April 2008

I don’t like bullies and if you ask me, the best way to deal with a bully that won’t leave you alone is to punch them in the nose.

That’s why I like the story of Tanya Andersen and how she’s successfully fought back the RIAA and now she’s going after them for their questionable — possibly illegal — legal tactics.

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Have you tested your kids’ to make sure that they are operating at the optimal download bit-rates in school?

Parents, school administrators, and teachers can’t seem to effuse enough about the wonders of computers in education. They insist we need to have wired schools; otherwise, a lack of adequate computing resources is going to cripple our kids’ success when they enter the real world.

Computers are beneficial. Their ability to simulate, automate, and communicate is amazing. The Internet can easily retrieve text, sound, video and more, from anywhere in the world in mere milliseconds. Over one-hundred million websites exist, ready to render up information and Google is ready to connect you with it, assuming that you can put the right keywords into the search box and click the mouse.

Some view education as the transfer and buildup of knowledge, so connecting kids with computers seems like the right thing to do, since computers are very adept at storing, retrieving, transferring, and presenting information.

Unfortunately, people start confusing the way computers work with how kids’ brains work. They assume that googling something and getting back information educational. Steve Talbott refers to this as the fact-shoveling model of education. Worse, some people think it’s less important to know things because you can always look it up on demand, later when you need it.

In Steve’s most recent newsletter, he points out that real education involves much more than acquiring facts. Minds also need training to be “capable of attending in a sustained, focused, ever more deeply penetrating way to whatever aspect of the world and its problems we are addressing…” The way that the mind’s cognitive processes and creative, imaginative abilities work is entirely unrelated to the way computers process and deliver information.

He’s concerned, not that we don’t have enough computers in education, but perhaps education has already become too computerized. He’s concerned that in the past couple of decades that education has gotten away from teach kids how to connect the dots, and creative and imaginative problem solving. Education is evolving into fact shoveling, in part due to the influences of the information revolution and people’s blind enthusiasm for technology.

Do you see efforts in your schools to wire them and put technology into the kids’ hands without a real understanding or plan as to how this is actually going to benefit the kids? Do they just see technology as a silver bullet and just assume that it will make the kids smarter because it can just download more facts into their brains?

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