Computers have to go outside the classrooms, don't they?

Introduction

I have been reading, watching, and hearing for some time that many

people are realizing the danger of screens for the little ones, how

they are, supposedly, lowering the cognitive level of children, and

many other problems. This is causing them to suddenly consider

removing all technology from the classrooms. In some countries they

say they are going to go back to books only and there are even reports

being made by "experts" who support this.

I have always defended that modern technology is a problem for

children and not so children, also adults and older people. But is it

really necessary to return only to the books of yesteryear? Haven't we

learned anything along the way? Why can't we have serious discussions

in modern societies and it always has to be all or nothing, black or

white, left or right?

I'm going to try to explain why I think removing technology from the

classroom is a bad idea and why permacomputing and retrocomputing

would be the perfect solution, or at least better than doing that.

When books dominated the classrooms

I know that sometimes I sound like an old man talking about grandpa's

little battles, but I really am, but I'm not that old. I don't have a

white beard, barely, I don't smoke a pipe and I'm not in a big chair

in front of the fireplace telling my grandchildren about this. I have

no grandchildren, only a cat, no house and luckily I have an armchair

and since I live in the south of Spain to light the fireplace that I

do have, it would be suicide.

But the thing is that those of our generation, between boomers and

millennials (it's the title of a book), have allowed us to see the

great changes in technology firsthand. I would have even preferred to

have been born in the 60s, but in countries like the US USA or England

and see the beginning of microcomputers, but oh well.

The thing is that I remember carrying giant backpacks, bigger than me,

full of notebooks, books, at least 7 or 8, every day, and also adding

school supplies, pencils, crayons, the sandwich wrapped in aluminum

foil that finally Due to the weight of the books, notebooks and so on,

it ended up being something like the thickness of a finger, a small

child's finger, and that was your food for the entire morning.

The backpack was heavy, uncomfortable, and quite bad for the

back. Someone will tell me that in some schools, the children left the

material at the school itself and therefore it was not necessary to

carry that material up and down. But the reality is that in 90% of the

schools in my country and many others, security in those centers when

they are closed is conspicuous by its absence and leaving something

there is usually equivalent to losing it.

And let's not talk about the economy. My family, admittedly, never had

problems buying me books every year, but I already realized that it

was nonsense to buy books every year that we didn't normally use,

because many teachers preferred to follow their own

notes. Furthermore, in a school where I was, the books were sold in

the school itself. One day in particular, we all went to the sports

hall and they called us one by one in front of everyone and asked us

how many books we wanted. There we could see who bought 7 or 8 books

for all the subjects and who only bought a few and we knew why they

didn't charge more. Some of us already noticed the shame of those who

could only buy a few because their families did not have more

resources. Things were such that when I was 9 years old I gave all my

books from the previous year to one of the kids with fewer resources

so that he wouldn't have to buy any.

In short, the idea of screens arriving in classrooms was very good

news. You could have the books on a tablet, it is not necessary to

carry 50 kilos of weight on the backs of 5-year-old children, since

curiously the younger or smaller the children, the more books they

carry, and the best thing, currently you have digital all the books

that a child may need throughout his or her student life and even

more, and also completely free.

But of course, as has always happened, companies come up with great

ideas and have to muddy everything up to continue making money even

though their products are no longer necessary, but they force people

to buy them and you know where I'm going.

Screens in classrooms and the attack of publishers and other

various parasites

As a story, the idea was great, it was no longer necessary to make

parents pay a minimum of 400 or 500 euros just for books, without

counting other things, every year, nor to make children carry 50 kilos

on their backs every day. and it depends on the families' money or 10

meters or several kilometers. Because not all parents can afford to

drive their children to the school gates every day or live near one.

As we see, a tablet, which can easily be financed by the government

and made specifically for that objective, that is, without internet,

with a liquid crystal screen that completely avoids the eye fatigue

that conventional LED screens do cause, and making them robust, solves

so many problems that could not be true. And of course, in the end it

was not true, because many companies, mainly publishers, which are

some of the companies in the world that generate the most money, would

lose one of their main sources of money.

Even so, the wave of new technologies was not going to stop just like

that, and although a lot of money was invested in avoiding it, for

example, saying that no free books but rather digital books, but with

DRM (a copyright for digital products) so that both governments and

parents have to pay for them and sometimes in duplicate or triplicate,

because a physical book can still be lent or given away, but these

books with DRM only worked with a specific device and if you wanted to

see it on another device you had to pay for it again.

And then, well, technology companies also entered. But of course, to

make a tablet, cheap, robust and without internet, specifically to be

used by children? Of course not. We give them some tablets, very

expensive, with a bitten fruit as a logo, with internet, very bright

screens and with internet, so that the children can connect to any

website at any time.

As an anecdote, I will tell you that I remember when I was advising

the use of Free Software in teaching, something that began to have a

certain impact due to what was done in Extremadura and Andalusia,

mainly, another day I tell that story that I experienced very hard

things, very up close, and then a Japanese kid made an interactive

whiteboard with a Nintendo Wii controller and software that he

programmed himself.

It blew many of our minds and we began to insist on the possibility of

using them in schools, we even did very satisfactory tests at the

university and we convinced many teachers to try them in their schools

and also with very good results. What did all this trigger? Schools

making contracts with companies and spending around 2000 or 3000 euros

for specific whiteboards for that, with closed software that was also

very expensive and that soon no teacher knew how to use or could not

use it. We are talking about a very high expense for a school or

institute that caused them to run out of money for, do you know what

is also important in a school? Exactly, teachers, teachers, school

supplies, good facilities...., hey, but they had tablets with the logo

of a bitten fruit and a blackboard that in the end was only used as a

blackboard, you know, a dark green sheet on which You could write with

chalk, only now they are white and you have to draw with markers that

are more expensive and much more polluting. A complete win-win.

Let's get technology out of the classrooms

It's been probably 20 years or more of all this and what have we

learned? that technology is bad in itself. Multiple studies have been

done and the level of children seems to have dropped drastically, so

if we join the dots, we can clearly see that the introduction of

technology in schools and institutes has ruined the education of

children and adolescents. These studies make it very clear and the

fact that children and adolescents only watch TikTok and dye their

hair colors is great proof of this.

I don't know if those studies or at least the people who take the

studies depending on the wind blows, have seen anything, about which I

have commented. I don't know if you have noticed that when introducing

technology, teachers were not really trained in it, and many of them,

not all, have not known how to take advantage of its benefits. I don't

know if they have studied what introducing technologies that are not

suitable for all ages could have had an impact, just as a bicycle used

by professional Grand Prix riders is not the most suitable for a 5 or

6 year old child. I don't know if the simple fact that the curricula

are a disaster and not because in many cases they are more focused on

providing teaching focused on the current job and occupying a certain

workforce than on providing real training and creating adults with

autonomy and critical thinking.

I also don't know if there are studies on whether the use of the

specific tools that have been used is good or bad. Put all

technologies in the same bag and say that because the programs,

technology or methodology used has not gone well, it means that we

have to return to the time of books, the weight on the back, the use

of books that are one year out of date. to another, etc., is the

best. I don't know, let's go back too, the letter with blood enters,

and since we are with the chisel and the stone, because writing is

good for retaining, and I think it is true, but carving the stone with

a chisel and a hammer must be the good milk Come on, you don't have to

forget a formula written like that in your life, let alone a

historical chronology, the Goth Kings for life.

In short, I will never understand how human beings swing like a

pendulum, both in ideologies, trends, tastes, etc., from one extreme

to the other without seeming to have learned anything along the way.

Permacomputing to the rescue

As some of you already know, I am a big fan of permacomputing and

retrocomputing, in fact I am writing a book about it, and this is not

self-promotion... or is it? The thing is, my passion for

retrocomputing, for example, is not the typical nostalgia of seeing

and/or using things from my childhood, or falling into the fallacy

that past times were better. As I already explained at the beginning

of the article, I have a good memory and no, not everything before was

better. Nowadays, I play Spectrum or MSX games but in digital format

without having to wait half an hour to load them.

As I was going, I was watching a documentary about a language that I

highly recommend today for teaching, which is Logo. In that

documentary, it was seen how children, many of whom are now great

computer scientists, mathematicians, etc., learned the basics of

mathematics, logic, analytical thinking, etc. But, there were big

differences to how it is done now that for me are fundamental and are

the ones that for me we must return to and not simply the return to

the books themselves.

On the one hand, the training was done by true experts both in the

teaching of computer science and mathematics and in teaching. On the

other hand, computers without an Internet connection were used and the

only connection they could have is to school or institute servers with

the necessary and essential resources. In addition, programs were used

in text mode, and for me, that is fundamental and I will explain this

better later, and in addition, notebooks continue to be used and notes

are continued to be taken, and collaboration between students is

enhanced, where several students speak and They discuss the program

they are developing because of a problem that the teacher has

proposed.

Here I suppose that it is a controversial part for some teachers and

defenders of teaching with computers in general, but it should, and

more so in children, eliminate the use of graphical interfaces or at

least simplify them to a minimum.

I have discussed a lot with many teachers and they tell you that using

graphic programs, block-based graphic programming languages, etc.,

makes the task much easier for children. The thing is that they are

not telling the truth consciously or unconsciously. The reality is

that the one who makes the task easier is the teachers, not the

children. Children have a brutal imagination, and giving them graphic

solutions is a way of killing that imagination and like any part of

our body that we do not exercise, it ends up being lost. Every book

reader, who has read a lot in their childhood, has noticed how what

they imagined when they read a book was a thousand times better than

when they later made the movie version, and that's why there is a lot

of anger among a certain generation against those movies. . And

furthermore, we all have the experience that even books that we have

read when we were young, I will give the example of the Lord of the

Rings, once we have seen the movies, we have been conditioned that

regardless of how we imagined it the first time we read the book, now

it is impossible for us to remember that and the vision of the movies

has replaced our vision.

If we give children and adolescents already defined graphic

interfaces, we are conditioning the mind and way of thinking of that

generation forever.

Logo is a language that produces graphics, but using a minimal

interface where commands are entered and the program generates those

graphics. But also, it is a complete language with which you can make

all types of programs, including video games, as with any other

language.

In addition, these minimal interfaces make it easier for us to use

less powerful computers, screens that do not strain the eyes, and even

liquid crystal screens that are safer than even paper, we save energy,

that is, we are more ecological and we encourage Use the computer only

for one thing, to learn, develop, reflect and the student does not get

lost in stimuli.

Conclusion

In conclusion, no one denies that the way computers are introduced

into teaching has been a disaster, and that much of the blame lies

with companies that only think about their profits, corrupt

politicians, and people without adequate knowledge for the tasks they

are tasked with. they have to face each other. Therefore, I see a

rethinking, a return to the beginning and rethinking things. But all

this requires a serious analysis, seeing what has been done wrong and

well, and a new analysis of what is needed but from many points of

view, not only by some "supposed experts" who we would first have to

know about. What are they experts or what supposed interests do they

have? They are not going to be the new advance of the publishers that

refuse to die and the solution is to sell books, promote back damage

and social and intellectual inequality.

In addition to the fact that today it would be very cheap to create

computers exclusively for teaching use and that would not come out of

schools and institutes and at such a cheap price that they would be

fully financed by the State (not corrupt, of course), thanks to

platforms like Raspberry. Pi and others like it.