[Edu-sig] Beyond CP4E

[Kirby Urner]

> I happen to see a synergy between teachers and old Life magazines,

Me too.
 
> Maybe we are reading the old Life articles to get a sense of life in the
> Fifties, maybe we are cutting out pictures and building collages, maybe we
> are taking silly putty and transferring images of faces onto to the putty
> and stretching the images and smiling.
> 

I have no objection to any of these activities.  However, when it comes to
perusing collections of old media, such as magazines, sometimes (not always)
the digital realm is the place to look.

Here's how I see it:  cyberspace is shaping up to be one of the greatest
libraries the world has ever known.  Schools are front ends to great
libraries.  Schools should be a front end to cyberspace.

I can get access to Life covers, plus a lot of the famous pictures, online,
e.g. here:  http://www.life.com/Life/  All the sites I checked encouraged me
to buy prints for like $20 a pop.  Thanks to the Internet, kids will at
least be able to look at pix.  Here's one of Gandhi:

http://frames.barewalls.com/frames/life/52/52105,52302/10/closeup/j8pod00245
352c.jpg

Found this with Google images:
http://www.chromosome.com/lifeDNA/Life-cover-April99.jpg (and many more
covers as well, plus some inside pix).

Great if you have a collection of old Life magazines in the school.  My
daughter has all the National Geographic magazines, including ads, back from
a certain year (cost about $50 at Fry's Electronics) -- on CD (so again, one
needs the computer).

Also:  because cyberspace *is* a great library, the option to homeschool, if
you have a home computer and decent internet connection, is more attractive
than ever.  Not just kids, but many adults, now learn more from home than
from sitting in any classroom.  But I'm not saying that should be the only
model, obviously.

In terms of bang for the buck, investing in computers, projectors, access to
cyberspace is a no-brainer.  You give students a huge library that could not
be reproduced as a physical brick and mortar library, for any reasonable
cost.  Plus you can still have your physical library of course (it's not
either/or).

> Frankly, I'd love to find a way to fit computers in, but between the chess
> tournaments, the model building, the old Life magazines - there just
> doesn't seem to be time.
> 
> Art

I understand that different schools systems and administrators will have
different priorities.  Getting one computer hooked to the Internet, and that
computer hooked to a projector, would be my initial goal for a school, then
for each classroom, then computers for each student -- perhaps laptops they
can take home.

Kirby