[Edu-sig] Interactive learning: Twenty years later

[Arthur]

> hmm.. I don't think the idea of mice was that could 'do everything by
> pointing'..
>
> Begs the question how well do most people deal with the world without
> looking?
>
> Hand-eye-mind coordination is an essential part of who we are as human
> beings. Mice are arguably a primitive first step towards that in a digital
> domain.

Let them play golf!

But the truth is I am not meaning to be as extreme as I might sound in some
of my ranting.  For example, I am a fan in many ways of Microsoft as well as
open source. Recently have devoted some energy to understanding .Net and am
excited by what I am understanding.  For reasons I won't go into.

But rather than contending point by point with your comments, I will make my
own comments.

I choose to work from a windowing envrionment, whether I am working on
Windows or on Linux.  Probably for the same reasons that does most of the
world.

But then I am often in "interface" mode, not learning mode.  Perhaps my
backwardness is due to the fact that in the end I can only take as true what
it is I know from my own experience.  In learning mode, I have always been
mostly at the keyboard. Notice the "mostly".  None of this is boolean.

We (you and I) seen to run around the same cricle alot. In the end I think
very little has changed, or will change,  by the fact of existence of the
computer in truly defining what it is to *be* educated .  One can argue that
since the computer is a fact of modern life, the ability to interface with
it should be an educational goal.  And in many cases that is the extent of,
or at least excuse for, making exposure to computers part of education.

To me, that puts "computer ed" on a parr with drivers ed.

In the end, words are words, literacy is literacy, understanding is
understanding. The damn 3 R's are the damn 3 R's, and I don't live in a
science fiction world where they have been replaced by a new paradigm or
twenty.

In continuing to assume that promoting a facility with the use of words as
central to an education, maybe a handwriting recognizing tablet might be a
acceptable alternative to a keyboard - where an alternative to pencil and
paper are called for - but not the mouse. Nope, no and no. And then you
would have to help me understand what of significance we have accomplished.

All this is Zen stuff really,  But the truth is that to the extent that it
has been studied, there is simply no evidence that computers are making a
difference, or if the are, there are great negatives that offset the great
positives, and we are left at zero.

Obviously I think great positives are possible.

The greatest educational benefit of PyGeo was to myself, in creating it. It
will never have nearly the same benefit to anyone else.  Happens to have
been one of the most productive educational experiences of my life. So the
point is not to use PyGeo or the like, so much as to help and facilitate
others in finding ther own PyGeo.

And I can promise I could not have created PyGeo working from some else's
environment designed with brilliance for the creation of PyGeos.  I needed
to be as far outside "environments" of any kind - looking in fact to create
my own.

We are a consumer society, and I would like to see education exempted. My
take on your take, is in accepting the consumption as technology as
educational. To me, only participation in the production of it can be
educational - and the sense of empowerment (to use a horribly correct term)
thereby achieved.  We do too much consumption of technologies we not only do
not understand - we are not expected to understand, we are not encouraged to
understand. Education should be in direct counter to all this.  When I think
of it, I despise the thought of a machine reading my kid's handwriting at
school.  Unless and until he is in a position to reproduce the machine that
it is doing it.

I want my child building a radio by wrapping wires around a tube. Not
listening to lectures from far away.

Art