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Listening and Speaking 3 - Coggle Diagram
Listening and Speaking 3
Democracy and Education
Defining Democracy
Government of the People
Democracy it is a concept still misunderstood and misused in a time when totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships alike have attempted to claim popular support by pinning democratic labels upon themselves.
In the dictionary definition, democracy "is government by the people in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system." In the phrase of Abraham Lincoln, democracy is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Democracies fall into two basic categories, direct and representative.
In a direct democracy, all citizens, without the intermediary of elected or appointed officials, can participate in making public decisions. Such a system is clearly only practical with relatively small numbers of people--in a community organization or tribal council.
Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is representative democracy, in which citizens elect officials to make political decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public good.
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
All democracies are systems in which citizens freely make political decisions by majority rule.
In a democratic society, majority rule must be coupled with guarantees of individual human rights that, in turn, serve to protect the rights of minorities--whether ethnic, religious, or political, or simply the losers in the debate over a piece of controversial legislation.
The rights of minorities do not depend upon the goodwill of the majority and cannot be eliminated by majority vote.
The rights of minorities are protected because democratic laws and institutions protect the rights of all citizens.
Democratic Society
In a democracy, government is only one element coexisting in a social fabric of many and varied institutions, political parties, organizations, and associations.
In a democracy, the powers of the government are, by law, clearly defined and sharply limited. As a result, private organizations are free of government control.
The pillars of democracy
• Sovereignty of the people.
• Government based upon consent of the governed.
• Majority rule.
• Minority rights.
• Guarantee of basic human rights.
• Free and fair elections.
• Equality before the law.
Internet and Education
Tips to use Internet
This section is about critical thinkingand the evaluative skills you need when using the Internet.
You should be better able to:
• Understand why there's an issue of information quality on the Internet
• Avoid some common pitfalls of Internet use
• Use critical thinking to improve the effectiveness of your Internet searching
Quality
One of the great things about the Internet is the ease with which minority, unpopular and individual views can be expressed - almost all of the barriers to publishing are removed.
The downside of this is that the extreme, the eccentric, the uniformed and the just plain wrong are all out there for you, unhindered by peer review, editors or proof readers.
The Web has no way of imposing the same control and standards that are present in other publishing media. You therefore need to protect yourself and your work from unknowingly using misinformation, biased sources, out of date or inappropriate information.
You need to maintain your critical awareness at all times in order to judge if a resource is credible.
There are several key questions you need to ask of every new Internet resource you find- remember them by thinking of the three WWW's:
• Who?
• When?
• Where?
Innovation and Education
digital classroom
The digital classroom is not a fashionable concept, but part of the generational language for the 21st century. It is a dual concept, since it acquires meanings at a physical and virtual level.
The physical level is a space for learning with high technology, where the technological platform of computing and telecommunications enable the development of new forms and learning scenarios.
On the physical level, a perceptible digital space and time is developed, called virtual space; where the possibilities of scenarios for learning are only limited by the imagination of teachers, students and engineers.
How to expand the dimension for learning?
This can be achieved when we make equitable, available: knowledge and communication in the global environment. The environment, on the one hand, forges an identity for us and, on the other hand, delimits the possibilities of development.
Some indicators allow us to see what the future could be like in the next ten years. Here are three events that must be taken into account:
• Some leading high-impact scientific-technical journals announced that in the course of the first decade of the 21st century, they will no longer be published in paper format, to mention a few: NATURE, SCIENCE, IEEE and the ACS, among others.
• The commercialization of goods and services will be given more and more through digital media. The computer has already integrated elements, such as: television, fax, cinema, magazine, mail, newspaper and many more.
• To meet ISO quality and environmental requirements, it is no longer possible to do so with the solutions of the past.
Business and Education
R.CH