About Clifford Stoll 3

After viewing the video from the previous post, these are the gems I derived:

• He described his experience in his school days regarding film strip day where educational films will be screened. One scathing comment he made was that when the film start rolling, the students stop thinking, calling it "edutainment"

• He commented that learning should not be fun, learning is hard work, it takes discipline, commitment, responsibility, means doing your homework, reading, thinking, discussing problems with teachers. the big payoff is an understanding…the payoff is not the instant gratification…it’s a very delayed gratification that may take years

• There is no easy or work free way of solving educational problems

• Information is power vs knowledge is power (using the example of librarian vs politician). He mentioned the huge gaps in the following sequence:

• When we denigrate one skill and praise another, it says something about where our values are in society

• By centering your educational system around one particular technological device, you exclude important aspects of education

• What good is all these glitzy technology to a child who cannot write analytically, who won’t read anything more than 24 lines by 80 columns, whose idea of Mathematics is that I don’t need to know that because we have computers

• Creativity is the inability to follow somebody else’s rules. When these people come across a wall, instead of following somebody else’s rule for getting around it, they create their own solutions, yet we marginalised them calling them dummies and idiots

Thats quite a mouthful but his video is entertaining in its own way. Weird professor with weird antics but HOWEVER do we listen? As parents in this age of IT should be not heed the warnings and be really skeptical about IT being the solve all and the only thing in the future?

IT is good, but without IT we wont die and putting ourselves solely in the hands of IT leaves us extremely vulnerable to its risks as well as its woes. please do stop and...

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