Computer in education

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Computers in education.

Supposing to indicate some milestone.

What may be new or different in the coming years? It is early to say it!

We can start asking us what we think already as old.

 

Great changes are taking place in computer technology, in network and in communication that conveys, with inevitable an impact. In education. All this acts on personal computers, its successors and their developments, including this in the network. Everything impacts necessarily in the working tools of the educators. This then leads also to the question: “How the logic and practice has affected the educational thinking?.

 

What is the impact these changes have for the educational technologies because they interact in the context to which they apply? While the firsts, although numerous, were understandable if you follow the red wires that lead, we remain baffled if you examine the variability in the applications of the seconds in the behaviour in education. These today are greatly diversified due to the melting pot that dominates them to the bubbling of the diversification of language, or by the fashion induced by the impact of the facts and media.

 

In the 80s of the last century the analysis of these aspects have been more immediate. They had not yet emerged “Born Digital”. The ignorance of their own, that “ignorance” was not yet easily identified. It was enough to distinguish between alphabets in computer and those that were not. In this way, the picture became clear. The rules firmly rooted in education have been given by the fact that first you must have the knowledge present in the field of pedagogy, then was available the culture induced by manuals existing at that time in computing.

 

Only in a few have insisted to focus attention on the need of the importance of scientific thought developed in accordance with a mathematical logic. All this took the name of structured thinking, but the logical thinking was mostly absent in the educational field. The situation was dominated rather by the fact: if A is equals B and B is equal to C, then A is equals C, regardless of the intrinsic conditions of A, B and C and of their characteristics applied in a structured programming.

 

The situation changes now due to the increase of digital processes increasingly linked to new technological resources that are renewed continuously. So this is the way we can make communication (almost depending on the culture and classes of membership; as an example, with the content of lean and impressionistic word conveyed occasionally through the E-mails, Facebook, or tweeting with 140 characters).

 

The contents proceed vice versa between people, between uncultured politicians, parodists; etc.

 

On everything with a further impact of the advancement of technology, fashion, the media circuit but not intelligence. All it is pending until a new wave induces other behaviours, as is happening, for example with the so-called “selfie” or occurs even more in communication where the still image replaces the a word reduced mostly to a snapshot, fleeting and ephemeral in Istagram, (3,500 billion photos taken last year) taken with various digital tools in standard and editable way, instantly shared on different social networks, individual or paired as Facebook, twetter, Flicker, etc.

 

Manny “Digital Idiots”, they are coming into being and communicating with a raised arm grasping an instrument capable to photograph parts that celebrate themselves. If you listen them talking you notice that their interview is extremely poor with absence of content.

 

If you asks to an educator in which consists a “digital library”, which nevertheless exists in a more or less ordered or more or less structurally organised, you will understand everything and opposite. The expressed concepts are seldom being analysed with the weapons of critics.

 

So in the context I have just devised the “Digital competence” or “Basic computer skills” seem to start a process increasingly difficult.

 

In conclusion, it seems difficult that can be achieved through a training really logical. I also presume that all this cannot produce real training to logical thinking structured as mathematical thought. Moreover I envisage the danger of implementing a simple mechanical training to new technologies limited by their increasingly short life