Banning smartphones but then making students do all their work on laptops is such a banger move.
“It has not paid off” Depends what the real objective was all along. If it were to control the flow of information, implement wide scale tracking, and further degrade the critical thinking skills of the working class, then I say it paid off handsomely.
Yeah, journalists can be very naive, taking the capitalists or the state at face value. Destroying critical thinking and literary skills was the goal. They’ve admitted over and over that schools exists to create the next generation of workers, not to create helathy thriving individuals that can go on to realize their dreams and do whatever they put their minds to.
Liberal: Your point, though accurate and poignant, is now mute since I see you misspelled “helathy.” I have now converted to fascism because of your error. Do better next time!
- moot
lol got em
lol
In all seriousness, I did forget the other piece of the laptops is to get children addicted to electronics and create a new generation of hyper consumer.
It’s okay, it’s all quite literally designed to fly under our radars. The “solution” of course is to be hyper vigilant but being hyper vigilant is exhausting. Exhaustion leads to lapsed vigilance. It’s an endless cycle.
I don’t even think any of that was intended. It was just a massive handout to Apple, Google, and other tech companies and a diversion of resources from teaching/education to hardware and apps. Coincidently it also made us all dumber which was a nice bonus for the capitalists.
Plus allowing private interests in league with the government to steal the biometrics of every student.
Instead of paying 50 dollars per textbook every 10 years, a school will pay 250 or more for a tablet or laptop every 2 years plus the licensing fees for the dozens of proprietary third party software.
No more computer labs
, give everyone a plastic thin client that connects to a multinational private entity with SaaS up the ass.Computers are no longer a tool, but an additional limb.
It’s okay though I bet the laptops are very high quality and durable they probably last for 20 years with no need for repairs or replacement
It’s probably more than 50 dollars for a textbook but absolutely, they are still paying exhorbitant fees for the digital works, and buying new ones when their old ones are still good. It’s not like there are advances changing these subjects, math, history, economics, political science, you name it, buy it once and own it, and reprint the same book. Print an addendum to add new information if you want. But there is no reason to get a new math book every few years. Algebra hasn’t changed one bit in lifetimes.
The CIA implemented laptops because they were tired of me writing Joseph Stalin’s name as the borrower’s name in the front of the textbook instead of my name.
One of the refrains I hear a lot from my kid is all the ways kids in their school figure out ways to bypass the content control systems on the school laptops/tablets. Which in one sense, is showing problem solving skills (how many comp sci types got their start figuring out how to break into systems?). Problem is, because they have those devices all day long, not just in computer labs, it means they’re constantly sneaking in visits to game sites and whatnot. So it goes too far and the devices become distractions.
Yeah when I was in high school we discovered an exploit on Chrome that would let you download files despite the content control blocking any downloads for non admins. So I hosted a bunch of pirated games on a google drive, and my friends and I would distribute it. Then everybody would be playing Minecraft or CS 1.6 LANs in class and in the after school detention room. Shit was awesome
At the risk of doxxing myself, I’ll tell you from the inside. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. The students will always find ways to circumvent the tools. And many of the teachers themselves do not know how to properly use the tools. It’s an impossible task. Monitor every student’s (20+ in a class) screen and manage open tabs/windows on a dashboard while trying to teach on a whiteboard? Not gonna happen.
We have to go back to pencil and paper. Even if that means I don’t have a job. Laptop and software platform based instruction is not working. It’s not good for developing brains. I’m witnessing it in person.
Laptop and software platform based instruction is not working. It’s not good for developing brains. I’m witnessing it in person.
It’s perfect for developing brains if you’re Google or Microsoft. Gotta get them hooked young and make sure these kids only know how to use Windows and Google Office.
I volunteer at a non profit in my town that takes old laptops and loads em up with Linux and Libre Office. Most people actually prefer that setup to the Google/Microsoft one and since it’s offline, you can just rip the wireless out of the device.
God I’m old. Our computers were garbage so we installed Bolo.
This was us and Halo: Combat Evolved in the engineering and business lab playing LAN back in ‘06
It seems to me that if you took a class of high school students and tasked them with the 100 day melon challenge in Minecraft, you will have prepared them with all the mathmatic, engineering, and research ability they need to navigate society.
They have to install mods for building, research what builds to make and why, know how much material they need, where to get it, learn about logic circuits+signal propagation in redstone, learn about the exponential curve of growth, and learn how to focus on a grind for an hour or two at a time.
Then say that whoever has the most melons gets a crown they can wear for the rest of the semester and they’ll be off to the races.
Which is to say that, in terms of applied academics, wouldn’t you be better off with access to Minecraft?
CS 1.6 and computer labs, good childhood.
I had an SAT prep class where the math section was entirely online and some guys learned that if you watch porn on the school’s computer it’ll block you from logging on but not say why so at one point most of the boys just couldn’t do their work
My sister is an English teacher and she says giving kids chromebooks instead of making them use a pen and paper and research shit the old way was a massive mistake. At first I thought she’s just being old but she gave me some pretty convincing arguments. Seems like it’s really messing with their ability to learn and retain info. And with easy access to AI it’s gotten even worse
The really “cool” thing about the Chromebooks is that it isn’t even teaching them how to use a real computer as a byproduct, because ChromeOS abstracts away and hides all the actual workings of the computer.
also, Google says it helps “get that loyalty early, and potentially for life”:
Never even considered that but you’re right. Wtf else uses chrome OS
The user doesn’t even get to see the real filesystem.
there’s probably an importance of learning how to use traditional methods before using the technology that is revolutionizing processes. especially, when the technology is not democratically controlled.
certainly, professional researchers start with electronic, indexed archives because that’s fast and easy. but any sort of delve into records shows how patchwork the availability of historical and even recent information can be in indexed or even digital records. and some of that migration is deeply political.
the authors i’ve known who have dropped some severe knowledge bombs using critical analysis have had to go to physical archives and look through actual paper media, sometimes in distant places, to find the treasure.
and that’s just in the highly developed world.
another thing that’s wild about digital archives is that, while they can be made available for distribution around the world… just as easily, they can be deleted in seconds forever by a single person. for a long time before digital records, one had to shred and burn shitloads of documents to permanently destroy them.
That is just the money to buy all the laptops and the like too, not counting the actual cost they paid for digital copies of books, which continues to be a huge racket.
Books that have new editions constantly, and students, or districts, are charged a hundred dollars per or whatever it is. But when is the last time math changed? Why are we buying new history books every two years? Or any subject. It’s just a racket, spending other peoples’ money, and kicking back money to the deciders of the contracts.
We could develop open source textbooks, that are not copyrighted, and print them off at cost, or use them at cost digitally, and save a fortune. Or at least buy a quality book once, and reuse it, perhaps printing an addendum to add anything new that needs to be taught.
Open source textbooks are an intriguing idea - basically like Wikipedia but in print.
Then you just have to figure out how to gate the nutters from editing, and a tremendous amount of cooperative oversight to ensure the record is factual.
The challenge is that so many people choose to live divorced from objective reality.
I would use LibreTexts in college as a supplementary resource when my assigned textbook was confusing or lacking. At least for math topics they are great.
For lack of a better term, there is a deeply Orwellian aspect to all of this. Through digitization, we’ve managed to make all of the learning materials completely ephemeral. Textbooks (if you could still even call them that) can be revised on a day to day basis. Controversial subject matter removed or reframed on a day’s notice. You used to need to replace an entire fleet of hard-bound textbooks to do this kind of revisionism, but now you can simply pass a law like New Hampsire outlawing “the dialectical method” and have the changes implemented throughout the entire public education system within a week. And it’s not even a matter of skipping a couple chapters of the textbook in the lesson planning, it simply ceases to exist.
I wonder which generation made it so that the internet and technology were all bottom feeding black box products that depend on psychological manipulation and addiction. I wonder which generation were the founders of modern social media platforms that have warped peoples perception of reality to profit off of?
I always had people be like “Look how generous these tech companies are giving away free computers to elementary schools.” And I was, even as a child like, 'Yeah its real generous to get someone to become familiar with your product when they are young, so when they buy things or ask their parents to buy things, they naturally gravitate to your product."
Generous my ass.
FSF already tackled this decades ago (https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.html#content). The ed-tech takeover of schools has been an effort not spearheaded by teachers and educators but by management and C-suites collaborating with each other.
Now people don’t know how document typesetting works, all they know is Google Docs.
I wonder which generation made it so that the internet and technology were all bottom feeding black box products that depend on psychological manipulation and addiction.
It’s millenials. Zuckerberg is 41. Altman is 40. But that just shows that capitalism ruins everything and every generation has it’s shitty capitalists(all of them).
I mean how much of that is the laptops, and how much if it is COVID fucking an entire school year? I am personally amenable to the idea that every school should just be a big faraday cage, but some of this test score decline is only showing up now despite the laptops being in use for a decade or more, which aligns much better with it being a delayed effect from COVID than of being a delayed effect from laptops.
Imo the bigger concern for COVID is the brain damage and other lasting symptoms caused by long COVID, which is now the most prevalent chronic illness in children.
Don’t copy that floppy, Hermione!
I mean, thats only one reason the kids are “less cognitively capable”…
