Comment There's No Satisfying You People, Is There? (Score 2) 488
Oooooh, those idiot teachers and administrators.
It seems that they're unable to find a use for computers and the Internet as other than a big library!
Why, all those kids can really do is ... read.
How "Old School".
Rubbish. Look: All television did for us was to perform the unprecedented bringing of audio-visual theatre into each home within broadcast range. That had a remarkable potential ... which we spent the next 3 generations progressively wasting.
Even the vast addition of cable-delivery (many more channels) has mostly wasted the medium.
TV's pervasiveness and popularity have brought out the worst in broadcast media.
TV's blue light flickers over the faces of millions of morons, and their ranks grow with each televised generation.
So, here we are with another unprecedented event: the bringing of a world library into a connected school (and honestly, into each connected home). The result?: ho hum. I can hear the virtual refrain from middle-class American homes: "Moooom! Now that we've got DSL, why doesn't the computer suck my dick when it shows me webcamgirl porn? Waaaah!"
What the hell does it take to satisfy you people? Does a technological advance have to be hip and sexy in order to be perceived as having value? Students can access knowledge of world-wide span at home, at school and in their public libraries. Literacy rates should be climbing when such an exposure occurs. But I just don't see that. I do see a lot of youth (computer-literate to the last) who have attentions that span comparably to short-lived nuclear particles. Did they expect the computers to do their reading for them?
Do any of you look at modern American grade-school and junior-high texts? They are becoming a blizzard of attention-diverting texts, colors, pictures and overall choppy layout. What ever became of the reasoned argument, which is the strength of textual information?
We must keep our eye on the prize. Books, field trips (to see artwork, manufacturing, etc.), lectures, and YES even the Internet are all tools for learning, and for developing that Holy Grail of education: critical and analytical thinking. If Internet usage seems to produce a drop in, say, understanding mathematics, then it's time to look at the student: his time spent online, what he sees online, and how he interacts with what he finds. Flighty use of an educational resource is more than enough grounds for downgrading its involvement. Yes, this might even mean restricting computers in schools to their libraries, where they probably should have stayed in the first place.
Rubbish. Look: All television did for us was to perform the unprecedented bringing of audio-visual theatre into each home within broadcast range. That had a remarkable potential
So, here we are with another unprecedented event: the bringing of a world library into a connected school (and honestly, into each connected home). The result?: ho hum. I can hear the virtual refrain from middle-class American homes: "Moooom! Now that we've got DSL, why doesn't the computer suck my dick when it shows me webcamgirl porn? Waaaah!"
What the hell does it take to satisfy you people? Does a technological advance have to be hip and sexy in order to be perceived as having value? Students can access knowledge of world-wide span at home, at school and in their public libraries. Literacy rates should be climbing when such an exposure occurs. But I just don't see that. I do see a lot of youth (computer-literate to the last) who have attentions that span comparably to short-lived nuclear particles. Did they expect the computers to do their reading for them?
Do any of you look at modern American grade-school and junior-high texts? They are becoming a blizzard of attention-diverting texts, colors, pictures and overall choppy layout. What ever became of the reasoned argument, which is the strength of textual information?
We must keep our eye on the prize. Books, field trips (to see artwork, manufacturing, etc.), lectures, and YES even the Internet are all tools for learning, and for developing that Holy Grail of education: critical and analytical thinking. If Internet usage seems to produce a drop in, say, understanding mathematics, then it's time to look at the student: his time spent online, what he sees online, and how he interacts with what he finds. Flighty use of an educational resource is more than enough grounds for downgrading its involvement. Yes, this might even mean restricting computers in schools to their libraries, where they probably should have stayed in the first place.
