This was my very first class in TWC and frankly, it has successfully accomplished its role as the first class of the course. Firstly, it helped to break the ice between people thanks to the brief introductions from everyone in the class as well as Prof Gurinder’s spontaneous humour which lifted up the atmosphere of the class quite a few times during the session. Secondly and most importantly, this session has provided some interesting points about the correlation between the development of technology and the world change, which resultantly ignites the desire in me to know more about this issue in the upcoming sessions.
During three hours in the seminar room, Prof showed all the students two videos, and I was left chillingly amazed after watching both. From the first clip ”Did you know: shifts happen”, it was quite interesting to learn that China will become the number one English-speaking country thanks to its giant population or that the jobs in highest demand in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2006. It can also be inferred from this clip that technology is the main engine to push the world forward nowadays and anyone who can get hold of it will have an upper-hand on the others. That makes me pretty worried since I’m not a fan of most of the new technologies.
The second clip,”Guns,Germs and Steel-part 1”,whose content was based on the book with the same name written by Jared Diamond, brought all the students to the partly untouched jungle of New Guinea where the people are still quite uncivilized, most of whom still wear diapers made of leaves. Seemingly, all of the people in New Guinea are not aware that they are left far behind by other countries in terms of technology and living standard, except for one man. His name is Yali who concludes this clip by a very intriguing question ”:Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?”. There was a myriad of answers given by students in the class but there were only two of those I believed to be the most convincing. First and foremost, it is because New Guineans live in islands which are isolated from others continents or countries that hinder the exchange of goods, culture as well as technology between them and others. Next, since the jungles New Guineans live in nearly provide them all of the basic necessities such as food and drink, they are not motivated to come up with anything new to improve their life.
Prof Gurinder also presented the timeline of the world since its beginning of Earth's life fourteen billion years ago! It reminded me of quite a few of interesting events over the course of humankind’s history, such as the first use of fire some 100000 years ago or the four greatest inventions of ancient China( gunpowder, papermaking, compass and printing). The session ended in a very relaxing atmosphere when Prof showed us a picture depicting the development stages of humankind, starting from an ape-like creature and ending with an obese man!
Generally speaking, this session was a nearly perfect one to a new student like me for the reasons I stated above. It could be further improved if there were more discussion about some points such as how to boost the technology development in New Guinea. Hence, I would rate it 9/10.
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