Where Skateboarding isn’t a Crime
May 12th, 2007 by ramvort
In the beginning Tom Jennings’ admonition that ’skateboarding is not a crime’ was the part of the documentation that I understood best of all. All of the technical descriptions of Fido-Net and electronic mail (netmail), scheduling and batch file error levels went straight over my head at first, but eventually, I found myself writing those batch files and watching the errorlevel exits, loops and functions work just like they were intended. Fido was an electronic BBS (bulletin board system) system, its uses beyond file trading and discussions of a technical nature seemed to be almost limitless at the time.
The original Fido logo from rtfm
When I used telnet for a connection that allowed access to ARPANet, I found an entirely new world where one could visit schools and government institutions all over the country. I was blown away as I found myself learning Unix at its most basic and traveling the highway that is so familiar to us today, this was a glimpse of what was to become the Internet, and a view of things to come.
With all that behind, and the world wide web, commercialism, spam and myspace ahead, those who foresaw some of that were rewarded well.
The idea that children who spend time doing creative things on the computer and interacting with others are wasting that time completely misses the point. The computer is a device that can help one learn how to learn, and to be creative. If we concentrate too much on the rote aspects of learning word processors, or spreadsheets, we put a cap on the almost limitless possibilities there are when we turn them loose to learn. Learning how to program. whether its in basic, html, Pascal or ‘c’ is learning in its purest form, and debugging that programming is the ultimate course in how to create.
The idea that test scores must improve to give meaning to any innovation in education is off base, even though of course, test scores mean something in the large picture, but educating a student in learning on their own is much more important. Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life applies here.
If you expect kids and computers to be compatible, you have to give them some freedom to explore and to manipulate. This is not to say that unbridled access to the Internet at a young age is required, or even desired simply that we not bemoan the fact that they spend more time chatting or programming than they do word processing. The fact that jobs require computer literacy doesn’t have to put them in a box, they can learn without being in a box.
The number one time munching activity among kids is probably playing games online, and while this is probably the least productive thing they can be doing, it has possibilities for useful learning, and we should encourage creating their own, whether it be programming a game, or programming for a game.. once again, creating generates creativity…
When Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the podium and said ‘we will bury you’ he didn’t count on the generation that was coming along, and once again we may be able to thrive if we trust in the generation of the computer age, and live by the constitution -and- the declaration of independence.
While running a BBS for many years, the range of things I learned to do was simply amazing, simple programming, improving my typing and all the rest made me computer literate and a much better learner than I would otherwise have been.
realism
