My grandfather earned his college degree via mail order around 1900, and liked the idea so much he spent the rest of his career as a salesman for college correspondence courses. He met my grandmother via selling her engineering courses. (I always laugh when people tell me women couldn't be engineers in those days.)

He started his career as a coaler on a steamship, probably one of the worst jobs at the time. Correspondence courses were a way up for people who could not afford attending college.

I’ve always wondered though, online learning today catches a lot of shit. I’ve heard from certain people (most notably tradition engineers) that they would never take seriously someone who got a degree online, even if it were ABET accredited.

Did correspondence courses come with the same sort of negative stigma in their time?

I completely agree. That's why I mainly blamed the education system. I never said these computers are a bad idea. But if they don't properly implement any of this technology, the number of students that benefit from this are smaller. There's always the ones that discover new and interesting things on their own, and maybe even make a carrier out of them, like the music production examples given here, programming, digital art, etc...

This could have been implemented in a better way. That's all I'm saying. It's still good that there students are getting access to computers at home. Even if 25% of them can take advantage of this, that's still a huge number of people.

this kind of thing unfortunately is an old issue, people think they can just dump computers (or musical instruments as another example) on students and it will be enough

as usual, its the hard work to set up the infrastructure, courses, support etc for the students and teachers that is needed and almost never gets done

as they say, the music isnt in the piano, same with computers

> people think they can just dump computers (or musical instruments as another example) on students and it will be enough

It was for many of us, at least in some ways. In the 80's when we got an Amiga 500 our parents had no idea what to do with it, it was up to us to learn and read the books it came with. That meant a lot of games but it also came with plenty of creativity software from music programs to basic. The same was true with music, we had a keyboard in the house and some kid friendly music sheets so I was playing regularly from about the time I could reach the keys. I can only imagine how much joy I would have had from a rasberry pi beginner kit.

You can't dump computers/instruments on kids and expect a full general education, but you can expect the curious ones to pick things up and learn if they have access.

I think like any new technology, there will be an extremely limited number of early-adopters, who figure things out, and then through social-osmosis, help others. It's not until at least the second generation that things really start to pick up. I suspect, had tablets and smart phones not really taken off in the last 5 years (which is a global miracle that should be further examined, although the devices are locked down pretty hard) this netbook program would probably have been all the more impressive. It's hard to look at a 7 year old, dumpy netbook and think it was a good idea, but at the time this was lightyears ahead of what was available to the general public, and put computers in a lot of families hands, that might not otherwise, have used one.

I had both a computer and a piano “dumped on me”. I learnt the computer by reading the book that came with it, going to the library to get more books and occasional buying a magazine.

The piano I started off with by trying to play along to TV theme tunes and songs i heard on the radio, then I started making my own music up. That was 40 years ago and I still make music just about every week if not everyday.

I’ve had this idea about using IPFS via buses and bus stops to disseminate data around.

Probably impractical, India 4G connections seem to have been very succeful.

This gave me a flashback to pre-web days, when I was in a developing country as a kid, and:

- used "FTP via email"

- connected via a national call ($$) to a shell account

- used pine to copy+paste email text into local files and vice-versa

- assembled segmented files by hand, then decoded and decompressed

- all on a Mac Portable

You might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal

Does IPFS do a good job of intermittently-online mostly-offline nodes with potentially non-linear updates?

Been spitballing the same concepts but with mobile phones (on a person or stashed on aircraft doing their weekly freight/mail run) where unused space is the bandwidth. Can move hundreds of gbs at zero cost but meh latency, as you’re imagining.

Not by default. You need to figure out how to connect to the network, which works great if you know how to reach other nodes - but in the small cell scenario? I don't believe they have a reliable local network discovery.

I haven't seen anything IPFS does better than bittorent.

It can reference separate files and repackage existing files into new directories. For some kinds of usage, that's a massive benefit.

In my experience, IPFS doesn't even do a good job of fully-online updates. Maybe my setup was bad, but I couldn't get it to reliably and quickly discover content on other nodes that were definitely online.

I would say lack of home internet could even be an advantage. Because the moment new demographics go online en masse, big internet corporations start salivating.

Without home internet no distractions, no dopamine hijacks, no content control issues, most importantly no imperative for parents to gain technological familiarity if they want to protect their kids. Kids could simply use school internet for research, download the relevant content, do the deep dive at home like they would do with any book from a library.

And this is why Argentina is an economic wonder.

They used to be (around the 20s maybe?)

At this point I'm not at all sure what people do or make there except they eat a lot of beef.

I get what you are saying, but we have to learn to live meaningfully, with the internet being now an inalienable part of our lives.

Why? The Amish are the extreme example, but you can minimize or even cut out the internet from your life if you want to.

In addition to what the other responder said (the Amish generally have some tech stashed away for use when necessary), a part of being Amish is being part of a community of other Amish people. Just like in a Orthodox Jewish community you will see Sabbath mode elevators on Saturday, Amish communities have access to services that bridge the internet and their moral code. There are services that will print stuff from the internet and have it sent to you, or an outsider accountant that manage your internet-accessible financial services. They are not really cutting the internet or its consequences from their life but rather in some cases cutting out their direct interaction with the internet.

In Europe, more and more banks have been slashing opening hours and the number of clerks at physical locations, or even closing locations outright, because customers are expected to do nearly everything through online banking. Many forms of interaction with the state require using their online portal, and even if you visit the government office, they may just show you how to do what you need through the online portal instead of helping you directly. Programs to assist people who do not have a phone and internet, now focus on giving those people a phone and internet; there simply isn’t willingness to make technology optional for that tiny demographic that eschews internet use.

Yes, the Amish have managed in the USA so far, but I think that even those days are numbered. Just as many Amish already own mobile phones, though they limit their use and keep them stashed away most of the time, they will be forced to do online things, too.

Much like the Amish will probably have a community mobile phone rather than a personal one a good middle ground for the rest of us could be public libraries. Government services and banking typically don't need frequent access so you don't need a personal internet connection just for them.

I'm ashamed to admit I didn't think of this earlier recently when I needed some printing/scanning done. I went and bought a cheap hp cloud printing (they don't even come with cables anymore) abomination. After trying to get that to work, screwing around with HP accounts, configuring a cloud printer from a linux desktop, installing an app on my phone, etc I ended up going to the local library and got it all done in 30 minutes It was cheaper, easier and better option for something I need to do a few times a year.

The problem with recommending public libraries is that government and banking services may require specifically a mobile app on one’s phone, not a website that can be used from any library computer.

>Programs to assist people who do not have a phone and internet, now focus on giving those people a phone and internet

This is smart though, since it costs very little to give someone a smartphone with internet these days (ALDI talk in Germany is 8€ a month with a bit of data, a cheap smartphone maybe 100€).

Trying to keep up a service that <0.1% of the population uses costs a lot more.

Having grown up here I think a lot of people would freak out if you had to use computers for services. The town I grew up in doesn't even let you pay taxes online in 2021.

Also not a lot of old people is computer savy in Europe.

And by old I mean > 55-60.

I saw some article suggesting that actual computer savviness is on the decline among people under 18 as well due to the growth of iPads and phones as the primary compute platform for the younger generations.

> we have to learn to live meaningfully, with the internet being now an inalienable part of our lives.

The Internet isn't what gives meaning to life.

What's the name of the Australian radio/mail distance learning program?

Something like that existed in the Canary Islands (Spain) so people could get a GED or a College diploma (pre-University/post-High School).

The internet makes the process a lot easier because of the fast feedback loop.

In reference to COVID... nobody was prepared for distance learning because why would they?

Indeed. OLPC built mesh networking to increase the efficiency of sneakernet data dissemination kind of