[ale] Planned obsolescence / Computers for Schools

[Tom Freeman]

I'll rise to the flame bait.

I must agree to a large degree with respect to the usability of _most_ 
computer based education support. Of course, this is partly just the 
learning curve of a new technology, and computers are a new technology. I 
expect that another two or three generations will be needed to shake out 
many of the concepts which are needed, and leave the rest behind.

That said, which is more important: learning to add, subtract, multiply, 
divide etc and have a feel for the results or punching mindlessly into a 
calculator and regurgitating the results? I have used a calculator in the 
past to gain familiarity with the numbers in a problem domain which 
strikes me as useful. I have also had a few students who were perfectly 
happy to miskey a chemical problem (subtract smaller volume from larger 
volume was the goal, and they added) and happily go ahead the their 
blatently wrong answer.

The point of writing an essay is to place words in a sensible order in 
order to communicate a result. Hand written does the job just as well as 
word processed, especially if the typing skills are weak. OTOH, once the 
skill of getting words in some order is present, some form of electronic 
editing sure makes it easier to play with the wording to improve its 
impact, and can be sooo much easier for somebody else to read.

My personal take? Early educational use of electronic aids during the 
skill aquisition stage is probably wasted effort. When it comes time to 
play with those aquired skills, the electronic aids allow more play with 
less drudgery, ie. an aid to learning or a tool.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.

On Sat, 24 Jul 2010, Chris Fowler wrote:

> On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 10:12 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
>>
>> When we tried to bid to finish the job throughout the school
>> district,
>> we were preparing to develop the industrial capacity to assemble and
>> deploy on the order of 15,000-25,000 thin clients - diskless, fanless
>> units screwed to the back of LCD monitors, with an app server for
>> every
>> 200-250 thin clients and one file server per school.
>>
>>
>
> I'm going to throw out some flamebait here but I don't understand the
> purpose of putting computers in school in large numbers.  Maybe there is
> motivation but is the US seeing results?
>
> When I was in HS we had one computer lab.  I took CS for 3 years and use
> that lab.  The only people that used that lab were the CS students and
> the French students came along after I wrote a program to quiz them on
> French -> English.
>
> I don't see why kids can't write essays with pencils.  I think there
> should be a lab for CS students and science studies where they could use
> tools like Matlab.  I'm not sure I understand the reason to progress
> outside of the lab.
>
> Even TC's seem to be a huge drain on resources and I'm not sure the US
> is seeing results.  It also seems the eduction in the US is going
> backwards in results.  Seems the computers that are there are not
> helping.
>
> I will admit that in my job I would be lost without Google.  Wikipedia
> is great for looking up anything I want to look up.  Kids need to learn
> how to use the Internet to lean anything they want to learn.  Even in CS
> we had slackers that would play Leisure Suite Larry instead of writing
> their programs.
>
>
>
>
>
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