RESEARCH SKILLS

INTRODUCTION*

Have you heard the term “Information Age” recently? This is the name given to the time we are living in today.

The world’s history is divided into time periods called Ages. These ages are named after the one thing that most influenced the way people lived their lives in that time. For example, thousands of years ago during the Stone Age, people learned how to makes tools from stone. This made life easier for people, but it also meant that their lives changed too. The Iron Age was a much later era(1) when humans learned to use iron to make tools, weapons, and simple machines. The use of iron meant that more food could be produced more easily, but it also meant that weapons were more effective and that people had to adjust to a new way of thinking about their world. The most recent age (1760-1980) was called the Industrial Age. During this 200 year period, complicated machines powered by energy from water, steam, and electricity were invented and assembly line factories appeared in almost every community. People began to move away from the country-side and into the big cities to find work. Once again, humans had to change the way they did things. In each age throughout the world’s history, changes occurred which disrupted people’s way of living and forced them to adapt to new situations.

Today, we are living through the changes and disruptions that go along with the beginning of a new age in human history, the Information Age. “Knowledge is doubling ever five years”, researchers tell us. People all over the world are discovering new ideas and thinking new thoughts more often than ever before. In 1995, there was twice as much information in the world as there was in 1990. Five years from now, there will be at least twice as much as there is today.

Computers have made it possible to store more information than ever before and to find it more quickly and easily. We know more today about the world around us than in all the other time periods before us put together. This has made it possible to discover and invent things faster than at any other time in history. As a result, information is one of the most important influences in the late twentieth century, and our world is being changed rapidly by it. We are now living in a new age called the Information Age.

1.period in time