本日は、当塾の全ての学習過程を終了し、2月に卒塾されたNSさんの最終の卒塾エッセイをシェア致します。
テーマは『インターネット』です。私たちが日常どっぷりと依存し切っているこのインターネットですが、素晴らしい面と同様にマイナス面も持ち合わせているのは、皆さんもよくご存じの通りです。
TEDに以下のようなタイトルのスピーチがあります。
“How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day”
これを視聴した後に、次のようなタイトルでエッセイを書いて頂きました。
（Title）
It is almost impossible for us to believe that a handful of tech companies such as GAFA, will steer what a billion of people are thinking today. But it’s a real story. They are changing the way of our conversations, our relationships with each other, and even our democracy.
In our life, there are so many possibilities of our being manipulated by them. Please give some examples. And is there anything you can do to deal with it ?
| With such a rapid speed, GAFA and other technology companies keep developing their services, and no one except for people inside of those organizations understands what is going on now. Although it could be described like a black box, many of us still benefit from it. This is shown by the data that more than one in two have smartphones in worldwide. There is also a survey in America which indicates that the average age of children getting their first smartphones is 10.3. Then, one specific question comes about: How to get media literacy and who should take the initiative? As globalization starts, there are so much up-to-date information that we can’t identify which is correct. In recent years, news about coronavirus is overflowing. Although some healthcare workers have warned about the side effects of the vaccine, some searching sites like Google hide the information. If you doubt it, you can try to search “covid-19 vaccine side effects” on DuckDuckGo, which never does information control. But why do they never do it? As for this, the Japanese government encourages people to get vaccinated and puts pressure on the media not to have the information accessed by nation easily. To make matters worse, many adults are ignorant of this fact, and it becomes very difficult for everyone to get the information correctly. One way to deal with this situation is through education. As I mentioned earlier, new and numerous information keeps being generated during my writing of this essay. So, we can hardly find teachers to teach us media literacy. Instead, we should learn by ourselves. It requires us to think critically about information: Where that information comes from? Who delivers it? To check it, you can use several sources to search about the same topic. The era of learning by ourselves, not being taught by others, has arrived. (N.S.) |
最終文のThe era of learning by ourselves, not being taught by others, has arrived. という言葉は、まさにその通りだなと思わされます。私たちも”media literacy”をしっかりと身に着けて行かねばならない時代に差し掛かっているのです。
ところでNSさんは現在フランス語にも興味を示し、活発に学習を進めています。何にでも興味・好奇心を持ち、前向きに学んでいくその姿には私自身も教えられる点が多かったです。やはり語学学習の原点は興味と好奇心、そして持続力なんだ・・・とつくづく思わされているところです。
NSさん、一緒に学んだ3年半は、最高に楽しかったよ！ありがとう！
今後のNSさんの活躍に心よりエールを贈ります！