On Wed, Aug 01, 2007 at 08:08:23PM +0530, shiv sastry wrote: > I worry about this.
Not just you. > Last month, my wife and I met the parents of a 6 or 7 year old boy. We have > known the child since he was about 2 and his parents proudly told us that his > new (upmarket, expensive) school has given each child a laptop. And the boy It's a good idea if it kills less trees (reduces costs, books are expensive and heavy). It would be an even greater idea if we had decent educational software. Alas, such are hard to find. The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer or Vinge's pedagogical tablets yet remains a fantasy. > proudly showed us his possession - an admittedly small and light affair which > apparently will be used exclusively to handle two subjects. > > But I am not at all sure of many things. Even if I assume that the laptop is > merely a notebook/pencil/textbook combined in a compact space, I worry about > things like handwriting, motor skills issues and RSI that little growing Who uses handwriting these days? Mine is degenerate enough that I only can do signatures. RSI, yes, but most interaction will be by touchscreen, audio and video. Today's notebooks are pure steampunk to what is yet to come. > hands might get. Nobody really knows what will happen as far as my knowledge > goes but this is being promoted like the greatest thing since the printing > press. In absence of teachers, computers are almost as great destroyers of minds as is TV. > A computer can open up vast new vistas (pun unintended), but can be > restricting in other ways. Creativity and art result from motor activity > associated with pencil and paper, and the relative permanence of something There's nothing particularly demanding about the physics of pencil and paper. A Wacom tablet already touches that range. > that is written on paper lends itself to sharing in a manner that is > different from information in a computer. It's an UI issue, not something intrinsic to a particular implementation. I can easily imagine sharing documents by dragging them upon group members. Or even a fake physics desktop, or an augmented reality overlay. > I think there are so many unanswered questions that I see this as a new drug > or medicine that is being tried out without any longterm testing. My kids are > too old for this - but I would be very concerned if they had been much > younger. My kid won't get a computer until he's ready for school. Strictly no TV either. We'll send him to a forest kindergarten -- plenty of plant and animal interaction, abstract stuff later. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
