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Wi-Fi Woods
Mr]-[at writes "School kids in southern England have been given PDAs and pocket radios to track down and record plants and wildlife, as part of the Ambient Wood Project. The feedback has been overwhelming positive."
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I'd love to see something like that around here if it weren't for all the booby-trapped marijuana fields everywhere. Well, in the north end of the county anyway.
Hmm, sounds like they should turn the volume down then.
I know first hand, that technology in this kind of setting can be a distraction to some students. They may want to mess around with the technology rather than learning about what the teachers want the technology to teach the students. But I think this is okay, because it's okay to mess around with technology, right?
So long as the students learn *something* I see this as valuable.
Why is it that kids today get every little tech toy that us kids of yesturday have been drooling over for years? I'm 18, and yeah.. i just bought my 1st car. But those damned PDA's are prolly more expensive then my freakin car (which i got for cheap...) But seriously, laptops, pda's, etc, etc... they get it all.. I'm only 18, and i already can talk to the kids like they're all whipper snappers.... "Back when i was a youngen, we had 8bit 2D graphics on our games, and we watched in awe! And back when i was a youngin... we watched the naked titty women on Duke3D for hours, like you will on Duke Nukem Forever when your 74! (btw, why is duke nukem forever on freshmeat?)
Anything your PC can do, my console can do better!
"Ambient Wood Project" ??
Wasn't that the subtitle of "Bukake Bud's Adventure #12"?
What about the plants right to privacy? First they monitor all wildlife activity, next they will be monitoring all human activity. Mwwaa haaa haaa!!
If only they could figure out how to get flouride in the plants' water supply!
...and chemistry instead of wasting money on PDAs and WiFi? What about giving them some real knowledge and skills that may help them understand the world better and be more successful in their future lives? Isn't this the goal of education? How exactly being in the woods with a PDA supposed to improve their understanding of ecological concerns, their causes and possible remedies? How is it better than a good ol' book with a bunch of color pictures commented by a bunch of gray-haired scientists?
I can't freakin' believe some shcools are wasting money this midlessly.
Maybe they are teaching the children that life isn't just about boring book studying. They are probably teaching the children how to interact with each other and the world around them. I would hazard a guess that the children might actually enjoy a break from the classroom once in a while and it probably makes school a bit more interesting.
School doesn't have to be long training course for a job.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I dunno. Technology is cheap relative to the cost of paying teachers, administrators, etc. Like it or not, technology is becoming more and more a part of our world. Pervasive technologies such as 802.11 and PDAs will continue to grow. Giving kids technology like this at a young age will only make them more comfortable with it when they are older.
Just because that's the way school was for you when you were growing up does not mean it has to be that way for kids now. Just because things are different does not mean they are worse.
Adminsitrators with the purse strings really eat that kind of thing up and it would go a long way towards justifing the expense.
A GPS unit with each child could allow the teacher with a laptop at their base to actually see where they are at all times.
Damn, why couldn't classes have been this cool when I was a youngun?
>>to enable pairs of children to collaboratively discover and reflect upon new kinds of experiences in mixed reality spaces.
Didn't they use LSD for that in the 70s?
In Michigan we're mandated by the state to integrate technology (i.e. electronic computing devices and related software) into ALL areas of the K-12 curriculum. We had to develop our curriculum in each educational area to include technology of all types, including devices like PDAs, computers, data recording devices, etc. so this is not something brand new. The issue isn't really why they're getting technology, it's whether or not they're using it to better their skills. That said, I am 100% for teaching concepts FIRST, technology SECOND. I don't want my kids using a calculator to do their math for example, and I don't let them at home until they understand and can do it manually. I stress being able to understand the subject first, being able to spell correctly and so on, and I DO check their homework. Having said all of that, I also think it's neat to see what they can do with technology once they understand why they're doing it... :)
Have you hugged your penguin today?
Yeah, when I was at school (we're talking early nineties) the problem with the way they taught computing was that they didn't integrate it into the rest of the curriculum, so you never actually got to use it in a real-life environment, meaning that it was impossible to learn.
So you'd have the "technology" teacher, probably with a background in woodwork, saying 'Yes, so this is a spreadsheet. Er, if you had a ny data to process, you'd see how useful it was...'
Meannwhile we're writing down all the results of our physics experimnts on a piece of soggy paper, with a biro.
The best way to teach people to use computers is surely to get them to use computers to help them with somthing they were going to do anyway, like people use computers in real life. Not only would that help persuade the more technophobic kids that computers were actually there to make their lives easier, it would help combat that "I wanna learn web design! Yeah! I want my own website! Cool! I've got my own website, now I need some content!" phenomenon.
Thanks for listening.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Yes, but "teaching the children how to interact with each other and the world around them" is not a reason to give them PDAs! What's wrong with getting out into nature, *without* bringing along all the technotoys?