Clackamas community college
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October 29, 1985
Vol. XIX, No. 3
‘Prepare for tomorrow,’ staff told
By Fritz Wenzel
Of The Print
The College’s teachers and administrators were
told Friday that teaching students to process infor
mation would be the key to their future.
The advice came from Margaret E. Gayle, an
education futurist who is associate director of
forecasting curriculum and training for the North
Carolina Department of Education.
“Developing the ability to find useful informa
tion when a person needs it should be what student
is learning,” Gayle said. Concepts and processes
to access information will be the key to succeed in
the future, as opposed to merely storing informa
tion.
“Between 1980 and 1998 the world’s knowledge
will double four times,” she said. “There is no
way that you can keep up with all that in your
head.”
Gayle, who spoke at the invitation of John
Keyser, the College’s president, said that people
need to come to terms with the information age.
“A 5-year-old today will learn in one year the
equivalent of his entire grandfather’s lifetime
knowledge,” she said. “While there is a difference
in experience, you get the idea of how much the
child will know. This same 5-year-old will have a
vocabulary of 5,000 words by the time he enters
kindergarten and our present school system will
ask him to graduate with only a 3,000 word
vocabulary.”
Television has a lot to do with the preschool
education of the child, Gayle said. She said that by
the time a child finishes high school, he will have
been only 13,000 hours, she said.
Gayle also said that the average television pro
gram flashes 1,200 images at the viewer each hour,
MARGARET GAYLE, ASSOCIATE director for
the North Carolina department of education, used
slides to demonstrate the effect of technology on
our lives last Friday.
and as a result, the average attention span of
Americans is growing shorter.
“A child in kindergarten has an average atten
tion span of only three seconds. A junior high
school student can go 4.5 minutes, and the adult
can concentrate for between 12 to 20 minutes. The
average attention span of everyone is seven
minutes, and you know what happens every seven
minutes on television,” she said, alluding to com-4
merical s.
Gayle said that in light of shortening attention
spans, teachers should try to involve more of the
students’ senses in the learning process.
“When someone reads, they usually retain
about 10 percent. But when students are learning
by doing, they retain about 90 percent,” she said.
“Right now, 65 percent of all college instruction is
lecture,” she said.
Thinking in the long term is vital to doing well
in the future, as a college and as an individual, she
said. People need to figure out where they are go
ing to fit in and be effective, she said. Today, that
means thinking into the 21st century.
Gayle works in the division of vocational educa
tion, and she speaks a lot about how businesses
and education need to form a partnership for the
future.
“We can no longer do business as usual,” she
said. “We can no longer make decisions from the
top down.” Gayle said reform needs to come in
both business and education for this is society to
succeed.
“While we teach our children to think in
dependently, we send them out into a system that
calls for them to conform. We must have a system
in which business works together with education
to build quality and keep productivity,” she said.
Ecology a 10 year concern for ELC
By Joy Granquist .
Of The Print
The College’s Environmental Learn
ing Center offers many services to the
public and has developed into a very
efficient educational offering over the
last ten years.
The ELC offers the many
ecologically-oriented services. Solid
Waste Awareness and other waste pro
gram's are aimed at assisting local
schools, businesses and area residents
and recycling industries. The ELC has
saved the College $20,000 annually
because of its successful recycling pro
gram.
A comprehensive education program
conducts over 75 college credit classes
and community education. Additional
center education outreach programs
provide many opportunities to 38
school districts in Clackamas County.
Thé Design and Planning services
assist in outdoor wildlife enhancement,
home and commercial landscaping and
park planning. The program has
assisted numerous cities and agencies
in Clackamas County in solving some
unique problems at a low cost. Some
examples of the work accomplished by
the service includes the design,
development, and implementation of
McLean park in West Linn, the
Oregon City Senior Center, and the
Milwaukie Senior Center.
Manpower Training at the center
focuses on improving individual skills
no matter what the level through direct
involvement in center projects. Train
ing includes carpentry, construction,
electrical work, welding, landscape
maintenance or installation. Nearly
8,000 persons have received work ex
perience training in these various areas
in the last ten years.
General public and school visitations
are welcomed by the center. The pro
gram now attracts over 20,000
residents and visitors of Clackamas
County each year. Visitors may tour
the grounds, observing wildlife and site
educational features. The center also
provides educational on sight activities
to over 10,000 children from area
schools annually.
The Center now provides Oregon
residents with nine different oppor
tunities to take a more in depth look at
what Oregon is all about through a
Tourism and Outreach program.
Specialized adventures on the Colum
bia, Willamette, and other Oregon
rivers coupled with a list of Oregon
regional interpretive adventures now
await visitors.
Shades
Autumn
of
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