Economic impact and anxiety in the workplace

Along with the many learning distractions, I found on Learning Town a survey http://trends.masie.com/archives/2008/9/26/546-urgent-economic-anxiety-in-the-workplace-survey.html to find out the impact on the workplace.
As future (and current) trainers/educators we need to be sensitive to our audience and the many stresses occurring in their lives. Having talked about the many challenges of e-learning, it is really important to realize what the economy is doing to many of our students.
People are distracted by what is happening in congress and with our banking and financial system. Many of our corporate students have potentially lost in the last week (in their 401K and retirement plans) what the make a year.
Think about what this can mean to the attention span and interest of students in what they are learning. These are unprecedented times that we are dealing with and until things become a bit more stable, we need to be more understanding and offer a safe environment for learners.

School shooting in Finland

Finland is a small and safe nordic country. It has a reputation of dynamic business opportunities with low crime rate and only minor drug use. The social welfare system and society are designed to quarantee everyone equal opportunities in terms of education, employment, health care and retirement. Also the direct democracy offers people a chance to participate in decision making. All and all the country is a wonderful place to live.
This is true especially for me. As I have been away for a long time the image of my home country as described before has been tattooed in my mind.

However, the image of a Nordic haven has shattered in the light of recent events. There was a school shooting in a high school of a small rural town in the beginning of this week. A young 22-yeard old male student shot 11 people , shot himself and died in a hospital a few hour later.

The whole county is in shock. There has not been a single school shooting in the history until a year ago when a similar tragic even took place last year. The severity of the situation might not feel as terrifying for most people, as such acts of violence unfortunately happen all the time around the world.

However for me as a Finnish citizen this is a terrible thing to witness. The thought on my mind shared with the 5,2 million other citizens is; How has our society changed in a direction where young people are depressed and expresses their desperation in such horrifying way.
Both the Finland shootings followed the same pattern as the unfortunate shooting at Virginia Tech. a few years back. Both murders in Finland included violent YouTube videos prior to the shootings and a quiet and introverted young man, who had no criminal record, no previous violent activities or drug use and no diagnosed depression or mental disorders.

I have a really difficult time understanding what brings young people to the state, where they feel as though suicide and hurting others is the only way out. My common sense tells me that a person who has healthy and meaningful human relationships, interpersonal communication and feels and receives empathy does not act in this way.

Isolation from the world that happens around you is a scary thought. I realize that this is can not be the sole reason for the violent acts of the few, but I have a reason to believe that lack of real human interaction (which has been the case in all of the cases I have mentioned)drives people to desperate spheres. As people are consumed more and more by the virtual worlds, simulation games and web communities, a certain ability to feel human connections and develop real relationships where people care for one another and develop emotions disappears.

I notice myself that I spend a great amount of time on my laptop and in the internet. I do mostly education related things, keep up with innovations in the field, read world news and interact with my friends on social networking sites. Sometimes in the evening I sadly notice that I have spent more time of the day on my computer than interacting with my significant other who lives with me or any of my other friends.

For myself I am not worried about the use of the computer, as for me it is not aproblem to shut it off. In fact usually look forward to being able to walk away from it to enjoy my real life. However, I can only imagine what the empty black screen of a shut down computer must feel like for a person, who lives most of their days in the surreal world created by web applications, online videos, movies and games all accompanied with the quiet humming of the computer. As the computer shuts down, their world disapprears and leaves them in a vast emptiness.

I know this is not the cause of the problem, but as the internet and its many uses take over a great chunk of our time,we sometimes forget what is actually important. Turn the damn computer off, and go enjoy the world and life that happens around you, right now.

The End of IP Addresses?

As the majority of our discussions on this blog relate to the Internet, it seemed necessary to discuss the issue of vanishing IPs. According to Vint Cerf, a main developer in creating the Internet, the Internet protocol addresses (IPs) days are numbered.

In 1977, Vint Cerf and his colleagues created the web using the IPv4 system. The IPv4 system uses 32 binary numbers that create a unique number which allows Internet devices to communicate with each other. However, the fast expansion of devices and an increase in Internet consumption has decreased the current amount of IP addresses. Current figures that the Internet will run out of IP addresses in 2010. Cerf recommends that current Internet users should transfer to a new system, the IPv6 system which uses 128 binary numbers. Here is the full article.

A-space

When I was reading news online the other day, I came across an article about a way that the government is using a Web 2.0 tool. According to the article on CNN.com, government agencies like the CIA and FBI are going to begin using a social networking tool called A-Space. This is somewhat similar to Web 2.0 tools like Facebook and Myspace, although it's not being used to share party pictures and pointless applications. Instead, employees with several government agencies can share ideas and information with one another. The creators of A-space plan for it to be used among spy agents to share information about terrorists.

I think it's interesting that these government agencies will be using a program like this. It's just another example of the usage of Web 2.0. My only concern would be this being hacked into by an unauthorized user. However, the creators claim that they are building checks into the system to track who is able to access the content. As the article mentions,

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space."

Hopefully, A-space will make it easier for important information to be shared among government agencies.