material for primary 1 and when he entered primary 2 more information is added and the process goes on until he completes his primary and secondary education in Form 5. But why stop there? Why not carry on the process to matriculation and even university education. Again why stop there as the file can go on adding information and studies at your work place or business. In other words such a file can record all your experience at the workplace, accumulated over the months and years. At the end of your life and even during your life this file can serve as a CV of all you have learned and studied. Not only that but the file can be exchanged with others by an intranet and can be passed on from one generation to the next even.
I then started work on developing such a file. What shall we call it? A Super file? A Mega file? The Mother of all files? I finally settled for One File for Life. To use such a digital file it would have to face or overcome the following obstacles. Firstly space or storage capacity. Presently the most commonly used files for large storage are pdf or portable document files. However after a certain size of say 10 MBs the pdf becomes more and more difficult to download, open and utilize because of its huge size. The second obstacle would be speed for search purposes. Since the file contains a huge data base it should allow for quick and accurate searches. By typing in a word or a group of words the database will be able to show how many hits and where those hits appear in the database. This is exactly a pdf can do but after the pdf grows beyond a certain size of say 5 MBs the searches get slower and slower or stop rendering results completely. On the other hand the One File for Life would contain all the information you can find in the public library at Kota Kinabalu and yet any search for information in such a file can be done instantly. In other words you think, you type and the result appears. This is why Forbes magazine described the file as “Bigger than Wikipedia and Faster than Google”. In fact such a file can be used not only by students but people from all walks of life to store all their data not only in their lifetime but from one generation to the next. TO BE CONTINUED.
It has been described by Forbes – the billionaires magazine as being faster than Google and bigger than Wikipedia. What am I talking about? When I was Deputy President of La Salle & Sacred Heart Alumni I worked on a project that I had initiated called the “ONE FILE FOR LIFE”. Now back in the bad old days (which are still with us) a student in school would have to tackle countless textbooks, notebooks (of the paper and not digital kind), various bits of papers and bookmarks and tags. This was a cumbersome way to do things but then there was no choice for want of anything better. Things would have changed with the invention of the laptop or so it seems. The laptop however did not change matters but made it more worse by spawning even more gadgets with storage capacity but not necessarily with more organisation. Now you have your hard disks, sd cards, pen drives, cds and even mobile phones with storage capacities. When I saw those students an idea leapt into my mind which I called the “COOL Project”. COOL stands for Computer Orientated Online Learning. What if a student entering Primary One or Form One had all his information and subjects and notes all in one digital file. What if that digital file would hold not only one subject of the student in that file but all his subjects, whether it was Maths or Science or History or whatever. The student could and would be encouraged to study at will any subject that he took fancy at any one time. To arrive at this point I did an observation study of gamers and new millennium learners or NMLs.
The NMLs Who exactly are the New Millennium Learners (NML)? Millennials is a term widely used to designate those generations born from the 1980s on and grown in a context where digital technologies form inextricably part of their daily lives, the so-called Generation X. In short, Millennials are the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital media, and are influenced by these technologies.
Accordingly, Millennials are thought to be adept with computers, creative with technology and, above all, highly skilled at multitasking and this is why they are also often referred to as the Net Generation, the IM Generation ( Instant-Message Generation), the Gamer Generation or even the Homo Zappiens for their ability to control simultaneously different sources of digital information.
Typically their everyday lives are characterized by immediate communication, via instant messenger, cellular conversations or text messaging. And today’s teenagers are increasingly spending more time using home digital media (computer, games, the Internet) than watching TV. Millenials usually take for granted that multitasking is the normal approach to using digital media: being online while at the same time watching TV, talking on the phone, and doing homework. While earlier generations were introduced to information through print, Generation X takes a digital path. They have short attention spans or “grasshopper minds”, for the inclination to leap quickly from one topic to another, sometimes back and forth, instead of lingering over a subject. Such a repeated behaviour will result in NML being impatient if sources of information are not instantly at their fingertips, and rarely spend long hours thinking about the same thing. NML have grown up used to: 1. accessing information mainly on non-printed, digital sources, 2. giving priority to images, movement, and music over text, 3. feeling at ease with multi-tasking processes, and 4. gaining knowledge by processing discontinued, non-linear information.
The resulting changes seriously defy traditionally expected behaviours and supported practices by formal education institutions – longer attention spans, reflective activities, and focusing intensely only on one activity typically involving some form of properly written text. NML can be said to be “digital natives,” native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet, as opposed to their teachers who are mostly “digital immigrants” and have had to adapt to the new environment created by ICT.
The One File for Life
But lets push the proposition or envelope on the topic I mentioned even further. If a student could learn all his subjects from one file what if he could do that also from year to year. That means when entering primary one his digital file would hold all study material for primary 1 and when he entered primary 2 more information is added and the process goes on until he completes his primary and secondary education in Form 5. But why stop there? Why not carry on the process to matriculation and even university education. Again why stop there as the file can go on adding information and studies at your work place or business. In other words such a file can record all your experience at the workplace, accumulated over the months and years. At the end of your life and even during your life this file can serve as a CV of all you have learned and studied. Not only that but the file can be exchanged with others by an intranet and can be passed on from one generation to the next even.
I then started work on developing such a file. What shall we call it? A Super file? A Mega file? The Mother of all files? I finally settled for One File for Life. To use such a digital file it would have to face or overcome the following obstacles. Firstly space or storage capacity. Presently the most commonly used files for large storage are pdf or portable document files. However after a certain size of say 10 MBs the pdf becomes more and more difficult to download, open and utilize because of its huge size. The second obstacle would be speed for search purposes. Since the file contains a huge data base it should allow for quick and accurate searches. By typing in a word or a group of words the database will be able to show how many hits and where those hits appear in the database. This is exactly a pdf can do but after the pdf grows beyond a certain size of say 5 MBs the searches get slower and slower or stop rendering results completely. On the other hand the One File for Life would contain all the information you can find in the public library at Kota Kinabalu and yet any search for information in such a file can be done instantly. In other words you think, you type and the result appears. This is why Forbes magazine described the file as “Bigger than Wikipedia and Faster than Google”. In fact such a file can be used not only by students but people from all walks of life to store all their data not only in their lifetime but from one generation to the next. TO BE CONTINUED.
