"Judy's reference to children not likely noticing the sound quality I suspect must be referring to very young children because all the fifth graders at my wife's school all have the latest pop songs blasting out their iPhones when somebody rings, they seem to be very image concscious."
Here in Bulgaria, while a lot of Bulgarians are 'image conscious', and a lot are plain and simple posers, a very large proportion of kids do not have arty-tarty-farty mobile phones for the simple reason that parents just don't have the money for much more than the bread and cheese. Working on a daily basis with the 6 to 13 year-old crowd I cannot help but be aware that some of the illusions that adults have about kids are seriously wrong! 1. Their inner / psychological / spiritual lives are at least as rich and as complex as those of adults. 2. Their ears work better than those of us old f**ts. My main problem is to stop kids clicking away as if they have some sort of motor disorder while either a program or a media file loads; these children WANT IT NOW, or, given the chance, even sooner. So LATENCY of all forms is my bugbear. A piece of music that takes 10 seconds to load will not get heard. A series of connected sounds that are d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d because it takes yonks for them to pop in and out of the memory swap space will only attract derision, and, from a pedagogical point of view, the kids' concentration will be broken. After all, a lot of teaching is not about fancy equipment and fancy textbooks, it is about the ability to weave a spell about the subject matter that holds the child so s/he doesn't take a quick mental space-shuttle to the moon. Not so long ago I went over to one of the grammar schools in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (where I stay) to see their fancy, new data-projector with interactive white-board: marvellous equipment with a classroom full of slack-jawed kids looking out the windows, writing each other notes, fiddling with their mobile phones, and so on. Perhaps a better teacher and a chalkboard would be a better bet! sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. ____________________________________________________________ A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ____________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
