Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Roller Coaster Ride Through History

This video of a ride through a Roller-Coaster Tycoon coaster representation of the graph of real estate prices since 1890 should be interesting to educators in a number of ways. If the preceeding sentence made no sense to you, just watch the video.

I'll point out one of the less obvious ones. So many arguments in favor of educational reform and technology these days start out by emphasizing the rapid rate of change in our lives, in comparison to "the past" which is generally pictured either as "Leave it to Beaver" or a bored latchkey kid watching "Leave it to Beaver." This video is a good reminder of some of the ways that recent history is far more stable than, say 1890 - 1950. Certainly this video presents a rather compelling visual argument that we've got a wild ride coming in the very near future, but we haven't gotten there yet.

Via Boing!Boing!

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