On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 01:57:24PM +0800, Dale Hill wrote:
> Our school has gone totally to the dark side, other than the two
> or three Apple IIes with color monitors working in the 1st grade
> school and kindergarten.
I became disenchanted with computers in schools around my last year
of high school, and it had nothing to do with their choice of
platform (they simply moved from old PCs to new PCs). Around that
point it became clear that computers were becoming status symbols,
rather than tools to teach new skills.
While I agree with another poster about schools dumping their
investment in old software is stupid, particularly because it is
the software that matters, you have to look at it from the perspective
of the school board. If parents get wind that their kids are
learning on twenty year old Apple IIe's when the equipment becomes
obsolete in three to four years, they are going to be upset.
There are a couple of reasons for that. One is the ease with which
an application like AppleWorks can be thought of as obsolete in a
world which uses the GUIified Word and Excel and (god forbid)
PowerPoint. It doesn't matter whether classes which teach with
AppleWorks focus on general skills, whereas the more modern labs
would be used to teach Word (in particular), because that isn't
what industry uses.
Even in the more general case of educational software (ie. stuff
designed to teach), you would be hard pressed to fight this notion
that progress flows in one direction. For example, Raskin argued
in a recent interview:
The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated
software in applications and operating systems. Some programs
I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written
in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware
1,000 times faster.
(see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0%2C3605%2C1331536%2C00.html)
In other words, modern technology doesn't necessarily offer better
software. I would imagine that this is particularly true in
education, seeming as advances depend upon a better understanding
of human psychology than pushing bits around a machine. Unless,
of course, you're one of those people who believe that educators
must entertain students. IMHO, they are confusing entertain with
maintaining the interest of.
Of course, if the objective is to entertain, you are stuck with
following each fad. This is because something which was effective
at one point of time, because of its novelty, isn't necessarily
going to be effective to the next batch of students, because it
lost its novelty.
Byron.
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