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<p>Reading some 'subversive' literature about unplugging our schools. It was interesting to reflect on the points raised by the author that children need to learn how to program but also need time to play. Learning with technology and learning about technology become different experiences. Regards Roland</p><p><strong>Quotes:</strong></p><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid #eee; padding-left: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><p><a class="diigoAnnotatedLink" href="http://diigo.com/0h473" title="Is It Time to Unplug Our Schools? | Lowell Monke | Orion Magazine">Is It Time to Unplug Our Schools? | Lowell Monke | Orion Magazine</a></p><ul></ul><ul><li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">one of the roles of schools in a free society is to serve as a cultural thermostat—to take the temperature of the culture, determine where the culture is over- and underheated, and then gear instruction to compensate for those extremes <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">one task of schools would be to stress the kind of deeply caring, fully present, and wholly human interaction that long ago disappeared from ordinary public life and is now rapidly evaporating from private experience as well. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">a school system wholly devoted to developing technical skills would not be particularly damaging if other institutions compensated for children’s severely mediated lives. Unfortunately, the institutions that could serve that function—church, family, community—have been diminished by technology’s cultural dominance. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">“unplugged schools”—would identify the values associated with technological culture and design curricula and an environment focused on strengthening the human values at the other end of the scale. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Nature is, of course, the richest resource for firsthand experience. Individual teachers have long tried to provide some contact with the natural world by bringing plants and small animals into their classrooms—a limited approach yielding limited results. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Our society seems to have decided that in the age of powerful mental tools, working with and understanding physical tools is a thing of the past. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Learning the fundamental principles of computer operations is not beyond the capabilities of most high school students if approached appropriately. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">The idea is not to make everyone a computer programmer—it is to help youth comprehend why our increasingly computerized environment functions the way it does. Only if they possess that understanding will they be able to decide which human powers are appropriate to hand off to computer calculation and which should be reserved for our own judgment. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Unplugged schools would compensate for this by creating an environment teeming with adults and older students conversing with, telling stories to, and working directly with younger students <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Combined with the emphasis on direct contact with the physical world, forging connections with older generations can help unplugged schools offset a glorification of constant change by fostering an appreciation for what is enduring and mature. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">As much as they need direct contact with caring adults, children also need quiet places that give them a respite from the din of adult-generated electronic media constantly assaulting their eyes and ears. In past generations, playhouses, treehouses, forts, or even a sheet thrown over a card table served as places to escape adult intervention for a time. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">our plugged-in society values the Internet for its capacity to overcome time and space—to allow us to “go anywhere at anytime.” Unplugged schools would recognize that this benefit has been accompanied by increased difficulty among children in feeling that they belong to any place at any time. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">“When you are drowning in a river of information,” he once wrote me, “the last thing you need to know is the temperature of the water. What you need is a rock to stand on.” <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Technological culture promotes a doggedly instrumental orientation to life in which every act is calculated as a means to something else. Even something as intrinsically rewarding as childhood play now must be considered useful in order to be scheduled into children’s frenetic lives <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">Learning with and about high technology then becomes a very different experience. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">not only should schools help students understand how these media work, they should also help them understand how such tools shape their appetites, relationships, and very conceptions of the world in which they live. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">one thing they must do is provide an alternative to the current penchant for viewing children as little biological machines whose knowledge and skills can be “constructed,” assessed, and labeled in schools according to the same cold logic of the spreadsheet that businesses use in producing commodities. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">efforts to label and sort children while constantly seeking technical means to accelerate, enhance, and otherwise tinker with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development are acts of mechanistic abuse (there is really no other name for it) committed against children’s nature <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">unplugged schools would get children deeply involved with nature and community; they would give a prominent place to the expressive arts; they would determine tool use according to developmental readiness; they would study technology explicitly; they would give children time and space to look inward; and they would rely on assessments that are rigorous and multifaceted rather than reductionist and multiple choice. <ul></ul></li>
<li style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:.6em;">there is no escaping, at least in public schools, a whole host of technocratic fetters, such as standardized curricula and testing, that are turning teaching as well as learning into intellectual factory work <ul></ul></li></ul></blockquote>
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<p style="color:#999">This message was sent to you by <a href='http://www.diigo.com/profile/rgesthuizen'>Roland Gesthuizen</a> via Diigo</p>
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