I have never actually had a blog before, so I wasn’t too thrilled to find out that one of my TWC assignments was to set up a personal blog journal and that it would be 10% of my total grade. L

Anyway the first lesson was pretty interesting, as we got a preview of what’s in stall for us this term. We viewed a video entitled “Shift Happens”, which is basically various facts and statistics related to globalization. One statistic that really caught my attention was that so much new information is being generated every year, such that half of what we are about to learn in our first year would be outdated by the time we get to year three. Hmm.. makes me wonder if I should be selective with my studying.

We also went through the “Timeline of Time”, which is a timeline of all the major events that took place since the creation of the universe, which was about 14,000,000,000 years ago. I thought that this part of the lesson was pretty dry, as it’s really just a long list of events. However I did pick out several interesting events, like that the Mayan calendar ends in year 2012 and that it indicates the end of the universe.

Next, we watched an excerpt from a documentary entitled “Guns, Germs and Steel” in which a New Guinean named Yali posed the question, “Why do white people have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?” Prof got us to discuss the answer to Yali’s question, and some suggested that the “whites” were more willing to explore outside the boundaries of their lands or rather required to do so in order to survive. Also, the availability of various resources to New Guineans for survival was probably one of the reasons why they did not develop as much as the rest of the world. They were probably also satisfied with their lives and as such did not find various ways and means to improve it further. This video also got me thinking if the New Guineans were happier and more satisfied with their lives than us, with all our convenient gadgets and a much larger variety of everything else.

Overall, I would rate this lesson an 8/10, as it wasn’t overloaded with information. The lesson also wasn’t too dry and the videos made it even more interesting. However I was hoping to watch the rest of “Guns, Germs and Steel”, but I guess that’s an unofficial assignment I have to do during my free time. I’m sort of looking forward to the next lesson. Haha.