Alternative to the NMRA Master Model Railroader?

[ocalicreek]

A helpful idea is that of immigrants vs natives to the digital world. Immigrants are those who grew up without the internet and for them the only way to interact with other modelers was through either round-robin groups or the NMRA or the local hobby shop coffee pot. Maybe attending a show and getting involved with a club was the way to go.

Natives are those who have grown up not knowing what life was like before the internet and whose entry point into the hobby may very well be a forum such as this. While the former options for interaction are still there and doubtless will continue for another generation at least (if they ever go away entirely), the prefered means of communication for natives remains through digital media with only occasional person-to-person contact.

Galen

Where do you put the large number of us who were middle-aged adults when the internet came along? I'm in that category, and I still prefer to actually talk to people. The day we stop doing that, we can kiss our rear-ends good-bye. Communication is already a dying art, and almost entirely non-existent among the youth of today, who cannot function without a cellphone that Tweets, Twitters, Texts, Sexts and connects to the internet, usually while walking, driving or just breathing.

I doubt there is a high school kid in America who knows how to actually DO research anymore. Somehow, I don't see that as "progress", nor even beneficial.

The rest of 'us', being that I was born in '75 and was already in college when the internet began to really take off beyond an academic exercise among universities - into the realm of entertainment and social communications - are immigrants. We have arrived on the foreign shore and learned the language but it is not our first language, whereas those natives born since the internet exploded on the scene have never known and will probably never know any different.

I have to disagree about research, however. Actually the opposite is the case. It's because of the internet that schools are requiring students to learn even more rigorous methods of research to compensate for the confusion the internet causes. Teachers generally won't accept papers with websites listed unless they are primary sources - papers published directly online or paralleled in a print journal. And too many conflicting opinions online forces a person to learn how to discern what is right and what has been fabricated or embellished.

Galen