I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty much the whole homework process is now moving online. Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around. That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.
What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the task.
This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our generation.
The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.
You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.
Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper. There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant that children would not be so careful about their writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and one of my teachers complained about how Encarta made it too easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking around the library. And it the back of every arts collage sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of splicing film reals together onto platters.
This suggest that really thinking and planning can't happen while doing these things. I understand the concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.
Same here.
Carpentry is a skill that needs to be trained. Using the tools safely and optimally isn't something that most raw beginners will be able to figure out on their own.
But computers: barring issues of socioeconomic status preventing access to them, the kids will do alright on their own.
Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime mastering it. So, let’s not pretend the bare minimum of computer literacy is all there is to know.
Anti Vax people for example have fundamental issues with knowing how to utilize computer technology. They where ill prepared to separate fact from FUD and it’s causing real problems. Having 11 year olds writing papers that get graded is a great way to transition kids from basic literacy into mastery.
Chromebooks are the baking soda equivalent in middle school school chemistry experiments. Cheap and instructive is considered good enough.
and for a lot of us geeks let's be super clear: it's a happy accident that all that time networking, overclocking, and modding our computers to play quake (or whatever) paid off. A lot of the most 'prepared for the real world' hacker news crowd could have benefitted from greater offline / social / artistic endeavors, including myself.
That isn't to say kids shouldn't have access to computers in school, only that prepping a kid for an information economy is not, can not, and should not be the only purpose of education.
Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.
>> {enable developer mode}
If it were sandboxed, that's shouldn't be something it's possible for managed administrators to disable.
No one would play TI-83 games if they had other options... but it'd be hard to say writing and modifying them wasn't educational.
Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders (11 year olds) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable.
Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel free to sell Linux laptops, just understand schools don’t want to spend anything managing computers.