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I really appreciate innovation, technology, and the power of technology to transform our quality of life, but I don't support the push to bring latest and great
by coffeemug 17y ago
I really appreciate innovation, technology, and the power of technology to transform our quality of life, but I don't support the push to bring latest and greatest technology to schools as a first priority. Education has much more important problems that need to be fixed first.
When I was in high school, the school decided to replace old DOS machines that ran Borland compilers with Visual Studio. I bet on paper it sounded like a great idea (teach kids newer technology), except no more than three or four kids out of the entire school of five thousand were capable of mastering simple, linear DOS programs. The rest of the kids just vandalized the machines.
Spending all that money on brand new Pentiums with Windows didn't advance the quality of education one bit. Spending it on teachers that can actually be engaging, requiring higher standards, involving parents, and bringing in a little bit of discipline would have done a lot more for less.
Getting broadband to every school is great, once we fix more pressing problems. Broadband on its own will just give most kids a better youtube connection.
- hussong 17y agoI agree. In Germany, we had an initiative called "Schulen ans Netz" (get schools online). It was all about uplink, neglecting the boxes and, above all, teaching resources. As one of my professors put it: "What are you going to do when all the schools are online? Take the first one offline again?". On a side note, at the time the university was online of course (now they even have wifi), but there was no chalk in the (often overcrowded) seminar rooms and it was hard to get an OH projector or even a beamer for presentations.