chenjaswords: World

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the world at your fingertips

On July 1st 1997 Dr. Jan Hawkins wrote an article titled "The world at your fingertips." In it she detailed how the world will be impacted by the changes in technology, with great emphasis on the benefits this change will have on education. Two years later, Dr. Hawkins passed on, but like all the great minds before her, her ideas took root. It is this ideas that have given birth to an explosion of awareness and realization, prompting experiments across the globe. Case in point it took Albert Einstein fifteen years to prove the general theory of relativity and five years to get the theory published in a recognized journal when he first proposed it.

In the current world a scientific paper, article or essay is posted online Timbuktu on Tuesday night and when the author wakes up they find four hundred unread emails, thirty missed calls from various journalists requesting an interview with an entire brigade of paparazzi outside their homes waiting to take the first picture. It's called going viral That may not happen exactly as stated but you get the drift; the world is wired small and tight! access to information is closer than the proverbial doorstep, it is in our ears, our palms OUR FINGERTIPS! We have material to learn more, to inquire, to improve, to inspire we may have well exhausted material on what we have.

Dr. Jan Hawkins saw a future that meant it would be easier to teach and to learn, a future that included faster and more efficient ways of solving tasks. She saw better time efficiency and increased personal as well as professional development. Hawkins was right, indeed technology has enriched as well as increased us, but(there is always a but sometimes even two) to what extent have we made use of the technological gains we have? It is about time we asked each other as we do ourselves, how well do we use the world at our fingertips?

#100Daysofblogging #Day15

I intend to introduce another argument on knowledge and how its influx may not be as rosy as Hawkins highlighted, but that is another post for another day.

The birth of this post was the possibility of avenues to read and satisfy our curiosity, expand our understanding scope or for whatever reason you read. It was this condensed list of free online course

juvenile delinquent

Life has been unfair to me

This can’t be all I was intended to be

Doesn’t this life hold much more?

Can’t I make it out of this hole?

I am 16 years old

I want new clothes

New shoes

I want a phone!

Why would my parents not provide?

I can find ways to make things work

This nonsense that surrounds me must stop

I am tired of my poverty

I am enraged by my struggles

I shall make it out

By any means

I picked an axe from my neighbor’s farm

I exchanged it for meat and ham

The butcher doesn’t know

Neither does my mum

I need a bigger take

I am 18 years for God’s sake!

I nicked car headlights outside the mosque

Four headlights for thirty smokes

That is a good deal no?

I am making my name hello!

And twenty years that may not be so bad a show

I have just received a briefcase of gold

From a white man who was shaken and old

I stood straight took instructions and strutted out bold

I am a go-between

From me to the big man across the creek

This is the big break I seek

I am twenty two years

My future doesn’t have to look so bleak

I moved up the ladder

Got a gun and I rule wider

I have my own sixteen, eighteen, twenty and twenty two year olds

But I will not live to tell my tale

For at twenty four

I hear the knocks on my mother’s door

I had come to upcountry to lay low

But someone must have mouthed.

For tomorrow I will be no more

I am a thief.

written with a 16yo thief, I encountered to day, in mind. May this 16 year old make better choices before life chooses the sequence for him.

#100daysofblogging #Day 6

p.s: I lacked an appropriate photo...

#stateofthenationaddresske

Image obtained from president's website: http://www.president.go.ke/

It is still too early to complain

That was the message from the crowd

They said they can wait

They are willing to sit it out

#SOTNKe

For the president is only young

And his term has been just BUT a year

It is acceptable

The people say it can be swallowed

That our wildlife has been poached faster in a year

Than it has been for the past decade

We accept that the terror attacks happened without our knowledge

And that getting the report endorsed and implemented

Is a privilege

One held by the political elite

We THE PEOPLE ACCEPT

That flying of flags takes precedence

And who flies them where and why is a matter of national concern

Despite the advice from the top man:

“Leaders in different arms of government ought to dedicate themselves to the achievement of the constitution, not the supremacy of their branch of the public service”

A concern that supersedes intelligence

Over increasing number of body bags in our presence

And the accompanying ‘investigative’ silence

We are okay with the increase in inflation

Provided uhunye is at the center of the national portrait

“Na tuko digital”

This is nonsense

A stupidity that goes beyond the emotional

The physical

The spiritual

This

This is the state of the nation address

Full of promise and lack of premise

I hear you Mr. President orate:

“but let us be careful: in devolving power and resources to the counties, we must remember that to infect our new county governments with the worst vices of the old is to betray the great hope of the constitution and its tenets of leadership and integrity. Such a betrayal must not happen under my watch”

Yet we all saw those that tender typewriters

And software that is available free online

We have found a new way to eat

KUSEMA NA KUTENDER

Masking our deals with business like undertones

Everything is in shades of grey

“and for governance in particular, article 10 calls for integrity, transparency, and accountability”

Including trips to Rwanda

To learn about city cleaning and decongestion

Yet Rwanda is on the record saying they learnt their trade from Nairobi

We too accept this

We accept this and other daylight robberies

Mr. President you rob me

YOU ROB ME Mr. President

Off my civil right to speak against ills

To march and mobilize people of similar opinion

#diapermentality

You stood up and spoke in a language flowery

Of how you defend and uphold the constitution

Do you realize our nation is slowly falling?

Accustomed to mediocrity

#HudumaKE

How goes that Commander in Chief?

Is still at its infancy stage?

Just like civility in this nation

Democracy

And governance

EVERYTHING is suddenly at infancy

We reply to each query

With a choreographed chorused answer

“This is a new constitution and we are doing everything to make it work. It is not the time to point fingers” ^*

What is wrong with the laptop project?