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Communications At-a-Glance
Introduction
Football is played and watched by millions of people in Britain. It is also played by 40 million people in over 175 countries around the world and watched by countless millions more. It is enjoyed by men and women, young and old, rich and poor regardless of their education, race, religion or political persuasion. It is the most popular game the world has ever seen.
Perhaps nothing could be more suitable for television, video and internet communication than this world wide sport.
One of the largest and most impressive behind the scenes features of any world event, sporting or otherwise, is the massive amount of equipment and people assembled to provide instantaneous global communications by television, radio, telephone, fax, and e-mail (electronic mail from computer to computer)
Because of the vast improvements in technology in recent years, people now expect to see and hear world events on their radios and TVs as they happen.
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Ideas
Task 1
Prepare a short message. Give them the chance to demonstrate how they would send it to someone they could see but was out of earshot.
Give examples of people failing to communicate because they did not understand the same code e.g. speaking different languages, using jargon or slang words.
Experiment (in pairs or small groups) with some of the codes mentioned and then create a code of their own and use it to write short messages to each other. Perhaps text messages.
Task 2
The children could write a few sentences then rewrite them using hieroglyphics.
Discuss why some of the words cannot be represented by pictures.
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How it all began
The most modern technology is based on the fact that humans communicate by talking and by signs and gestures.
To talk we use a language and a means of sending it. A language is really a code which is understood by the sender and the receiver. It can take many forms in addition to the spoken word.
For example:
Native Americans used smoke signals.
- Certain tribes throughout the world used drum beats
- Morse code, invented in 1840, is a system of dots and dashes combined in different ways for each letter of the alphabet, sent along wires or flashed with lights.
- Semaphore, a code using flags held in different positions.
- Braille, invented in 1829, is a system of raised dots combined in different ways to enable blind people to read.
- Hand signs, a special language used by some deaf and mute people
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Writing
Once a language can be written down, information can be recorded for other people to read. Written records are important in history, education, government and business.
A bout 6000 years ago when people began to write they drew simple pictures of objects. A circle, for example, to represent the sun.
Picture writing, called Hieroglyphics, was used by the Ancient Egyptians. But many words could not be written like this so in most languages pictures gave way to alphabets, in which letters represent sounds.
This made writing and reading much easier and the sending of messages feasible.
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