Google just launched its Google Life photo archive with millions of photos, some are published for the first time, just like the one I showed here.

To search for these photos, when you do Google image search, include source:life at the end of your keyword, such as:

Ford source:life

And see what you can find about Ford.

Definition of Educational Technology by the Terminology Committee of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT):

Educational Technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.”

From this definition, you can see that educational technology has less to do with a particular product than with a process. It’s about the use of processes and resources to facilitate learning and improve performance. Along this line of thought, distance education dates back much earlier than we might think. In Exodus 24:12-13, God asks Moses to come to him:

“The LORD said to Moses, "Come up to me on the mountain and stay here, and I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and commands I have written for their instruction. Then Moses set out with Joshua his aide, and Moses went up on the mountain of God.” (NIV)

Today stone tablets of stone might have been replaced by electronic tablets, but the same idea applies: the spoken word given on a particular occasion could well be extended through a medium (papyrus or paper or personal computers). So long as we view technology as extensions of us, we should not fear that our message can be reduced by our presence at a distance, or our absence in students’ physical presence.

Haven’t Paul’s letters reached believers on distant islands, and even us today?

“We are how we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. Exactly how we read and how that shapes what we are? To answer that question I recommend the Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making us Stupid? for the author’s interesting observations and analogies (for instance, how Nietsche’s writing style changes after he starts to use the typewriter).

There is probably nothing new about the question being asked. It has been asked (not exactly in the same phrase) when the Gutenberg’s printing press was invented.

People may become stupid anyway, with or without the help of Google. In like manner, people may become smart anyway, with or without the help of Google.

The important thing to note is that change is underway, that communication is being mediated with all sorts of newer medium with or without our approval, that there are potentials to embrace while there are pitfalls to avoid. Instead of becoming a doomsayer, which won’t take us very far, it is time to put this question behind and see what we can do to improve reading and writing for learners through newer methods of mediation.

The Atlantic Monthly article says that some people cannot read War and Peace now, due to the reduced attention span in the Internet Age. Weird as it sounds, recently, I decided to read the Chinese version of the Brothers Karamazov (we'll see how far I can go), which I cannot obtain in a library here. I decided to do so because when scanning another book in a public library, I find the author strongly recommends Brother Karzmazov, which got me curious to start reading it. I would find it easier to read the Chinese translation of the Russian classic. Fortunately someone put that online. I might be doing something else once in a while while reading it, but alas, it is there. What we lost in attention span, we gained in the convenience of access.

Would love a hat like that.

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