No Music No Civilization

Youthnet is the new, what should I say, ‘invention’ of the 21^st century learning. Youthnet is a global-scale project caused by Lindsea, an ordinary high schooler with some experience thriving in the Internet. Reading the introductory entry given in Student 2.0 gave me a sensation about how usage of Internet could (have) be(en) better for me as a human. We teenagers can live 24/7 with this thing called Internet. But, why are we, at the most of our times, using it to ruin ourselves?

There has been a rumor around that Internet (or a server-type of a thing) was brought into Korea in order to transfer pornographic videos more efficiently. That badly, in the culture I live, usage of Internet is discouraged as a learning tool; Internet carries a bad connotation of serving a sole purpose of ‘distraction’. True, these purpose-less social networking (Cyworld, Facebook, MSN) and temptations from various flash games brought me severely down from going to Ivy Leagues and now I can’t recover.

I hadn’t been able to get myself off with the temptation till recently. The 1:1 laptop program was a poison for me in the first semester. We didn’t do anything with it in school; research in class was all we did which we could still do with our previous laptop-cart system. But for the first time in my life, I found myself useful on blogging. This blog of mine started last year and as you can see, it’s been just about a month that I completely came back from a deep dive*. Still, I didn’t know what to do with it simply I hadn’t had any ‘real’ social networks (like Twitter) and interactions.

On Twitter, I met some enlightened people randomly. Cool thing about Twitter was that there’s no dumb, gay, and self-centered people that I always find in Facebook. Besides, probably influenced by cburell, all the people around me in Twitter are somehow post-modern-education related and that is giving me a good atmosphere about the movement of education as in a global scale (America, Qatar, England, and more…+Korea).

cburell tweeted me that, “just write ’see wikipedia’ for most of the multiple choice questions. we need to teach the AP people what century this is.” Standardized tests are still remaining in a redundant manner (USA gotta shift some budget into Education from Military!) and also my very cool follower dmcordell mentioned that “Job interviews wanted to know if had degree but no questions [were asked about] GPA. Skills,including interpersonal [are] more important”. It could be foreseen that from these little tweet tweets, numbers and letters won’t matter much in the later generations of Education (wish that happened now for me)

And recently, I am being very proud of myself that how I got myself disconnected from addictinggames.com, and how I access Facebook and chattings for only necessary purposes. It’s not like I went on a cold turkey method, but as I was blogging and interacting with all the people more mature than me, I just naturally felt that i didn’t ‘need’ those pieces of garbages in my life anymore. This really made a difference in me and I want to thank all the people whom I talked in Twitter and such, for pulling me up from the manhole.

Back to the business, Youthnet is (one of) the first attempt to collaborate student global-wise and share students’ causes and proejects that require some International Help. It is interesting to note that Internet was first invented in the late 90’s and for 10 years there was no globalized and organized student study groups. Only requirement for the using student is that English will be the used all the time, except in some project that is exclusively from Spanish Class or French Class or Whatever language. There is no central leadership; everyone should feel, literally, free to get involved and… do whatever! I hope all the people around the world join this borderless society, because the more users, the more effective it is! Currently, as I’m writing this, there are only two people registered: Me and the Founder Lindsea. But Youthnet is expecting lots of new members soon.

Education changes, and it means more when student body rise up and ask what they want to learn. Although chances of immediate changes might be as bad as 0%, but if Youthnet works successfully, at least my son and daughter will receive some abstract educations that we longed for. The Team is making the Difference!

Just too bad non-English speakers don’t have access to the thang =p

*Dive means to be unplugged for a long time in Korea.

Photo Credit: Youthnet Logo (captured from site), Illiterate Spartan (Aaron Doran)

Technorati Tags: Youthnet, Post Modern, Education, Student, Revolution, Twitter, 21st Century, Globalization

Filed under: 3.0, freedom, unschool, 2.0, Anibal's Diary, Education, Reality, Future, Blogging