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Not sure what you want me to do dude, I'm sorry I'm speaking my truth and it is upsetting I guess. Take care.

Edit to your edits: he wrote several books talking about computers, or more specifically, the computers of the 80s and 90s, being worthless and would lead us all astray.



One book-- Silicon Snake Oil. And criticism of that is worthwhile.

Your exaggeration, on the other hand, is not.


High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian is literally about stopping computer education.


And as I've discussed with you elsewhere-- I feel like most of that criticism is spot on.

Computers in education are great for:

* Education on how to use computing or programming (... though when I teach these subjects, I do a whole lot of it offline)

* Independent research (though you'd better stand at the back of the classroom and monitor what's going on very closely... and do this sparingly).

* Occasional rapid feedback through a Kahoot about how much your class understands a given set of subject matter.

* Letting students write and revise a paper quickly now and then

* Occasional individualized practice through something like Khan.

On the other hand, they're greatly overused even today. Instructors do things like:

* Use a Kahoot every class to convey key learning material, which results in a disorganized, flash-card experience.

* Perform enough of the work on computers that plagiarism and academic integrity become a huge concern.

* Displace valuable classroom practice performing labs or doing arithmetic with inferior virtual eqiuvalents.

* Allow students (without any type of learning or physical disability which would necessitate this) to take notes online, which under the best of circumstances is demonstrably inferior to paper note-taking for retention and also invites massive amounts of abuse.

I feel like the case was similar in the 1990s: there was little evidence of benefit. There was less of the online abuse of computing, but there was still a lot of abuse and misuse.




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