On doing homework in the New Millenium
Sep. 10th, 2009 09:39 amSo last night I was helping my daughter with some of her homework (a rare thing these days to be sure). She's a sophomore in High School, and she is taking American History I (colonization to the Civil War, I believe), and the teacher used to teach in a Catholic High School, so the academics in this class are rather rigorous. Last's night homework assignment was to discover unique facts about the presidents. Since I'm not a presidential trivia expert by any means, we were using the Internet to do research.
What I find interesting is that, since my daughter didn't start this assignment until after dinner, some other kids from her class had posted inquiries on various online Q&A fora. We found this out because Google returned the questions in the top 5 search results. Many had not been answered yet, and I didn't trust the ones that were without another source of information. I am impressed by the speed of Google's indexing, and had no idea that it had come down to minutes from days.
Text messages were also flying through the airwaves.
What I find interesting is that, since my daughter didn't start this assignment until after dinner, some other kids from her class had posted inquiries on various online Q&A fora. We found this out because Google returned the questions in the top 5 search results. Many had not been answered yet, and I didn't trust the ones that were without another source of information. I am impressed by the speed of Google's indexing, and had no idea that it had come down to minutes from days.
Text messages were also flying through the airwaves.