Comment Posted to Connected Learning Community: Learning in the 21st Century

I do believe in the long-lived premise that the only thing inevitable in this world we live in is change and no less than change. We have seen the transition of education as a process, being so education experts have already said that the educational community must also adapt to the changing times such is what is happening at the moment.
Learning as given before being hierarchical and process or linearly oriented must also be reconditioned to meet the times’ needs. Learners nowadays are not as passive as they were decades ago. Now people crave to be ‘on line’- that is to be more participative in the acquisition of knowledge itself. Students now know were to get answers from queries that bother them, thus making learning as easy as a touch of a button.
The linear progression in the curriculum will stay for quite sometime, believe me. But there is always room for the improvement of such. The interconnection of the learning communities through linked digital automation technologies have far increased the drive to learn and furthermore to share what is learned.
This web would further create a strong bond that is needed by the educational community at this moment. Education would persist to be as important as before yet now more accessible and more holistically shared.

"The Greatest Physicist"

Sir Joseph J. Thomson, headmaster of Trinity College, Cambridge, discoverer of the electron, and considered by many the greatest living physicist, is in the United States on an extended visit as the guest of Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. As guest of the Western Electric Company at luncheon in the Bell System laboratories, Sir Joseph saw in operation many applications of his fundamental theories and inventions. Among these was a water-cooled copper vacuum tube, devised by W. G. Housekeeper, with 40 times the capacity of the present glass-enclosed tube used in long-distance radio. This may shortly be installed on all American battleships. Professor Thomson's chief contribution to science is the proof (in 1897) that the rays given off from the cathode, or negative electrode, within a vacuum tube are streams of minute bodies of negative electricity, called by him "corpuscles," but later renamed "electrons." It is now believed that all matter is made up of "electrons," particles of negative electricity, and "protons," particles of positive electricity. The smallness of the electron is beyond human comprehension. Its diameter is about 30 trillionths of an inch. The most powerful microscope known would barely enable us to see an object 200 atoms wide, and if an atom were about the size of a large office building, an electron would be the size of a pinhead. Professor Thomson was Cavendish professor of experimental physics in Cambridge University from 1884 un- til 1918. During that time he developed a great research laboratory which attracted workers from all parts of the world. He received the Nobel prize for physics in 1906, and holds many other awards and honors from the great scientific societies of the world. In 1908 he was knighted, and during the World War he was an important figure in several Government research committees and technical departments.
A number of British scientific men, under the leadership of Sir Kenneth D. Mackenzie, formed the Scientific Expeditionary Research Association to facilitate and promote scientific expeditions to all parts of the world. The first voyage under its auspices will be to the South Pacific Ocean, starting this summer.

(taken from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,715245,00.html?iid=chix-sphere)

Who is NIKOLA TESLA?

Nikola Tesla (Serbian scientist) the greatest genius since Leonardo da Vinci. Few people even know that man who invented the 20th century even existed. His ideas and inventions were credited by others. Nikola invented X-rays (credited to Roentgen), radio (credited to Marconi), the microwave oven, speedometer, automobile ignition system, basics behind radar, fluorescent bulb, electron microscope, neon lights and on top of all Tesla designed the first hydro-electric power plant in Niagara Falls (invented alternating currents). Tesla had biggest competitor Thomas Edison, who did everything to prove Tesla wrong and to erase him from history books. Tesla's ideas were so extreme that scientist community thought he was lunatic. He believed that both voice and image could be transmitted through the air (in the late 1800's), which of course was true since we have wireless Internet today.