Why one early adopter of computers in classrooms has decided to toss them
Childhood and Education #20: Phones and Screens
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
The digital exiles: Why people are abandoning their smartphones - Coda Story
A growing movement of “former screenagers” is calling for a screen-free, surveillance-free life, for a chance to build a future beyond tech capture
Stripped Down Browsers
I started learning programming in High School by using a toy language with graphics.
triumph of the nerds
When the Internet Was a Place - Front Porch Republic
Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when done, you left […]
‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom
Education is at a crossroads, argues the author and academic. Should we embrace new technology in the name of efficiency, or is it time to fight back?
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the first part of this talk, in which we shall furthermore supply evidence in support of our assumption.
Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?
Short Shelf Lives Make For Bad Curricular Planning
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
A mere fifteen years ago, computer nerds were seen as m…
Notes from my Beginner Computer Literacy Class Part 1 - Alex’s Writing Journal
Helping the uninitiated navigate this brave new digital world
The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens
Taken together, these four features can create a trancelike state that can keep us stuck on social media apps or video games for hours. Children are particularly vulnerable.
The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens
Taken together, these four features can create a trancelike state that can keep us stuck on social media apps or video games for hours. Children are particularly vulnerable.
Norway Abandons Ed-Tech, Embraces Books
A massive revolt against educational technology in the classroom is under way, especially in certain European nations. Education leaders in some countries have concluded that Ed-tech is the primary…
» Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment The Digital Antiquarian
If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.
Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy
An impassioned guide to how computers can fundamentally change how we learn and think.Andrea diSessa's career as a scholar, technologist, and teacher has b
