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I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can orga

I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids. Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video), I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.

mirimir 7y ago
As in Stephenson's Diamond Age.
- RangerScience 7y ago
  Ah! You know, kinda, yeah. Combine educators who can produce detailed lesson plans with performers who can deliver them, kinda like a lecturer and a TA, and it really is reminiscent of the Primer.
- arthurjj 7y ago
  I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated. Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education. For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment. That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Miranda played a much larger role in Nell's education than merely acting a role in the Primer.
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      Yeah wasn't there a whole subplot where she was super attached to the kid and tried to find and adopt her?
      - mirimir 7y ago
        Right, but then she got absorbed into the Drummers.
- sifar 7y ago
  The primer ... I used to dream about building this when I had kids , still do :)... Especially when I see a lot of parents being clueless/mishandle raising kids. As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.
nostrademons 7y ago
I've got a group of online friends from my alma mater that were thinking about this, and a bunch of the single folks volunteered to entertain kids over videochat for an hour or so, and they actually organized a Google Doc & Hangouts link to try it. So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other. My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me. As a parent, I see two big problems with it: 1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.) 2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.

mirimir 7y ago

As in Stephenson's Diamond Age.

RangerScience 7y ago
Ah! You know, kinda, yeah. Combine educators who can produce detailed lesson plans with performers who can deliver them, kinda like a lecturer and a TA, and it really is reminiscent of the Primer.
arthurjj 7y ago
I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated. Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education. For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment. That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Miranda played a much larger role in Nell's education than merely acting a role in the Primer.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    Yeah wasn't there a whole subplot where she was super attached to the kid and tried to find and adopt her?
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Right, but then she got absorbed into the Drummers.
sifar 7y ago
The primer ... I used to dream about building this when I had kids , still do :)... Especially when I see a lot of parents being clueless/mishandle raising kids. As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.

nostrademons 7y ago

I've got a group of online friends from my alma mater that were thinking about this, and a bunch of the single folks volunteered to entertain kids over videochat for an hour or so, and they actually organized a Google Doc & Hangouts link to try it. So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other. My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me. As a parent, I see two big problems with it: 1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.) 2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.