Happiness is in the eyes of the individual. If what you did made you happy, fine, that doesn't make you valuable. It makes me happy to achieve, to be counted above others, sought for my skill, intellect, adaptability, and responsibility. It's a coincidence that this makes me valuable, and if my wife ever leaves me (which I doubt, as I married an extremely loyal woman of admirable character and intellect... otherwise I wouldn't be able to stand her much less respect her), I'm sure I'll make more than enough to sate my mid-life crisis however I wish.
I might add that should I die tomorrow, it would be just as smugly, but with more elitism. Hell, I could mutter my last words in Latin and die like a proper patrician. Sic erat in fatis...
Be aware that each airline has its own policies. This is the best guide I know of for this subject. You should of course be familiar with the baseline federal standard.
Computer labs were once 'enough' when computers had a marginal role in business and society (and were many times more expensive than now), but computers now occupy a primary role in both business and personal life. It is only natural that this be extended into the classroom so that students can adjust themselves to functioning productively with them, even in spite of them, because that is what they are likely, depending on career, to have to face for the rest of their professional lives.
Your attempt to link increased exposure to computers in schools as causal to the effect of this exceptionally ill conceived institutionalized voyeurism carries no water. The problem was only that these were computers issued by the state for the purposes of the state, which, shockingly (that's sarcasm), turned out to be directly opposed to the best interests of those to which they were issued. If these had been private laptops, as happens in many schools already, the problem, even the temptation of the problem would be so remote and infeasible as to be nearly impossible.
Your appeal to 'common-sense' might have been reasonable once, long ago in the dim before-time when computers cost thousands of dollars each, but now they are cheap commodities. Some kids go to high school with shoes that cost more than a serviceable laptop.
You lastly make the argument that you would have personally enjoyed a computer because it would have enabled you to fully express your personal deficiency of character. That is tragic for you perhaps, but I brought a laptop to high school (now almost a decade ago, sad to say), maintained a 4.0 GPA, graduated with honors, etc. Don't blame the tool for the person that you may be and how you might use that tool. That's like blaming guns for murder while ignoring the times that they have been used to save the lives of others being assaulted. The tool is only as good or evil as the one who wields it.
Yes, it would have been warmer and greener than it was now, but if there was subterfuge in the naming of the country then I don't imagine that it was a tropical paradise
Why it's our old friend, Mr. Strawman! I like how you concede that the GP's statement is probably true (the first, not the second, which I agree is known false), BUT don't think that it's some wild extreme that was never posited. Way to go, killer.
It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.
It also doesn't mean that it wasn't. No assumption made here in either direction should be construed as proven (and even Phil Jones says this point is unprovable at this time).
Do you deny that being shot by a gun could kill you, merely because other people have died without being shot. Just because it got warmer then doesn't mean that we are not causing it to get warmer now. It is getting hotter, faster and more globally than it did back then.
This is confusing causes with effects and with a pessimistic bias to boot. (Warming must be bad, the only question is how bad!) In the first place, warming trends in the planet's history have frequently been positive for speciation and population, and even if some warming trends have had negative impacts, that would simply demonstrate that warming by itself is either not a catalyst for speciation and population, or that it is only part of a multi-faceted paradigm that could go one way or another based on other factors.
In the second place, if man is the primary cause, and it's happening hard and fast, so what? Photosythetic life changed the planet's atmosphere completely during the Siderian, causing the Oxygen Crisis that led to mass extinction of anaerobic life, as well as making all current animal life possible where it otherwise would not. Would you like to go back in time and undo that? Mankind is so conceited that he thinks the biosphere he has come to know in the last few centuries of biology is the ONE PERFECT BIOSPHERE that must be FROZEN IN TIME at all costs, because change is bad and scary! Who knows how many cuddly animals might cease to be viable, just as over 99% of all species in the planet's history already did. Never mind new species coming on to the field, that can't possibly be relevant or natural, right?
Nobody has every claimed that we are making the sun hotter.
Do you imagine that the solar output is fixed and unchanging? Of course we're not causing it to change, but it DOES change, and temperature records do more closely correlate with solar output than CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The climate change "scare" as you call it was instigated by the scientists, not the politicions.
Yeah, Margaret Thatcher never latched onto it in attempt to undermine the power of coal miners' unions and commissioned original research to try to buttress it. I just imagined that. More contemporary examples exist, but that one goes back before most people in either the scientific or lay community knew or cared anything about the issue.
Because you know of course those animals evolved in mere thousands of years, otherwise how could they have survived the far warmer holocene climate optimum? Oh right, that would be impossible, therefore we know that those species have survived far warmer temperatures before. Oh, but now we have all sorts of people to get emotional about it! That's progress.
And people have never had to migrate because of changing environmental conditions, no sir, how could they possibly be expected to do that now?
While other parts of women have been arbitrarily sexualized at various times and in various places, that does not detract from the basically universal understanding of breasts as a symbol of fecundity.
I would further maintain that less than a century where infants were primarily bottle-fed is not a significant thing viewed through the lens of the last few thousands of years of human behavior. The bottle-feeding craze of the 20th century is an aberration born of an enfatuation with convenience. Not to mention you're dealing with instincts here that don't just dry up and blow away with a few decades of social trends, even a bottle-fed guy isn't going to look at a breast-feeding and think 'well, that doesn't matter to me, I was bottle fed!' Absurd.
You obviously lack the historical perspective to know what freedom was in the 18th century when the US was founded, or what it is and should be in contemporary society. Go back and study slavery, feudalism, monarchy/tyranny/despotism, rule of law, positive and negative rights, natural law, etc. Then maybe we can talk.
How cute, you provided an answer to a question that wasn't asked, and then call the poster's perspective 'know nothing'. I'm fairly certain the poster understands vulgarity, but that's immaterial, as social standards are not by themselves capable of objectively defining virtue. (Where objective means based on a real causal understanding of harms and the avoidance of bias and bigotry.)
If you read the Old Testament, you'll find that social standards determined that women were unclean when menstruating, and contact with them was a sin. Further that women who gave birth to boys were unclean for a week, and those who gave birth to girls were unclean for two weeks. Community standards can be complete bullshit.
Quite frankly, though I am neither a feminist nor female, I think that the aversion to breasts stems from the remnants of patriarchal power jealousy. Where men are concerned they don't like being reminded that they were utterly dependent on their mothers at one point, and where women are concerned I think part of it is internalized patriarchal masculinism (as there have been women who were even against sufferage) and the other part is instinctual jealousy and anxiety over how men will be attracted to the breast-feeder and her fitness as a mother. As none of these are rational, the mind varnishes the feelings with some bullshit about morality.
It depends on your definition of oppression. It is necessary to exert some level of authority in any functional household. It would be unworkable (and hence why it would be irrational) to treat children as complete equals. Any household with two or more kids run as a democracy would end up looking like the child-based societies in Logan's Run or Miri.
That said, as a father who has not forgotten his own childhood, there are things that happened to me that I will not let happen to my own daughter. I will answer any question she asks with the truth, and if I catch anybody lying to her because they think innocence can only be achieved by ignorance, I will thank them not to do it again. If somebody has a problem with her behavior they should take it up with her first to give her a chance to change of her own accord or to even defend her rationale. I hated it when people would air their grievances with me behind my back to my parents as though I were some disobedient dog that did not deserve the respect of direct contact but should be brought to heel by my 'owner'. There are more than these, of course, but the take away point is this: I am not my parents.
However I get the impression that I am a minority. At PAX some years ago I went to a panel about the role of gamer parents in their children's lives, and I heard the same old crap that the generation before ours gave us. I got up and asked the panel, essentially, 'if it didn't work the first time, why do you think it will work now?' And they fed me and the crowd some more crap. No approach is so perfect that it can't be improved. If we mindlessly follow the same patterns as our parents, how can we hope to improve our children beyond that limit? Social development will stagnate. Luckily, even if my kind are a minority, there's still some movement.
I know that in NY state there was a court battle over car rental companies denying customers service based on age, and the plaintiffs won. It is now illegal there for car rental companies to deny anybody over the age of 18 a car rental (which of course still happens everywhere else).
If I were to accost an unarmed official at gunpoint, they are in that moment defenseless. There is nothing absurd about that. They are individuals in individual circumstances, and any movement that thinks the mere occupation of government workers forfeits their honorable treatment as human beings is despicable and one I would oppose by force regardless of their so-called principles.
Nelson Mandela achieved an honorable goal through dishonorable means. I don't personally respect him or his methods, but that doesn't mean I would reinstate apartheid. (Many, many persons of deficient character have advocated reform only to leverage the discontent of the masses so as to be able to ride on their shoulders to power. Lucius Sergius Catilina comes to mind easily.) The means a movement uses betrays their true nature. If they are so desperate for power that they will throw anybody into a meat grinder then it doesn't matter what they say they want, chances are they are lying, because their actions demonstrate they are desperate enough to kill dishonorably. You think a movement that isn't afraid to do violence to the defenseless is afraid to lie about its goals or principles? Pull the other one.
I have a feeling that you're one of those liberals who gets their jollies by pretending to be a crazy conservative to defame conservatives and perpetuate the stereotype that they're insane and irrational. However, I'm going to feed the troll.
If you want to start a political movement that proceeds from ballot box to ammo box, I can respect that, so long as you walk in the founders' footsteps, taking responsibility, petitioning first, working in public and doing whatever possible to engender the support of the public, and if all else fails, attacking military targets. On the face of it though, you advocate your own tyranny. Forcing the defenseless to your personal political whims on threat of death is wholly dishonorable. That makes you a tyrant, no better than any other dictator rightly despised by history. And I tell you this, though you would go to a government office and demand at gunpoint everything that I myself ever dreamed a government should do or be, were I there and armed (and I am almost all the time) I would cut you down immediately, for that very reason. Sic semper tyrannis.
My perspective is directly reactionary to my experience in childhood. I enjoyed 'living room' games of Scrabble, and in fact I admired those who performed ably, because in 'living room' games, those people are almost invariably the most literate, the most educated and well-read. Finding out that the professional competitors were the opposite, knowing nothing but the manipulation of the lifeless husks of words they didn't even know, was crushingly disillusioning. (Especially given that Scrabble's roots are in crosswords, where the meaning of words is inextricable from the process of successful completion. In that context, this 'strategy over knowledge' approach to Scrabble is not just an affront to the abstract of knowledge, but also a betrayal of the spirit of the predecessor from which it is derived.)
In the end, it's just a game. I don't really care that much, and I still play it now and then, but I don't respect professional players. That's just my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.
It's funny that you should allude to the workplace, because that can be the keystone to a counter-argument. Technology is pervasive in almost every workplace, and it is critical the people learn how to balance its productive use with its distractive nature (including when it breaks, as that's as common to the professional world as it is the academic).
You're right, learning isn't and shouldn't be all fun and games, and I don't think that technology's role is to make every subject into flashing images, sound bites and bullet points. However, that's not an issue of too much or too little technology, that's an issue of how it should be applied.
In my opinion, technology should be used in classrooms the same way it should be used in cubicles: for research, cooperation, organization, synthesis, design, testing, reporting, etc. (I emphasize 'should be' in the latter because few people exclusively operate like that at work, and I'm no saint myself, because that's where I'm typing this.) The reality of the classroom and the workplace is the reality of the new mind of the average person produced by our current environment. The days of long thoughts are gone for most people, which is sad, but irreversible without interfering with private life, and each generation has a shorter attention span (gratefully balanced by an increased multitasking capacity, any denial of which by older generations is nothing but jealous disbelief).
Yeah, I don't know anything, I just watched the private lives of national competitors. I judge them lacking. That is my prerogative.
Also, Scrabble lacks depth at higher levels. National competitors learn spellings but not necessarily meanings, which completely bastardizes the entire point of language. National Scrabble competitors essentially live or die by the number of combinations of seven letters they know are valid. To me that is a disgusting travesty, and quite frankly after watching Word Wars I discovered I had a lower opinion of tournament Scrabble players than I did before I knew anything about them. Once again, my prerogative. I don't know you, and if you're different, great, but you're not the only Scrabble player, and I'm more keen to trust what I've seen than you, quite frankly.
There is a prerogative to parenting. If child wants a bike, they may want some fancy three dozen speed expensive behemoth out of the gate. However, a parent is likely to start them out with something simpler and cheaper. If they don't like it, tough. When there's only one option, there's only one choice. I'm not going to force my daughter to practice writing shell scripts or something, but I have a feeling that just having a system to mess with will be enough. Environments favorable to exploration have a pulling effect, rendering pushing redundant. So long as I make myself available to answer questions, I don't think I'll have to do any pushing at all.
I did mention FreeDOS, which has various BASIC interpreters. However, my own experience with BASIC ruined my future as a serious developer, so I'm not going to push too hard on that. What I'm talking about is the real operation of a computer, navigating via CLI, editing system files, customizing beyond 'browse' and 'apply'. (I used to take a solid week to get a system the way I wanted it. Back in the DOS days that included lots of ANSI.SYS-related escape sequences.)
Yeah, I completely trust one perspective. It couldn't possibly be refined, and no technology will ever improve. Whatever. I've worked in plenty of places that are de facto paperless at a departmental level and they seemed pretty efficient to me.
I assume that this was submitted by somebody directly related to techlearning.com where the PDF is hosted (and whose server is being roasted by every/.er downloading a 32 page PDF at the same time... ), and they have an agenda to push 'solutions' on the education industry. In their minds 'effective' means people are buying whatever products their sponsors are hawking. Pfff. *cough*slashvertisement*cough*
The fact is technology has completely changed society, and education has not adapted. The internet has killed the exclusivity of the knowledge-based education paradigm. This isn't to say that people should not still learn facts, but there needs to be a new focus on logic, synthesis, and processes. People need to be taught how to find what they want to know, and not just by hur dur type things in da search box lol but real boolean logic. Then they need to be taught how to use that information in a synthetic, practical way.
But dude, DUDE, how would we accommodate backwards compatibility?! You and your attempts to move us forward will invalidate all that expensive, proprietary stuff we bought into which we locked all our data!
This is completely true. As soon as my daughter can read (she's 2), I'm giving her an old computer, probably running FreeDOS or ubuntu (depending on how old).
I will teach her the ways of the command line and seal her fate as a future nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
Happiness is in the eyes of the individual. If what you did made you happy, fine, that doesn't make you valuable. It makes me happy to achieve, to be counted above others, sought for my skill, intellect, adaptability, and responsibility. It's a coincidence that this makes me valuable, and if my wife ever leaves me (which I doubt, as I married an extremely loyal woman of admirable character and intellect... otherwise I wouldn't be able to stand her much less respect her), I'm sure I'll make more than enough to sate my mid-life crisis however I wish.
I might add that should I die tomorrow, it would be just as smugly, but with more elitism. Hell, I could mutter my last words in Latin and die like a proper patrician. Sic erat in fatis...
As for you, qui ignorabat, ignorabitur.
Be aware that each airline has its own policies. This is the best guide I know of for this subject. You should of course be familiar with the baseline federal standard.
Computer labs were once 'enough' when computers had a marginal role in business and society (and were many times more expensive than now), but computers now occupy a primary role in both business and personal life. It is only natural that this be extended into the classroom so that students can adjust themselves to functioning productively with them, even in spite of them, because that is what they are likely, depending on career, to have to face for the rest of their professional lives.
Your attempt to link increased exposure to computers in schools as causal to the effect of this exceptionally ill conceived institutionalized voyeurism carries no water. The problem was only that these were computers issued by the state for the purposes of the state, which, shockingly (that's sarcasm), turned out to be directly opposed to the best interests of those to which they were issued. If these had been private laptops, as happens in many schools already, the problem, even the temptation of the problem would be so remote and infeasible as to be nearly impossible.
Your appeal to 'common-sense' might have been reasonable once, long ago in the dim before-time when computers cost thousands of dollars each, but now they are cheap commodities. Some kids go to high school with shoes that cost more than a serviceable laptop.
You lastly make the argument that you would have personally enjoyed a computer because it would have enabled you to fully express your personal deficiency of character. That is tragic for you perhaps, but I brought a laptop to high school (now almost a decade ago, sad to say), maintained a 4.0 GPA, graduated with honors, etc. Don't blame the tool for the person that you may be and how you might use that tool. That's like blaming guns for murder while ignoring the times that they have been used to save the lives of others being assaulted. The tool is only as good or evil as the one who wields it.
Yes, it would have been warmer and greener than it was now, but if there was subterfuge in the naming of the country then I don't imagine that it was a tropical paradise
Why it's our old friend, Mr. Strawman! I like how you concede that the GP's statement is probably true (the first, not the second, which I agree is known false), BUT don't think that it's some wild extreme that was never posited. Way to go, killer.
It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.
It also doesn't mean that it wasn't. No assumption made here in either direction should be construed as proven (and even Phil Jones says this point is unprovable at this time).
Do you deny that being shot by a gun could kill you, merely because other people have died without being shot. Just because it got warmer then doesn't mean that we are not causing it to get warmer now. It is getting hotter, faster and more globally than it did back then.
This is confusing causes with effects and with a pessimistic bias to boot. (Warming must be bad, the only question is how bad!) In the first place, warming trends in the planet's history have frequently been positive for speciation and population, and even if some warming trends have had negative impacts, that would simply demonstrate that warming by itself is either not a catalyst for speciation and population, or that it is only part of a multi-faceted paradigm that could go one way or another based on other factors.
In the second place, if man is the primary cause, and it's happening hard and fast, so what? Photosythetic life changed the planet's atmosphere completely during the Siderian, causing the Oxygen Crisis that led to mass extinction of anaerobic life, as well as making all current animal life possible where it otherwise would not. Would you like to go back in time and undo that? Mankind is so conceited that he thinks the biosphere he has come to know in the last few centuries of biology is the ONE PERFECT BIOSPHERE that must be FROZEN IN TIME at all costs, because change is bad and scary! Who knows how many cuddly animals might cease to be viable, just as over 99% of all species in the planet's history already did. Never mind new species coming on to the field, that can't possibly be relevant or natural, right?
Nobody has every claimed that we are making the sun hotter.
Do you imagine that the solar output is fixed and unchanging? Of course we're not causing it to change, but it DOES change, and temperature records do more closely correlate with solar output than CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The climate change "scare" as you call it was instigated by the scientists, not the politicions.
Yeah, Margaret Thatcher never latched onto it in attempt to undermine the power of coal miners' unions and commissioned original research to try to buttress it. I just imagined that. More contemporary examples exist, but that one goes back before most people in either the scientific or lay community knew or cared anything about the issue.
Because you know of course those animals evolved in mere thousands of years, otherwise how could they have survived the far warmer holocene climate optimum? Oh right, that would be impossible, therefore we know that those species have survived far warmer temperatures before. Oh, but now we have all sorts of people to get emotional about it! That's progress.
And people have never had to migrate because of changing environmental conditions, no sir, how could they possibly be expected to do that now?
Absurd.
While other parts of women have been arbitrarily sexualized at various times and in various places, that does not detract from the basically universal understanding of breasts as a symbol of fecundity.
I would further maintain that less than a century where infants were primarily bottle-fed is not a significant thing viewed through the lens of the last few thousands of years of human behavior. The bottle-feeding craze of the 20th century is an aberration born of an enfatuation with convenience. Not to mention you're dealing with instincts here that don't just dry up and blow away with a few decades of social trends, even a bottle-fed guy isn't going to look at a breast-feeding and think 'well, that doesn't matter to me, I was bottle fed!' Absurd.
You obviously lack the historical perspective to know what freedom was in the 18th century when the US was founded, or what it is and should be in contemporary society. Go back and study slavery, feudalism, monarchy/tyranny/despotism, rule of law, positive and negative rights, natural law, etc. Then maybe we can talk.
How cute, you provided an answer to a question that wasn't asked, and then call the poster's perspective 'know nothing'. I'm fairly certain the poster understands vulgarity, but that's immaterial, as social standards are not by themselves capable of objectively defining virtue. (Where objective means based on a real causal understanding of harms and the avoidance of bias and bigotry.)
If you read the Old Testament, you'll find that social standards determined that women were unclean when menstruating, and contact with them was a sin. Further that women who gave birth to boys were unclean for a week, and those who gave birth to girls were unclean for two weeks. Community standards can be complete bullshit.
Quite frankly, though I am neither a feminist nor female, I think that the aversion to breasts stems from the remnants of patriarchal power jealousy. Where men are concerned they don't like being reminded that they were utterly dependent on their mothers at one point, and where women are concerned I think part of it is internalized patriarchal masculinism (as there have been women who were even against sufferage) and the other part is instinctual jealousy and anxiety over how men will be attracted to the breast-feeder and her fitness as a mother. As none of these are rational, the mind varnishes the feelings with some bullshit about morality.
It depends on your definition of oppression. It is necessary to exert some level of authority in any functional household. It would be unworkable (and hence why it would be irrational) to treat children as complete equals. Any household with two or more kids run as a democracy would end up looking like the child-based societies in Logan's Run or Miri.
That said, as a father who has not forgotten his own childhood, there are things that happened to me that I will not let happen to my own daughter. I will answer any question she asks with the truth, and if I catch anybody lying to her because they think innocence can only be achieved by ignorance, I will thank them not to do it again. If somebody has a problem with her behavior they should take it up with her first to give her a chance to change of her own accord or to even defend her rationale. I hated it when people would air their grievances with me behind my back to my parents as though I were some disobedient dog that did not deserve the respect of direct contact but should be brought to heel by my 'owner'. There are more than these, of course, but the take away point is this: I am not my parents.
However I get the impression that I am a minority. At PAX some years ago I went to a panel about the role of gamer parents in their children's lives, and I heard the same old crap that the generation before ours gave us. I got up and asked the panel, essentially, 'if it didn't work the first time, why do you think it will work now?' And they fed me and the crowd some more crap. No approach is so perfect that it can't be improved. If we mindlessly follow the same patterns as our parents, how can we hope to improve our children beyond that limit? Social development will stagnate. Luckily, even if my kind are a minority, there's still some movement.
I know that in NY state there was a court battle over car rental companies denying customers service based on age, and the plaintiffs won. It is now illegal there for car rental companies to deny anybody over the age of 18 a car rental (which of course still happens everywhere else).
If I were to accost an unarmed official at gunpoint, they are in that moment defenseless. There is nothing absurd about that. They are individuals in individual circumstances, and any movement that thinks the mere occupation of government workers forfeits their honorable treatment as human beings is despicable and one I would oppose by force regardless of their so-called principles.
Nelson Mandela achieved an honorable goal through dishonorable means. I don't personally respect him or his methods, but that doesn't mean I would reinstate apartheid. (Many, many persons of deficient character have advocated reform only to leverage the discontent of the masses so as to be able to ride on their shoulders to power. Lucius Sergius Catilina comes to mind easily.) The means a movement uses betrays their true nature. If they are so desperate for power that they will throw anybody into a meat grinder then it doesn't matter what they say they want, chances are they are lying, because their actions demonstrate they are desperate enough to kill dishonorably. You think a movement that isn't afraid to do violence to the defenseless is afraid to lie about its goals or principles? Pull the other one.
I have a feeling that you're one of those liberals who gets their jollies by pretending to be a crazy conservative to defame conservatives and perpetuate the stereotype that they're insane and irrational. However, I'm going to feed the troll.
If you want to start a political movement that proceeds from ballot box to ammo box, I can respect that, so long as you walk in the founders' footsteps, taking responsibility, petitioning first, working in public and doing whatever possible to engender the support of the public, and if all else fails, attacking military targets. On the face of it though, you advocate your own tyranny. Forcing the defenseless to your personal political whims on threat of death is wholly dishonorable. That makes you a tyrant, no better than any other dictator rightly despised by history. And I tell you this, though you would go to a government office and demand at gunpoint everything that I myself ever dreamed a government should do or be, were I there and armed (and I am almost all the time) I would cut you down immediately, for that very reason. Sic semper tyrannis.
If the majority of people are idiots, then probability dictates that you are likely an idiot, and we should ignore your opinion.
My perspective is directly reactionary to my experience in childhood. I enjoyed 'living room' games of Scrabble, and in fact I admired those who performed ably, because in 'living room' games, those people are almost invariably the most literate, the most educated and well-read. Finding out that the professional competitors were the opposite, knowing nothing but the manipulation of the lifeless husks of words they didn't even know, was crushingly disillusioning. (Especially given that Scrabble's roots are in crosswords, where the meaning of words is inextricable from the process of successful completion. In that context, this 'strategy over knowledge' approach to Scrabble is not just an affront to the abstract of knowledge, but also a betrayal of the spirit of the predecessor from which it is derived.)
In the end, it's just a game. I don't really care that much, and I still play it now and then, but I don't respect professional players. That's just my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.
It's funny that you should allude to the workplace, because that can be the keystone to a counter-argument. Technology is pervasive in almost every workplace, and it is critical the people learn how to balance its productive use with its distractive nature (including when it breaks, as that's as common to the professional world as it is the academic).
You're right, learning isn't and shouldn't be all fun and games, and I don't think that technology's role is to make every subject into flashing images, sound bites and bullet points. However, that's not an issue of too much or too little technology, that's an issue of how it should be applied.
In my opinion, technology should be used in classrooms the same way it should be used in cubicles: for research, cooperation, organization, synthesis, design, testing, reporting, etc. (I emphasize 'should be' in the latter because few people exclusively operate like that at work, and I'm no saint myself, because that's where I'm typing this.) The reality of the classroom and the workplace is the reality of the new mind of the average person produced by our current environment. The days of long thoughts are gone for most people, which is sad, but irreversible without interfering with private life, and each generation has a shorter attention span (gratefully balanced by an increased multitasking capacity, any denial of which by older generations is nothing but jealous disbelief).
Yeah, I don't know anything, I just watched the private lives of national competitors. I judge them lacking. That is my prerogative.
Also, Scrabble lacks depth at higher levels. National competitors learn spellings but not necessarily meanings, which completely bastardizes the entire point of language. National Scrabble competitors essentially live or die by the number of combinations of seven letters they know are valid. To me that is a disgusting travesty, and quite frankly after watching Word Wars I discovered I had a lower opinion of tournament Scrabble players than I did before I knew anything about them. Once again, my prerogative. I don't know you, and if you're different, great, but you're not the only Scrabble player, and I'm more keen to trust what I've seen than you, quite frankly.
There is a prerogative to parenting. If child wants a bike, they may want some fancy three dozen speed expensive behemoth out of the gate. However, a parent is likely to start them out with something simpler and cheaper. If they don't like it, tough. When there's only one option, there's only one choice. I'm not going to force my daughter to practice writing shell scripts or something, but I have a feeling that just having a system to mess with will be enough. Environments favorable to exploration have a pulling effect, rendering pushing redundant. So long as I make myself available to answer questions, I don't think I'll have to do any pushing at all.
Oh right, she should be a cheerleader right? Yeah, I totally want to raise a female stereotype. Is that what you want, anonymous twit?
I did mention FreeDOS, which has various BASIC interpreters. However, my own experience with BASIC ruined my future as a serious developer, so I'm not going to push too hard on that. What I'm talking about is the real operation of a computer, navigating via CLI, editing system files, customizing beyond 'browse' and 'apply'. (I used to take a solid week to get a system the way I wanted it. Back in the DOS days that included lots of ANSI.SYS-related escape sequences.)
We have voice control now. It's just annoying, and practically speaking, I don't think current generations want to talk to their computers.
Would it be too burdensome for you to expand on 'how'?
Yeah, I completely trust one perspective. It couldn't possibly be refined, and no technology will ever improve. Whatever. I've worked in plenty of places that are de facto paperless at a departmental level and they seemed pretty efficient to me.
I assume that this was submitted by somebody directly related to techlearning.com where the PDF is hosted (and whose server is being roasted by every /.er downloading a 32 page PDF at the same time... ), and they have an agenda to push 'solutions' on the education industry. In their minds 'effective' means people are buying whatever products their sponsors are hawking. Pfff. *cough*slashvertisement*cough*
The fact is technology has completely changed society, and education has not adapted. The internet has killed the exclusivity of the knowledge-based education paradigm. This isn't to say that people should not still learn facts, but there needs to be a new focus on logic, synthesis, and processes. People need to be taught how to find what they want to know, and not just by hur dur type things in da search box lol but real boolean logic. Then they need to be taught how to use that information in a synthetic, practical way.
But dude, DUDE, how would we accommodate backwards compatibility?! You and your attempts to move us forward will invalidate all that expensive, proprietary stuff we bought into which we locked all our data!
This is completely true. As soon as my daughter can read (she's 2), I'm giving her an old computer, probably running FreeDOS or ubuntu (depending on how old).
I will teach her the ways of the command line and seal her fate as a future nerd.