Couros Blog has an
entry that links to an article about technology in
Argentina. It makes the case that you can't just throw computers
at people without training and expect them to make much difference.
Yeah, that's true. In Argentina. Today. We've been saying that
for at least 20 years. What's interesting to me is that I'm not sure
it's true anymore. I remember being outraged 10 years ago about
computers that sat in boxes for months because there was no one at the
school who felt qualified to take the things out of the box, much less
make them do something useful. For a time, having actual children
touch computers was problematic for some for fear that they'd break
them. I argued then that the real problem was that the computers
would not get broken soon enough and wouldn't get replaced.
Today, here in the US, I think the story's a bit different. I
posit that if we put in classrooms computers with the affordances that
most people who use computers effectively have they'll make a
difference. Without training.
With very few exceptions, there are no personal computers in K-12
schools or even most colleges and universities. Students are
itinerant computer users. When you sit at your personal computer
you've got your stuff there. Your bookmarks. Your files. Your cat's
picture on your desktop. Everything is in its place. Sitting at
someone else's computer feels only a little less invasive than poking
around in their underwear drawer.
When you go use a computer at a Internet Cafe or a library, you're
considerably constrained. Maybe you have your files on a USB drive.
Maybe you've emailed the one that you want to work on to yourself.
Maybe, like me, you have access to all of the files on your
workstation via FTP, HTTP or scp. But you don't have your cat's
picture. And you don't have your bookmarks. (Sure, you can solve the
bookmarks problem with http://del.icio.us/, which I still haven't
figured out, or http://webliographer.com/webliographer/, which I wrote
a decade ago, but still you don't have your cookies and all those damn
passwords that your own browser remembers for you.)
Teachers know how to use word processors, email and the web. (And
math teachers know how to use spreadsheets.) Students know how to use
computers for all kinds of things; heck, some of them can even blog. This is
the intro to my "If only people would use K12LTSP" (which provides the
affordances described above easily, cheaply, and reliably) then
computers might really be used to make a difference in schools. Of
course, I really need to be doing work to collect those data instead
of writing stuff here.
