> Bert Freudenberg writes: > > > I question the very assumption that continuously telling > > the time is even remotely important on a learning machine > > for kids in elementary school age. > > Dealing with time is a critical life skill that must be learned. > Having a clock is thus very important.
Whose time? Hours minutes seconds? Days since a recent feast? When the sun is at a certain position in the sky? Since I last saw you on the road? How much do I quantize? Is quantization of time even a concept I am familiar with? The notion of time is _highly_ contingent on situated cultural factors. Just because in the West we measure things using hours, minutes, and seconds, does not mean that the entire world does so. In fact, our conception of time is directly related to churches and clock towers in the middle ages (see Lewis Mumford on this idea) first, and then assembly lines and educational/disciplinary institutions (see Foucault) . The rest of the world has not necessarily adopted our way of dividing days into ever smaller chunks---perhaps there is no quantization at all! A clock application, especially given the areas of deployment, is _not_ something you rush into with the assumption that you can merely write a graphic display of 00:00:00. One must understand the local conditions to know how time is told _on the ground_ and be careful to not impose a Western notion of quantization and temporal division that might be entirely foreign. nick knouf _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel