I've been reading this thread with a lot of interest. I don't really understand what issues are being discussed here, but I do have one post to say it so I will.
There seem to be two extremes that people are leaning toward - one where they lean toward the present educational system being flawed, and one where the present educational system is not flawed. Based on these two preferences in lean, there is difference in opinion. To further upset the balance, there are variances in perspective based on what level of an educational system is being discussed, as well as personal leans on the role of technology. The truth is made up of all of these opinions and more, I am willing to guess. So I would suggest that instead of looking at present educational systems (leave that to the Moot Court), it might be worthwhile to consider how the spirit of education could be better served with modern technology. If the focus really is *education*, I think that this would be a discussion that would be more progressive. And with a focus of education, instead of a system of education that is presently being implemented, real progress could be made in changing the system into something that follows the spirit of education while meeting the needs of specific contexts. There's also the issue of labels. It's human to label things, but in labeling things we bring stereotypes from our own pasts. The truth is that technology has changed the things that we label such that there is a mixing beneath the surface - a merging in some instances, or a splitting in others. I see our role not as people who quote people of the past, but rather people who are supposed to be fixing the things of the past. There is no perfect model; they are all flawed. It's fixing the flaws or making the flaws less relevant that we should be doing; not putting new realities into old models. I think we should be making new models that are not necessarily based on the old ones, and the overall goal should be improving the educational systems throughout the world within the local context and also with a compatibility between the systems in mind. If education is a simple matter of having parrots repeat what they have read, then we can scrap all of this and find a way to directly upload information to human brains (and based on this month's Scientific American, we're not too far away). But if we're talking about teaching people how to think and add to the body of human knowledge, we might want to take a step back for a moment and consider what it is we are supposed to be doing. So much confusion stems from the use of the phrase 'Education' to denote specific educational systems, especially for me. The present educational systems are only implementations of the abstract concept of 'education'. And how this relates to the subject of 'personal vs. social' sort has me somewhat confused, and I'll clarify my opinion on that. Where I stand on 'personal vs. social' is that there can be no social without some level of personal. We could talk about number of machines, but let's talk about space-time for a second (no pun intended). If even 20 students share one PC for some time each - is that PC not *their* PC within their timeframe? If they get half an hour, for that period that machine is their *personal* machine. But now the limitation, traded at cost, is the amount of time there is in a day - which is also a cost. -- Taran Rampersad Presently in: Panama City, Panama [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Taran "Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
