Welcome to the pedagogical site of Nigel Ward, teacher of ICT, integrated science and physics at the European School 3 in Brussels, Belgium.

I have made this site to help my students in their various classes - use the pull-down menus above or the table of contents to navigate through the hundreds of pages here. Or use this Google search:

This is not an official school site.

Please send comments to me at nigel.ward-at-ee3.org.

visits since 01/01/01.

REVOLUTION! 

The topic of our 2009 'Topoi' project was 'revolution'. The most revolutionary change in our lives is likely to be the integration of computer technology and the human brain. It is estimated that computers will exceed the capacity of the human brain in about 2029, in less than twenty years. Paralleling the rapid advance in computer science, neuroscience is expected to progress to the extent that in twenty years' time it may be possible to read all our thoughts, and thus all our mind. Combining these advances we can predict that it may be possible to transfer a human mind to a computer. The implications would be enormous - nothing less than immortality for the human mind (could we still call it human?) and vastly-enhanced thinking abilities. Of course this is all highly controversial and clearly has a dark side...

 My S5 ICT students participated in the Revolutions project in five ways:

- They watched and discussed in detail a series of YouTube video clips about the above-mentioned advances, paying special attention to identifying the most important concepts so that we could reduce the one hour of video material to just 10 minutes. The result should be playing on your screen just below.

- Some students took a video camera and filmed interviews with several students and with Mr. Radhuber, Deputy Head of our secondary school. Excerpts from some of these interviews are included in the video.

- The students suggested questions for inclusion in a questionnaire which was then administered to about thirty students - the results have been analyzed and are now available HERE.

- The students gave their opinions on these issues in free response form - a selection of their comments will soon be available here.

- The students made PowerPoint and Flash presentations about other revolutions in technology, both past and future - these will also be made available here shortly.

This video lasts 13 minutes. You may be able to download it (52 MB) in FLV format by right-clicking HERE. A good viewer for FLV files is FLV Player (do a Google search!).

If the video does not play smoothly then pause it for a minute to allow some of the video to be cached, then resume viewing.

If you find this video interesting, check out the original 6 video clips on YouTube, each about 8 minutes long:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

Please also check out this clip.

 STOP PRESS