Talk about evolution! In case you have not realized it, learning has become more fun these days
In the beginning, there were just books. Some were real boring books. Others were books with limited information (you need to buy the entire series to understand the whole story). How well a book was read was all depended on how well the book was written and how strong the reader’s imagination was. I am not talking about novels here – I can read it with good imagination at any given time of the day. What I am referring to here is science or unadulterated history books.
The other “tools’ for learning in those days was our very own TV Pendidikan (we did not have Astro back then and of course it is better now ever since it was taken over by Astro). I still remember my school days when we were herded like cattle into the small & boring AV room for our “TV Pendidikan” session. It was like going to a torture hall. Luckily for us, the teacher would leave us for 2 hours because of meetings & other duties. This is when we will quickly change channel or in some daring moments, watches videos (my friend brings the video cassette whenever we have this session with one guy standing guard near the door).
We have certainly come a long way since then. These days, the means for knowledge is abundant – at a click of a mouse or TV remote control, we can read and understand things at an instance and in more detail. Gone were the days where I had to wait one month before I could get hold a National Geographic Magazine from the local bookstores. These days I just click on the NGS website and the entire archive is there for me to read through – many with interactive features.
When I got my Astro, the first I did was to make sure I had the learning channels on…next was the kids show…then the movies and finally the news channel (used to sports but no one watches them that often). I wished that the Tamil channel was an optional channel so that I can disable it but I was disappointed when I found that it was comes free with any package. Damn!
I was watching the Discovery channel the other day and the show was on dinosaurs. I was amazed on how well the facts were shown on dinosaurs by means of CGI (my grandma though T-Rex was still alive and kicking somewhere in US), great story telling (they sure don’t make scientists like they used to) and CSI-like forensics investigation (Grissom would have fitted nicely in here). Within 30 minutes into the show, I was already an amateur advisor on the science of paleontology. But if you have given me a thick book on dinosaurs (the one with very little pictures and tons & tons of words), I probably would have dozed off in less than 5 minutes.
When I got internet at home, I admit that I was not that fast to click on the NGS or Discovery Channel site. Frankly, porn sites took precedent but hey, at that time, I was so curious and it was a “learning” channel as well. These days, the internet is purely for real learning sites, emails and blogs – anything and everything that got to do with betterment of life. Internet is one mean of getting uncensored news and images – to digest and use them is another matter though.
A website full of information – just waiting to be clicked and understood
There are great sites on the net but 3 most sites that I checked out on a regular basis is NGS, Discovery and Popular Science. There are also other sites for business skills, computing and self improvement – all I need to do is to Google it.
Time to surf the net now…click!
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