Learning points unit 3

(bold words are learning points)

Text 1 - How times have changed

It's a typical saturday for my nephew John, a student living in Hong Kong. At 8:30 am, his mum yells for him to wake up and eat breakfast. The first thing he does is reach for his smartphone to check the time and see if he has received any text messages. He is still at it while brushing his teeth,and only puts down his phone to wash his face. He then walks out to the living room with his eyes glued to the screen, reading updates on his social networking site. He even eats breakfast with one hand in order to browse the web.

At 9:40 am, John goes back to his room and turns on his computer. He needs to finish researching a school project due next week, and find the pictures and facts he needs online. If it weren't for the internet, he couldn't be able to finish it in time. All the while, he listens to a new album he downloaded yesterday on his MP3 player - He is very good at multi-tasking.

Around 11:40am, John has been on his computer for two hours when his friends post a message on his microblog reminding him about lunch. If his friends hadn't sent him a reminder, he would have stayed onine for a couple more hours.

While on the MTR, John and his friend Susie chat by sending instant messages. They discover that they are on the same train. They find each other and begin discussing which film to watch in the evening using a film review app. Susie says she'll treat him to lunch since it will be his fifteenth birthday next week. They meet up with their other friends and spend all afternoon together, taking photos on their smartphones.

Later, when John gets home at 7:30pm, he receives a text message from his sister Jess, who is in the next room. She wants to know if he wants a pizza for dinner because she wants to order one online.John texts back to tell Jess to order. He figures that their parents won't be back for dinner so he'll have the whole evening to spend on his compter. He posts pictures, updates his microblog, chat sites before getting to bed at around midnight.

His smartphone has not left his side all day.

Text 2 - Online Facts

There are over 4.88 million internet users in Hong Kong. Of these, 3.6 million are part of a social networking site. That's around half of the population of the city!

People often talk about how too much internet time is bad for you. However, problems could also occur when you have too little of it. Recent research showed that students who spent more than two hours online every day and those who didn't go online at all could be at risk of depression. Some survey respondents even mentioned that they felt helpless when they were without internet access.

Text 3 - Back then

Looking back on the days when I got my first computer that weighed a zillion times more than the tablet computer I am using now - I can see just how much things have changed.

When I was my nephew's age, we also had the internet at home. However, there was only one desktop in the living room that our whole family used together. There were no sites to share photos or videos such as Flickr and Youtube. Websites often took over three minutes to load because the modem is very slow.There were no microblogs like Twitter and Weibo, and there was no way to get online to stay connected with others once you left your house. The most advanced piece of technology i carried around was my portable MD player.

Search engines like Bing, Baidu, Google and Yahoo! weren't around, so for school projects, we actually went to the library to do research.When we wanted to go out with friends, we needed to plan well beforehand the time and place to meet because very few of us owned mobile phones. When we wanted to watch a film, often we had to go to the cinema in person to buy the tickets. If online ticketing had been available back then, a lot of time could have been saved.

Text 4 - Where do we go from here?

Internet-enabling technology has become a very important part of our lives. Life would be different if I had to live without my smartphone, which is a pocket-sized computer itself. It is convenient and provides information at my fingertips. However, I am concerned that kids like John and Jess are becoming so dependent on these gadgets that their lives are built completely around them. In many ways, their smartphones have become their partners, replacing their friends in real life. We need to remember that all this technology is just a tool to make things easier and not something we need to use 24/7.