Incredible Earth

How about a change from the usual past times on your day off–chores, meeting friends, relatives, tv, movies, parties, best-sellers; or if you have kids and want to spend time learning something together about our wondrous planet. Here's a coffee table book about Earth that is as amazing to look at as it is packed with "did you know?" stuff that is well worth your time.

Published by How It Works, it is filled with beautiful illustrations and photos that inspire the readers to delve into nature and geography. Below are examples of just a few of the pages that made me travel vicariously as I sipped coffee. 

It is also a very informative science book for students that explains natural processes like plant and  animal biology, the weather, firestorms, geological formations and much more with super illustrations that enhance understanding.

For home-schooling students, reading all 200 beautiful pages make this book worth a year of study for general knowledge and to inspire wonder and care for our precious planet. 

The book is available on Amazon, click here or on any of the plates to purchase.

A Future of Self-Study

National or public schools like any other government institution have become lumbering bastions of the old guard, protecting what was at one time successful education policies and systems that were the vanguards of the future. Public schools are still run very much like when I was in school in the late 70’s and 80’s. Even then I felt much of my time wasted in the classroom where the teacher was simply repeating what could easily be read and understood from professionally written textbooks and revision guides.

Now of course we have the internet, most especially Youtube and TED that have plenty of study guides. Any academic discipline, for any grade level, if you are looking to teach or learn you can usually find more than good resources on Youtube. In fact there are so many well done learning resources on the internet that schools can simply package their selected resources for their students and provide it to them on a school website for every subject and all grades except perhaps the arts where students have to create something.

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For instance, it took me less than a minute to find the youtube below on Newton’s Second Law of Motion. What is impressive to me is the amount of work that went into creating this animated presentation and all this for free–well…you’d have to have an internet connection and a computer, pad or phone, that's about it. Plus Youtube organises related topics on the side bar for further study.

Here is one for learning your ABCs, just for fun.

Not to mention the popular self-learning websites like Khan Academy and TED Ed.

If you have watched the docu-movie Waiting for “Superman” the take-away would be that public schools are failing and that solutions are difficult to implement because of nothing other than politics. It is a sad situation that is plaguing the future potential of our children.

Yet solutions are at hand and it may not lie in valuing schools as where kids go to learn academics. There may be other disciplines such as sports, drama, public speaking, arts and craft and such which the internet cannot provide that schools can concentrate on. When it comes to academics I believe self-study using the internet as the main resource is one of the best solutions, it can even displace expensive private school options. The key then would be to motivate students to study on their own, this will be where the challenge lies.

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Education: Its called Waiting for "Superman"

...and its a docu-movie about the 'school problem'.

Sharing and improving knowledge from one generation to the next is really what our future is made of. Get educated for a bright future has been the maxim of every nation of the last century. The performance of national schools and universities have been used as a touchstone the gauge the future potential of nations through international rankings and student aptitude tests. You would think that in the 21st century we would have the art of 'getting educated' super mastered, yet it seems getting our kids an education is becoming an unexpected source of worry.

I can tell you that it is a big headache for middle-class parents in Malaysia, where I currently live. Malaysia is a country vying to be a developed nation by 2020, still this promising country that is no stranger to modernity is in a socio-political conundrum on how to improve its deteriorating public education performance. I couldn’t have guessed that this would ever become an issue as I thought the system was good when I went through it. What changed?

It was enlightening to me after watching Waiting for "Superman" that the problems the US is facing with its elementary and high schools are similar to what my country in the far side of the world is also facing.

 Click here to watch Waiting for "Superman" 

I am using this movie as an intro to my ideas on the future of education which I believe will transform by leaps and bounds as the internet education technology takes hold and provides greater autonomy to students, teachers and parents.

Waiting for "Superman" trailer

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